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KELLY J. SHANNON
In September 1994, CNN ignited an international firestorm over the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM).1 While covering the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour decided to report on the practice of FGM in Egypt. Working through a freelance producer, CNN convinced an Egyptian family to allow Amanpour and her crew to film their daughter’s clitoridectomy. Amanpour then showed the footage at the UN conference, and it aired on television worldwide.2 The graphic video depicted ten-year-old Nagla Hamza having her clitoris removed without anesthesia or sanitary instruments. Time magazine described the footage, which depicted
a crowded living room, where relatives smiled and ululated in celebration. As a voice-over explained that no sanitary precautions would be taken, no anesthetic applied, Nagla was tilted onto her back by two men—a plumber and a florist—and her legs prodded into the air in a wide V. While the florist cradled her from behind, the plumber wrapped Nagla’s hands around her ankles. Then the plumber quickly leaned in between Nagla’s legs and cut off her clitoris with a pair of barber’s scissors. The girl barely had time to emit her first gasp of pain before her legs were lowered and her mutilated genitalia were bound with rags.3
Nagla, who was dressed in a party dress and smiling before the procedure began, clearly experienced agony as she cried, “Father! Father! A sin upon you! A sin upon you all!”4
The video did not show Nagla’s genitals during or after the procedure, but her screams were enough to cause “an immediate worldwide public outcry.”5 Official delegates to the UN conference, policymakers, and the mainstream global public were outraged when the footage aired. The UN issued its harshest condemnation of FGM to date, and people worldwide called for the eradication of the practice. Despite the fact that Egyptian law did not ban clitoridectomy, Egyptian authorities arrested Nagla’s father, the two men who performed the procedure, and the freelance producer who arranged for CNN to film it. Egyptian President Muhammad Hosni Mubarak denied that FGM was practiced in Egypt, but the film was evidence to the contrary.6 Despite Mubarak’s attempts to quell the uproar, international condemnation of FGM continued to intensify.
The Cairo conference brought global public attention to the international movement to eradicate FGM, which had been gaining momentum since the late 1970s. For decades, anti-FGM activists from around the globe had been working tirelessly without significant mainstream recognition. Not only did the CNN video create intense public scrutiny and broad support for anti-FGM campaigns, but a simultaneous shift in international human rights law allowed activists to recast FGM as a human rights issue. As a result, several countries took steps over the next few years to outlaw the practice within their borders, grant political asylum to women fleeing mutilation, and participate in international efforts to end the tradition.
In the early 1990s, the stage was set for a revitalization of international human rights law. The United Nations, freed from the confines of the Cold War era superpower struggle, could pursue the protection of human rights with renewed purpose. Over the course of the 1990s, it convened six international conferences that were critical to the reconceptualization of human rights, including the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna and the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994.7 The amount and scale of activity focused on human rights undertaken by the United Nations during the last decade of the twentieth century was revolutionary, comparable only to the period immediately following World War II when the UN was formed.8 Of the many momentous developments in human rights during this period, the most important were the UN’s formal recognition that women’s rights are human rights and the drafting of several international documents which enshrined that principle in the international human rights regime.9
This shift in the conception of human rights to include women’s rights and abuses in the “private” sphere represents an important turning point in the history of human rights, one that must fundamentally alter the way scholars assess the human rights movement. Put another way, the 1990s represent the moment when individual rights trumped government sovereignty in the long-standing tension between the two. The history of human rights in the twentieth century is mainly the story of the development of protections for civil and political rights and of international human rights agencies’ concern with state abuses against individuals. Social, economic, and cultural rights, which scholars often refer to as “second generation” human rights, were downplayed or ignored at the international level, and violations of women’s rights in particular did not receive attention because they usually involved abuses committed by private citizens, not states.10 Although the 1945 UN Charter and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights endorsed the principle of gender equality, women continued to face discrimination worldwide. The UN did little to advance women’s rights before it convened the Decade for Women from 1975 to 1985.11 Even then, it took until the 1990s for the principle of gender equality to find its way into international human rights instruments. It was then that the international community declared it could intervene when states failed to protect their citizens from human rights abuses committed in the “private” realm. This important shift subordinated state sovereignty to international human rights law, bridging the public-private divide that prevented the universal application of human rights protections. The campaign against female genital mutilation epitomized this moment of transformation.
Without this shift in human rights discourse, anti-FGM activists faced an uphill battle in securing international support for their efforts, even from the UN and its affiliates. For example, a group of African women urged the World Health Organization (WHO) to study female circumcision in 1961. The WHO refused on the grounds that it was a cultural practice, not a medical problem, so FGM was none of its concern. In any case, WHO policy precluded the organization’s intervention in the domestic matters of sovereign states, and no government had invited it to take up the issue of female circumcision.12 Consequently, there was no discussion of FGM at the UN’s first World Conference on Women in 1975.13
The reason for this refusal by international organizations like the WHO to discuss FGM in the 1960s and 1970s was the construction of certain categories as being beyond the purview of international law. Culture, religion, and the family supposedly belonged to a “private” sphere, not subject to “public” debates or action. This sphere, of course, was where societies constructed and defined women’s roles and rights. Declaring the private sphere off-limits to international human rights intervention effectively ensured the perpetuation of women’s subordination worldwide. Accordingly, international organizations like the UN and WHO concerned themselves only with state violations of human rights; they pointed to the “private” nature of FGM, as well as other abuses committed against women, when explaining their reluctance to insert themselves into the matter.14 They felt it better to allow individual states or ethnic groups to work out solutions for themselves. So common was this premise that the private sphere was beyond the purview of public intervention at the time that women’s rights activists in the United States had to struggle to get the public and government involved in protecting women from such abuses as domestic violence and rape.15 Anti-FGM activists faced the same battle at the international level.
Despite the resistance of the UN and other intergovernmental organizations to take up the issue of FGM, Arab and African grassroots activists worked steadily to combat the custom in their home countries and to build international support networks. By the late 1970s, their efforts began to pay off, as Western feminists threw their support behind the anti-FGM campaign, and women built an international movement that eventually succeeded in getting the UN, its affiliate organizations, and national governments to take up the issue.
The first step in the campaign was the collection of data to prove that the practice was widespread and harmful to women and girls. While some physicians had published national studies in medical journals, no comprehensive international study of FGM existed in the 1970s.16 American feminist Fran Hosken helped remedy the problem. The Austrian-born Hosken, who immigrated with her family to the United States in 1938, was a Harvard-educated journalist and urban planner. She was horrified when she learned about female circumcision when traveling in Africa in 1973 and was equally shocked to learn that the international community was largely silent on the issue.17 Hosken made it her goal to push for the eradication of the practice. After UNICEF and the WHO rebuffed her requests to examine FGM in the mid-1970s, she set out to conduct her own study. To acquire the necessary expertise, she took three trips across Africa to interview midwives and doctors, sent hundreds of questionnaires to women and institutions in Africa and the Middle East, and wrote to the authors of existing medical publications on FGM.18 The result of these efforts was the 370-page Hosken Report, which appeared in 1979.19
The Hosken Report documented the geographic scope and history of the practice, described the various types of FGM, enumerated its health effects, explained its purpose, and provided statistics for how many women and girls were mutilated worldwide. Most subsequent studies relied heavily on Hosken’s figures.20 Because Hosken was the first person to study genital mutilation comprehensively, her work framed subsequent debates on the subject in the international arena.
In fact, it was Hosken who coined the term “female genital mutilation.” She argued, “Female circumcision is the popular, but medically incorrect, name for a variety of mutilating genital operations to which female children and young women are subjected in Africa and the Middle East” and that “genital mutilation is the correct definition.”21 Hosken hoped the new name would combat the perception that female genital operations were akin to male circumcision.22 So great was her influence on debates about female circumcision that “female genital mutilation” soon became the official term used by the United Nations and much of the NGO community for female genital cutting practices.
Notwithstanding its substantial research base, The Hosken Report was a manifesto against FGM that combined research with moral outrage. For Hosken, medical concerns, feminist theory, and human rights were inextricably intertwined with genital mutilation. She declared, “I am concerned first of all with health,” a right to which all human beings were guaranteed in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.23 She defined health broadly, as “physical integrity and psychological well-being, freedom of [sic] fear and a quality of life that assures the fullest development of the human personality.”24 This holistic definition allowed her to frame her arguments in terms of the larger position of women in the societies where FGM was practiced, alongside concerns about the custom’s health effects. She thus connected her arguments with the strand of feminist theory popular at the time that critiqued global patriarchy.25 According to Hosken, FGM remained pervasive in so many countries because of “contempt for the female of the species.” The practice became “a means to prove male sexual superiority.”26 Genital mutilation was the most horrific form of male oppression because it struck at the heart of what defines a woman as female according to most societies: her genitalia. Therefore, according to Hosken, the international community should become involved in efforts to eradicate FGM because it violated the basic human right to health and because it hindered the physical and psychological well-being of women.
While Hosken attempted to raise American women’s consciousness about FGM and build a broad-based international coalition to eradicate the practice, her report had the potential to alienate the very people with whom she was trying to build an alliance. Although she argued that Westerners who opposed FGM must first and foremost support the efforts of African and Arab women to combat the practice, she claimed in her report, “The victims of the practices described here are, for the most part, illiterate and too young to speak for themselves, unaware of the rest of the world and of their own bodies’ biological functions. They are quite unable to communicate their needs.”27 Hosken’s characterization of the “victims” of FGM as wholly ignorant of biology and as unconscious of their own oppression offended adult African and Arab women. Her approach proved problematic when it came to dealing with women from FGM-practicing countries who should have been ready allies.
Hosken’s report alienated men who opposed the practice by stating that she was “deeply ashamed for all men because ultimately they are all responsible.”28 Persuading global leaders to make FGM their concern was difficult under any circumstances; Hosken’s rhetoric thwarted her ability to do so. Indeed, while Hosken stated repeatedly that international organizations were crucial to bringing about the eradication of FGM, she heaped criticism upon the UN, WHO, and UNICEF for their characterizations of the practice as a cultural issue outside of their purview. She accused these international agencies of upholding the patriarchal status quo and creating a global “conspiracy of silence” about FGM.29
Recognizing that her criticism of the organizations was backfiring, Hosken’s contemporaries urged her to tone down her rhetoric for the good of the cause. In her 1981 review of the second edition of Hosken’s report, Africanist Margaret Jean Hay praised Hosken’s research but called her a “crusader” who weakened the overall impact of her own report with her “general tone of outrage and sarcasm.”30 Similarly, after Hosken criticized Ms. magazine’s March 1980 feature article on FGM and its inclusion of the respected Egyptian activist and author Dr. Nawal El Saadawi’s account of her own clitoridectomy, Ms. editors Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem cautioned Hosken about her “troubling … cultural bias” which “could overshadow the enormous value of the work you actually have done” and “confirm the understandable suspicions of Third World women that outside criticism of their countries may have a racist base and agenda.”31
Despite Hosken’s approach, her efforts and those of other activists to draw international attention to FGM began to yield results. In particular, The Hosken Report had exposed the pervasive nature of FGM; it reported that female genital cutting rituals occurred in over two dozen countries, cutting a swath across Africa and into the Middle Eastern countries of Oman and Yemen. According to Hosken’s initial estimates, at least 60 million women and girls worldwide had undergone some form of genital mutilation, a figure she later revised to 120 million.32 The report’s hard facts demonstrated that FGM occurred on a scale greater than anyone had imagined and gave the anti-FGM movement ammunition to galvanize the international community. Shortly after its publication in 1979, the WHO hosted an international seminar in Khartoum on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children. There, official delegations from nine African and Middle Eastern countries, as well as Hosken, discussed FGM openly for the first time and drew up specific recommendations for eradicating the practice.33 Following the seminar, the UN and its affiliates paid increasing attention to FGM. Newspaper, magazine, and journal articles, as well as scholarly studies, appeared with increasing frequency throughout the 1980s.34
As genital mutilation gained greater international attention, anti-FGM activists expanded their organizational reach. The NGO Forums which paralleled the two UN conferences on women during the decade—in Copenhagen in 1980 and Nairobi in 1985—brought women together from across the globe to discuss FGM face-to-face. At first, the women who met in Copenhagen disagreed fiercely over how best to approach the issue. During several sessions devoted to genital mutilation at the NGO Forum, women from African and Arab countries took offense at how American and European women discussed the practice. For example, when Hosken encountered Dr. Nawal El Saadawi, the two clashed, despite their common opposition to FGM. El Saadawi, an influential international spokesperson against FGM, complained that Hosken seemed intent on blaming Islam and Africans for female genital mutilation, whereas El Saadawi argued, “It has to do with patriarchy and monogamy … But she doesn’t want to hear any of this.”35
African and Arab women at the sessions felt that Hosken and other Western women were either amplifying female circumcision for their own benefit or were neoimperialists bent on “saving” FGM’s victims from a barbaric, exotic practice. El Saadawi argued that “the West is exploiting this issue,” while Marie Angelique Savane of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD), one of the NGOs that sponsored the sessions on FGM, protested that Westerners “have fallen back on sensationalism, and have become insensitive to the dignity of the very women they want to ‘save.’”36 For their part, many Western women at Copenhagen encountered the issue for the first time. The New York Times reported that Western women at the sessions “seemed visibly shocked to learn that girls in African and Arab villages are circumcised … Waving a pamphlet entitled, ‘Genital and Sexual Mutilation of Females,’ a Swedish student asked an American, ‘Have you read this? This is barbarism, what they are doing.’”37 Such statements incensed African and Arab women, prompting Savane to characterize the Westerners’ comments as “latent racism.”38 African and Arab women wanted support for their efforts to eradicate FGM, but they did not want American and European women to see them as ignorant victims of barbaric cultures that needed Western enlightenment.
This controversy prompted AAWORD to issue a statement condemning “this new crusade of the West” and asking Western women to allow African and Arab women to speak for themselves.39 In response, some Western women expressed resentment that they were being told to leave FGM for African and Arab women to deal with. A Swedish woman, for example, wrote in protest to the NGO forum newspaper, “We cannot accept the idea that because we have no experience of genital mutilation we should therefore not express our views on the subject … we feel so strongly that no human being has the right to decide over another person’s body.”40 It was difficult to set goals and strategies for the eradication of FGM when women who opposed the practice could not even agree on whom had the right to speak. There was little consensus by the end of the forum about how best to proceed in the fight against FGM.
Sessions on the topic at the next UN women’s conference in Nairobi in 1985 were not marked by such fierce acrimony, largely because in the intervening years Western women had deferred to the leadership of African and Arab women. The forum newspaper commented that “a big shift has occurred in the fight to stop circumcision,” as the sessions were “run like an annual report meeting to donor agencies … This is a far cry from the confusion and rumour surrounding the issue at the mid-Decade meeting in Copenhagen.”41 Finally, women were able to coalesce around FGM and develop clear strategies to end it.42
That the practice was a problem related to the global lack of women’s rights was clear to the women who met in Nairobi and elsewhere to organize the international anti-FGM campaign.43 Yet those involved in the movement recognized that international agencies were unlikely to draw upon feminist arguments against the custom due to the potential to offend the governments and citizens of countries where FGM was practiced. NGOs and members of the UN were sensitive to the legacy of colonialism in the African and Arab countries where, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European imperial powers had often used arguments about the oppression of women by indigenous men to justify their domination.44 To avoid charges of neoimperialist interference, those who worked to end FGM chose to adopt a more neutral discourse that focused on the practice as an issue of public health. Hosken, of course, had been arguing for several years that FGM was a health issue, but other leaders of the international movement against FGM made a calculated decision to avoid linking it to patriarchy or culture and to focus exclusively on the physical effects of FGM.45 This paved the way for the UN to get involved in anti-FGM campaigns without threatening countries’ sovereignty.
Health arguments against genital mutilation were more palatable to governments and practitioners, for whom the custom was deeply tied to issues of culture and religion. Especially in the 1980s, opponents of non-Western traditional practices, which oppressed women, faced the obstacle of cultural relativists, who claimed that universal human rights were simply a form of Western cultural imperialism and that all cultural practices are equally valid.46 Practitioners of traditions that subordinated women claimed that those customs were legitimate and that the imposition of women’s equal rights undermined their right to cultural identity. According to these groups, writes Iranian feminist Mahnaz Afkhami, women “have rights because they belong to certain cultures or religions, not because they are individual human beings.”47 Maintaining women’s subordinate status became an integral part of maintaining cultural identity for these communities, and any woman from the community who expressed a desire for change could be labeled a culturally inauthentic tool of Western imperialism. Arguments against FGM based on notions of universal women’s rights were unlikely to be successful, whereas arguments based on the medical consequences of FGM could theoretically avoid charges of cultural insensitivity because they did not criticize the cultures that practiced FGM or challenge the overall status of women in these societies.
A medically focused campaign was not only politically acceptable to international leaders, but the practice did have serious health consequences for women. Health professionals, activists, and scholars agreed that various genital cutting rituals could be placed into three categories based on the amount of tissue removed: clitoridectomy, excision, and infibulation. Clitoridectomy, the mildest form, involves the removal of the clitoris. Excision is a clitoridectomy with the additional removal of some or all of the inner labia. The most severe form of FGM is infibulation, in which all of a woman’s or a girl’s genital tissue is removed, and the wound is sutured, leaving only a tiny opening about the size of a matchstick through which menstrual blood and urine can pass.48 Research on FGM demonstrated that, most often, these surgeries took place in nonsterile environments and were performed by women (and sometimes men) with no formal medical training. Those performing the procedure outside hospital settings used no anesthetic and crude instruments, such as broken glass, knives, and razor blades; along with ash, herbs, and other substances to stop the bleeding; and, in the case of infibulation, thorns or catgut to suture wounds. These operations led to a host of short- and long-term physical complications, such as severe blood loss, shock, pain, chronic infection, urine retention, infertility, incontinence, painful menstruation, difficult childbirth, and even death.49 Infibulated women faced the most difficulty; if they survived the initial surgery and its complications, they faced a lifetime of cutting and suturing to facilitate marital intercourse and childbirth.50
Because of Hosken’s report and the work of other researchers, anti-FGM activists knew that roughly two million women and girls worldwide underwent FGM each year, leading to the deaths and the physical impairment, infection, and pain of many African and Arab women.51 For this reason, the Voltaic Women’s Federation, Somali Women’s Democratic Organization, and Cairo Family Planning Association—all organized and run by women from FGM-practicing countries—worked for change by educating their countrymen and countrywomen about the negative effects of female circumcision on women’s health.52 International NGOs, such as the New York-based Research Action Information Network for Bodily Integrity of Women (RAINBO), did the same and also attempted to educate the West. Dr. Nahid Toubia, the director of RAINBO, the first female surgeon in the Sudan, and an official advisor to UNICEF, the WHO, and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), published a booklet targeted at an American audience that took the medical approach to FGM.53 Organizations like RAINBO scrupulously avoided criticizing FGM as a “barbaric” and exotic practice and instead utilized a neutral medical discourse.
At first, the public health campaign seemed to be effective. The combined efforts of NGOs succeeded in getting FGM on the agenda of the UN, WHO, and UNICEF. In 1984 the UN formed the Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children (or IAC), which appointed a special rapporteur to deal with “Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children,” including FGM. The IAC, composed of representatives from twenty African nations, conducted studies of FGM and adopted the medical approach to educate people across Africa.
Yet despite the hard work of grassroots activists and their success in getting UN organizations to address FGM, they struggled to get mainstream public attention and to change local practices. By the start of the 1990s, millions of women still underwent some form of FGM each year. Without significant funding and public attention, it was difficult for grassroots activists to reach each community that practiced FGM, and many Westerners still had no idea it existed. In places where anti-FGM activists were able to reach out to the community, they often faced resistance. Tribal and religious leaders—invariably men—often castigated local women who worked to end FGM as tools of imperialists bent on eradicating indigenous cultures in favor of “Westernization.”54 In addition, the women who performed the surgeries often depended on the income they received from the families of the girls and women they cut, so they had no economic incentive to cease the practice. Even many mothers who believed circumcision was wrong still chose to practice it because they feared their daughters would be unmarriageable without undergoing the procedure. In societies where marriage was a woman’s only option for survival, parents would be irresponsible to jeopardize their daughters’ marriage prospects. Many communities saw FGM as an important initiation into womanhood, while many people in African Muslim societies believed that circumcising their daughters was a religious requirement, although it is not in the Koran.55 For those reasons, convincing practitioners to give up their custom was difficult.
Even worse, it appeared that the medical approach to FGM had backfired. Once they launched education initiatives, activists realized that many FGM-practicing peoples already knew about the consequences of cutting rituals, but they perceived the health risks as less dangerous than the social ostracism they or their children would experience if they chose not to follow tradition. In addition, the medical discourse focused largely on infibulation. However, clitoridectomy was more widespread; therefore, those who practiced clitoridectomy or excision deemed the health warnings inapplicable to them. Others started paying medical professionals to cut their daughters, resulting in the medicalization—and further entrenchment—of FGM, while some Muslim groups who practiced infibulation shifted toward clitoridectomy, which they assumed was a “safer” form of female circumcision that allowed them to uphold their religious requirements.56 Activists now had to rethink their arguments.
The conceptual shift in human rights theory that occurred in the early 1990s allowed anti-FGM activists to change their tactics and amass more broad-based international support. This conceptual transformation was due to the lobbying efforts of women’s rights groups, particularly the Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL), headed by American feminist Charlotte Bunch. Women’s rights NGOs had learned during the Decade for Women how to lobby the UN effectively, and they used that expertise to create a well-organized campaign to put women’s rights on the international agenda in the 1990s. During the preparatory period for the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, Bunch and the CWGL joined forces with other NGOs to create clear goals for putting women’s rights at the center of the conference and any human rights policy that resulted from it.57 Their goals included breaking down the public-private dichotomy that prevented the international community from addressing human rights abuses that occurred in the private realm and exposing the specious nature of claims to cultural or religious rights that perpetuated practices that violated women’s human rights.58 To that end, they organized a series of seminars in several countries starting in 1991 that brought women together to develop strategies. They also organized an annual 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence, which included, among other activities, an international petition drive to get women’s human rights included on the agenda for the Vienna conference.59 They submitted reports and recommendations to the UN preparatory meetings and eventually succeeded in getting on the official agenda.
Their most effective tactic was the Global Tribunal on Violations of Women’s Human Rights, held on June 15, 1993, the second day of the conference, at the NGO Forum which paralleled the official conference activities. There, thirty-three women from twenty-five countries testified about human rights abuses they had suffered because of their sex, as four prominent human rights advocates presided as judges over the event.60 The witnesses spoke out about issues as diverse as bride burning in Pakistan and the abuse of migrant women in the United States. FGM was included because Charlotte Bunch believed, “Traditional practices which are intrinsically injurious to women and girls can find no justification or immunity in a human rights framework that claims to be universal.”61 Recounting the stories of several women who had undergone FGM, Dr. Toubia of RAINBO testified that FGM is “a cruel and unnecessary tradition” that “is not a private issue nor the concern of one nation” and called for the international community to take immediate action to end it.62 Citing the right to bodily integrity, Toubia made a strong argument for the categorization of FGM as a human rights abuse.
The tribunal provided clear evidence that women across the globe lacked human rights protections. One thousand people attended, including “community leaders, human rights activists, UN delegates and other high-ranking government officials.”63 The tribunal organizers issued a report to the official conference arguing that women’s rights must be included in human rights law if “the promise of universal human rights will be realized” in the twenty-first century.64 Their arguments proved persuasive. In the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, the UN stated unequivocally, “The human rights of women and of the girl-child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights,” and “the equal status of women and the human rights of women should be integrated into the mainstream of United Nations system-wide activity.”65 The Vienna declaration also called for “the eradication of any conflicts which may arise between the rights of women and the harmful effects of certain traditional or customary practices,” clearly negating claims that rights to cultural or religious identity trumped women’s rights.66
Before Vienna, the UN had treated women’s rights and human rights as separate categories, even though the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights had declared the equality of men and women in the 1940s, and the UN had adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 1979. In practice, member states of the UN had ignored women’s rights for decades, and many of the countries that ratified CEDAW did so with so many reservations as to make the convention effectively useless. The Vienna conference represented a concrete step toward the protection and promotion of women’s human rights by the international community.
This expansion of human rights allowed feminists to pressure states at the international level to take action to protect individuals from human rights abuses that occurred in the “private” sphere, condemning an array of private cultural practices as “violence against women.”67 This move paralleled the efforts of women’s activists in the United States and elsewhere to subject private abuses, such as rape, sexual abuse, and domestic violence, to public scrutiny and government action. Thus, the inclusion of women’s rights into the human rights agenda was part of a larger move within states and the international community to cast the private categories of culture, religion, and the family as areas for legitimate public and governmental involvement.
With this shift in the conception of human rights, the door opened for anti-FGM activists to pursue their opposition to the practice within the framework of the existing international human rights agenda, such as CEDAW and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989. Notwithstanding FGM’s negative health consequences, activists now argued that an even more basic problem with the practice was that it violated women and girls’ rights to bodily integrity and freedom from abuse and violence. Situating FGM under the umbrella of human rights allowed activists to argue that no solution was acceptable other than complete eradication, which rendered insufficient efforts to medicalize cutting procedures and empowered activists to shame states into taking positive steps toward ending FGM.68 The UN and other international agencies only moved away from the medical discourse because of the efforts of anti-FGM activists to recast the problem as a human rights abuse. By 1995, the transition from the medical approach to a human rights discourse was so complete that the UNFPA, UNICEF, WHO, and UNDP issued a joint statement calling the medically based opposition to FGM a “mistake” and insisting on a human rights basis for anti-FGM policies thereafter.69
Women’s rights NGOs built on the Vienna experience to prepare for the UN International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo: they lobbied the UN and member states to include FGM as one of the major items of discussion. Meanwhile, FGM began to receive increasing visibility in public venues. In the United States, popular authors Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor published novels in 1992 that featured infibulated main characters, bringing the issue of FGM into American fiction for the first time.70 Abe Rosenthal condemned FGM in his regular New York Times column throughout the 1990s, while ABC’s Day One, hosted by the respected news anchor Forrest Sawyer, ran a segment on FGM in September 1993 that won a prestigious Peabody Award.71 The momentum built by international anti-FGM activists and the media created sufficient pressure for the UN to include FGM on the official conference agenda in Cairo in 1994.
While organizations including the Cairo Family Planning Association, Equality Now, Sisterhood Is Global Institute, and RAINBO lobbied the UN and member states successfully to make FGM a topic of discussion, proponents of “traditional” practices and gender roles combined forces to contest the official conference program. In particular, Muslim groups decried the conference as a Western imperialist plot to reduce the number of Muslims worldwide, and they put aside theological differences to join forces with the Vatican to create a conservative, patriarchal bloc opposed to the inclusion of women’s issues in the Cairo conference. News of this unusual alliance grabbed headlines before the conference began.72
Christiane Amanpour’s CNN video, however, upstaged the opponents of the conference and spurred the conference delegates to denounce all forms of FGM. In its “Report of the International Conference on Population and Development,” the UN declared, “In a number of countries, harmful practices meant to control women’s sexuality have led to great suffering. Among them is the practice of female genital mutilation, which is a violation of basic rights and a major lifelong risk to women’s health.”73 The report continued, “Governments and communities should urgently take steps to stop the practice of female genital mutilation and protect women and girls from all such similar unnecessary and dangerous practices,” and it listed recommendations for how governments and communities might do so.74 This final statement from the ICPD was the “strongest language opposing FGC in the history of the U.N. system.”75
Amanpour did not single-handedly thrust FGM into the international spotlight—anti-FGM activists were the ones who got female genital mutilation on the agenda for Cairo and forced states to grapple with the issue—but her video did what women’s rights activists, the UN, and the few journalists who wrote about FGM had been unable to do during the previous two decades: bring FGM to the international public. Her position as a major media figure with the power to bring issues to millions of television viewers worldwide gave her a unique ability to publicize the campaign. Thus, the combination of the UN’s condemnation of FGM at Cairo and the significant reaction to the CNN video put FGM on the map in a way that allowed for real progress in the international campaign to end the practice.
The CNN piece spurred a heated debate in the United States, as Americans watched the footage on television and journalists reported on its aftermath. For many American viewers, it was their first encounter with the existence of FGM. Paige Prill, spokeswoman for CNN, commented that one caller to the station said that she had not believed written reports on FGM until she saw the video footage from Cairo. The images on screen proved far more powerful than any written testimony. Judy Mann of the Washington Post concluded, “That’s probably the best argument for showing shocking and horrifying footage of any atrocity. The world has far too long pretended that female genital mutilation isn’t happening … It’s a ritual born of ignorance and superstition that can no longer be excused in a modern world.”76 Meanwhile, a flood of articles began to appear in newspapers across the country, and U.S. scholars began taking a greater interest in the subject.77
American lawmakers proved equally susceptible to the persuasive power of the CNN video. Representative Constance Morella (R-MD) viewed the film at the Cairo conference. When she met later that week with President Mubarak, Morella pressed him: “I asked him about female genital mutilation, and he said that it does not happen, that it’s not legal in Egypt. I said that [the law] must not be enforced … that I’d seen the CNN film.”78 Reports later surfaced that at least 80 percent of Egyptian women had undergone FGM in some form. The international pressure brought to bear as a result of Amanpour’s video eventually forced the Egyptian government to ban FGM and implement programs to eradicate it.79
Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) first learned about FGM when a longtime friend called him to describe the CNN footage. As he told his fellow Senators, “I became almost sick to my stomach by listening to her describe what she watched on television.”80 Reid was so horrified by his friend’s description that he watched the video, commissioned his staff to undertake a thorough study of FGM, and co-sponsored legislation in late 1994 with Representative Patricia Schroeder (D-CO) to ban the practice in the United States and to tie U.S. foreign aid to eradication efforts. A staunch advocate for women’s rights in the House, Rep. Schroeder first introduced anti-FGM legislation to Congress in 1993 as part of the Women’s Health Equity Act, but the bill did not pass.81 She kept pushing the issue in the House, but it took Amanpour’s video for other legislators to support her efforts.82 Taking up Schroeder’s earlier arguments that FGM violated women and girls’ rights to bodily integrity, Senator Carol Moseley-Braun (D-IL) declared during the introduction of the legislation in the Senate, “This is not just a matter of difference in cultural points of view. This really goes to … a concern for human rights that I think as Americans we all share.”83
With bipartisan support, Schroeder and Reid’s proposals resulted in the passage of anti-FGM legislation in September 1996. The act criminalized FGM, bound the United States to oppose nonhumanitarian loans or other funding from international financial institutions for countries that had not taken steps to eradicate it, and mandated that immigrants from FGM-practicing countries receive information about the negative effects of the custom and of the criminal penalties they would face if they practiced it in the United States.84 Along the way, in June 1995, the House also passed Rep. Schroeder’s resolution “urging the President to help end the practice of female [circumcision] worldwide,” which pressured President Clinton to take up the issue at the executive level.85 On September 30, 1996, Clinton signed the ban on FGM into law, and fifteen states followed suit with anti-FGM legislation of their own.86 The U.S. legal system underscored these developments by making the United States a safe haven for women fleeing genital mutilation when the courts ruled that fear of FGM for oneself or one’s children was sufficient grounds for a woman to seek and receive political asylum.87
The anti-FGM legislation and asylum cases in the United States were part of a larger trend that saw the criminalization of genital mutilation across the globe. By 2000, twenty nations had passed laws specifically targeting female genital mutilation, and seven others recognized that their existing civil, criminal, and child protection laws applied to the practice. These ranged from Western countries like Australia, the United Kingdom, and France to countries with the highest prevalence of FGM, such as Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Djibouti, and Egypt.88 In addition, Canada and some other Western nations also recognized FGM as a basis for asylum during the 1990s.89
These developments, while encouraging, did not eradicate the practice of female genital mutilation. Today, the struggle to end FGM is far from over. Indeed, scholars and activists have questioned whether national legislation is enough to combat the practice, or if it is even an effective way to approach the issue.90 For those who support the legislative efforts, the struggle to get governments to commit the resources and political will to uphold their laws is ongoing. For example, no person was prosecuted for violating the U.S. ban on genital mutilation until 2006.91 Most governments that passed anti-FGM legislation have yet to dedicate enough funding and attention to enforcement. After passing the laws, many turned their attention to other pressing problems, and FGM faded from their agendas. Enforcing the legislation must be accompanied by culturally sensitive, on the ground efforts to change the views of practitioners. NGOs and grassroots activists have led the way, but they often lack adequate resources. They still struggle to counter the arguments of cultural relativists who argue the practice should continue. Scholars even continue to argue about what to call the customs that constitute FGM.92 Thus, at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the debate about FGM and how best to bring about its eradication continued unabated.
Yet the developments of the 1990s opened up space for progress in the campaign to end FGM. The story of human rights in the twentieth century is that of the continuous expansion of rights, increasingly due to the efforts of grassroots activists and NGOs rather than governments or the United Nations. It was the rise of NGOs and grassroots activism in the last quarter of the twentieth century that both created the campaign against FGM and helped expand the international human rights regime so that FGM could be considered a human rights abuse. Without the efforts of nonstate actors and the media, FGM would have remained on the margins of the human rights agenda. Activists caused the crucial shift in human rights discourse and practice that led to the categorization of abuses in the “private” realm as human rights violations. Women’s human rights could no longer be ignored in the name of cultural autonomy or state sovereignty. This development paved the way for activists and the international community to use human rights instruments in new ways to broaden and strengthen human rights protections, as they did in the campaign against FGM. The revolutionary breakdown of the public-private dichotomy, which had dominated human rights law for most of the twentieth century, created the potential for a truly universal application of human rights.
NOTES
I would like to thank Richard Immerman, Petra Goedde, Will Hitchcock, Beth Bailey, and Harvey Neptune, as well as the participants in Temple University’s International History Workshop on the history of human rights, for their critical feedback and support in the writing of this chapter.
1. The various rituals that involve cutting the female genitalia are also referred to as “female genital cutting” (FGC), “female circumcision,” “female genital modification,” and “female genital surgeries” (FGS). “Female circumcision” was the earliest term, while FGM came into use by the late 1970s. FGC, FGS, and female genital modification are more recent terms created due to the debate about finding terminology that is accurate but not offensive to practitioners. This chapter is not concerned with these debates; I have utilized “female genital mutilation” because it was the most commonly used term during the period under examination.
2. Gail Young reporting from Cairo, The World Today, CNN, September 7, 1994, DVD, Television News Archive, Vanderbilt University Libraries.
3. Jill Smolowe, “A Rite of Passage—or Mutilation?” Time, September 26, 1994, 65 and at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,981483,00.html (accessed September 13, 2008).
4. Young, World Today, CNN.
5. Nada Khader, “Hope for Our Sisters: Ending Female Genital Mutilation,” Proutworld, 2001, http://www.proutworld.org/ (accessed October 22, 2008).
6. “Egypt: UN Conference on Population and Development and FGM,” Women’s International Network News 20, no. 4 (September 1994): 29; Judy Mann, “When Journalists Witness Atrocities,” The Washington Post, September 23, 1994, E3; and Elizabeth Heger Boyle, Female Genital Cutting: Cultural Conflict in the Global Community (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 3.
7. Berta Esperanza Hernandez-Truyol, “Human Rights Through a Gendered Lens: Emergence, Evolution, Revolution” in Women and International Human Rights Law, vol. 1, Introduction to Women’s Human Rights Issues, ed. Kelly D. Askin and Dorean M. Koenig (Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers, Inc., 1999), 31–32. The six conferences were the 1992 “Earth Summit” in Rio, the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, the ICPD in Cairo in 1994, the 1995 World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen, the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, and the 1996 Conference on Human Settlements.
8. For scholarship on the formative years of the UN, see Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); Micheline R. Ishay, The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 174–243; Jack Mahoney, The Challenge of Human Rights: Origin, Development, and Significance (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 42–53; Marilyn Lake, “From Self-Determination via Protection to Equality via Non-Discrimination: Defining Women’s Rights at the League of Nations and the United Nations,” in Women’s Rights and Human Rights: International Historical Perspectives, ed. Patricia Grimshaw, Katie Holmes, and Marilyn Lake (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), 254–71; Stephen C. Schlesinger, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2003); M. Glen Johnson, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A History of Its Creation and Implementation, 1948–1998 (Paris: UNESCO Publishers, 1998); Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001); A. W. Brian Simpson, “The Road to San Francisco: The Revival of the Human Rights Idea in the Twentieth Century,” Human Rights Quarterly 14 (1992): 447–77; and Hernandez-Truyol, “Human Rights Through a Gendered Lens,” in Women and International Human Rights Law, Askin and Koenig, 3–39.
9. These include the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, the 1994 Cairo Programme of Action, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, and the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women.
10. Hernandez-Truyol, “Human Rights Through a Gendered Lens” in Women and International Human Rights Law, Askin and Koenig, 25–26; Kenneth Cmiel, “The Recent History of Human Rights,” American Historical Review 109, no. 1 (February 2004): 123.
11. Charter of the United Nations, preamble and Article I, at the UN website, http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/index.shtml (accessed August 12, 2009); Universal Declaration of Human Rights, http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/(accessed August 12, 2009). The UN Charter declares “the equal rights of men and women” (preamble) and upholds “promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion” (Art. 1). The UDHR declares the equality of all human beings and specifically addresses sex: “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” (Art. 2).
12. Boyle, Female Genital Cutting, 41.
13. Ibid., 45.
14. Hernandez-Truyol, “Human Rights Through a Gendered Lens,” in Women and International Human Rights Law, Askin and Koenig, 3.
15. Karen Lindsey, Holly Newman, and Fran Taylor, “Rape: The All American Crime” (1973), in Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement, eds. Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 195–96; Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975); and Estelle B. Freedman, No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002), 276–302.
16. For a good list of the publications available before 1979, see the bibliography in Fran P. Hosken, The Hosken Report: Genital and Sexual Mutilation of Females, 4th rev. ed. (Lexington, MA: Women’s International Network News, 1993), 429–39. Hereafter Hosken, Report (1993).
17. Fran P. Hosken, “A Personal View,” in The Hosken Report: Genital and Sexual Mutilation of Females (Lexington, MA: Women’s International Network News, 1979), 1. Hereafter Hosken, Report (1979). Hosken numbers each chapter separately in her report, so I must refer to the chapter title as well as the page number for the purposes of citation.
18. Hosken, “A Personal View,” in Report (1979), 1–20.
19. Hosken, Report (1979); Fran P. Hosken, Female Sexual Mutilations: The Facts and Proposals for Action (Lexington, MA: Women’s International Network News, 1980); Fran P. Hosken, The Hosken Report: Genital and Sexual Mutilation of Females, 3rd rev. ed. (Lexington, MA: Women’s International Network News, 1982); Hosken, Report (1993).
20. For example, Dr. Nahid Toubia states that she relied upon Hosken’s figures when no national studies were available. Nahid Toubia, Female Genital Mutilation: A Call for Global Action (New York: RAINBO, 1995), 22.
21. Hosken, “Medical Facts and Summary,” in Report (1979), 1; and Hosken, “A Personal View,” in Report (1979), 2.
22. Hosken, “Medical Facts and Summary,” in Report (1979), 1. As Hosken and many subsequent anti-FGM activists have pointed out, the male equivalent of female “circumcision,” even the mildest form, would involve partial or total amputation of the penis.
23. Hosken, foreword to her Report (1979), 2, 4.
24. Hosken, “Medical Facts and Summary,” in Report (1979), 1.
25. For example, see Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978); and Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
26. Hosken, foreword to her Report (1979), 1–2.
27. Ibid., 6.
28. Hosken, “A Personal View,” in Report (1979), 1.
29. Hosken, “The Politics of Genital Mutilation,” in Report (1979), 12.
30. Margaret Jean Hay, review of The Hosken Report: Genital and Sexual Mutilation of Females in International Journal of African Historical Studies 14, no. 3 (1981): 523–26.
31. Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem, “The International Crime of Genital Mutilation,” Ms., March 1980, 65–67, 98, 100; Nawal El Saadawi, “The Question No One Would Answer,” Ms., March 1980, 68–69; Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan to Fran Hosken, March 26, 1980, letters to Ms., 1972–1980, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. The dispute between Hosken and Ms. arose because, when Hosken heard the magazine was considering running a piece on FGM, she proposed that she be the author. She was insulted when Morgan and Steinem decided to write the articles themselves, and she objected when they included El Saadawi’s article rather than focus on Hosken’s campaign. Hosken objected to El Saadawi’s socialist politics and accused her of being a “tool of the PLO.” Steinem and Morgan to Hosken, March 26, 1980, letters to Ms., 1972–1980, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University; Fran Hosken to Gloria Steinem, May 28, 1979, Gloria Steinem Papers, 1940–2000, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.
32. Hosken, “Personal View,” in Report (1979), 5. Hosken, “Health Facts and Overview,” in Report (1993), 1.
33. World Health Organization, “Seminar on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children,” February 10–15, 1979, A/CONF.94/BP/9, microfiche, Women’s Rights Collection, 1789–2000, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.
34. For example, see Nawal El Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World (London: Zed Press, 1980); Olayinka Koso-Thomas, The Circumcision of Women: A Strategy for Eradication (London: Zed Books, 1987); Hanny Lightfoot-Klein, Prisoners of Ritual: An Odyssey into Female Genital Circumcision in Africa (New York: Haworth Press, 1989); Raqiya Haji Dualeh Abdalla, Sisters in Affliction: Circumcision and Infibulation of Women in Africa (New York: Zed Books, 1982); Blaine Harden, “Africans Keep Rite of Girls’ Circumcision,” Washington Post, July 13, 1985, A12, A13; and Margaret Strobel, “African Women,” Signs 8, no. 1 (Autumn 1982): 109–31.
35. Nawal El Saadawi, quoted in Tiffany Patterson and Angela Gillam, “Out of Egypt: A Talk with Nawal El Saadawi,” Freedomways 23, no. 3 (1983): 190–91.
36. Maggie Jones, “African Women Must Speak Out on Circumcision,” Forum80, July 21, 1980, 2, International Women’s Tribune Centre Records, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College (hereafter IWTC, Smith).
37. Gorgia Dullea, “Female Circumcision a Topic at U.N. Parley,” New York Times, July 18, 1980, B4.
38. Jones, “African Women Must Speak Out on Circumcision,” 2.
39. AAWORD, “A Statement on Genital Mutilation,” in Third World, Second Sex: Women’s Struggles and National Liberation, vol. 1, ed. Miranda Davies (London: Zed Press, 1983), 217–20; and Dullea, “Female Circumcision a Topic at U.N. Parley,” B4.
40. Gertrud Anljung, letter to the editor, Forum80, July 22, 1980, 7, IWTC, Smith.
41. Nadia Atif, “Workshops: Circumcision,” Forum ’85, July 15, 1985, 6, microfiche, IWTC, Smith.
42. Nadia Hijab, “Attempting to Tackle a Sensitive Issue,” Forum ’85, July 25, 1985: 2, microfiche. IWTC, Smith.
43. For example, one hundred participants from twenty countries met in Dakar, Senegal, for the 1984 Seminar on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children in Africa, sponsored by WHO, UNICEF, and the UNFPA. It was there that the Inter-African Committee was formed. International Women’s Studies Institute, “A Report and Recommendation Based on Selected Sessions of the 1985 NGO Forum Held in Conjunction with the U.N. Conference on Women,” 95–97. IWTC, Smith.
44. For example, French colonialists justified their domination of Algeria by pointing to the oppression of Algerian women. Franz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 23–68; Todd Shepard, Inventing Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 186–89; and Hal Lehrman, “Battle of the Veil in Algeria,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, June 13, 1958, SM14–SM16.
45. Boyle, Female Genital Cutting, 48.
46. Christina M. Cerna and Jennifer C. Wallace, “Women and Culture” in Women and International Human Rights Law, vol. 1, Askin and Koeing, 626; Mahnaz Afkhami, “Cultural Relativism and Women’s Human Rights,” in Women and International Human Rights Law, vol. 2: International Courts, Instruments, and Organizations and Select Regional Issues Affecting Women, ed. Kelly D. Askin and Dorean M. Koenig (Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers, Inc., 2000), 481; and Mahanz Afkhami, introduction to Faith and Freedom: Women’s Human Rights in the Muslim World (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 3.
47. Afkhami, “Cultural Relativism,” 481.
48. Toubia, Female Genital Mutilation, 9–10.
49. Ibid., 14.
50. Ibid., 14–15. For firsthand accounts of infibulation, see Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel (New York: Free Press, 2007); Fadumo Korn, Born in the Big Rains: A Memoir of Somalia and Survival, with Sabine Eichhorst (New York: The Feminist Press, 2006); and Waris Dirie, Desert Flower: The Extraordinary Journey of a Desert Nomad, with Cathleen Miller (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1998).
51. Toubia, Female Genital Mutilation, 5; and Nahid Toubia, “Female Circumcision as a Public Health Issue,” The New England Journal of Medicine 331, no. 11 (September 15, 1994): 712–16. There are no exact figures available for the number of deaths caused by FGM each year, although most believe a considerable number of women and girls have died as a result of complications of various genital cutting procedures. The author of “Razor’s Edge—The Controversy of Female Genital Mutilation” writes, “It is difficult to determine the actual numbers of women who die from FGM-related complications, given the highly guarded nature of the practice. Medical record-keeping systems are also rarely configured to record FGM and FGM-related complications as causes of death.” IRIN (Integrated Regional Information Networks), a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, “Razor’s Edge—The Controversy of Female Genital Mutilation,” http://www.irinnews.org/ (accessed August 24, 2009).
52. The Voltaic Women’s Federation was created by women from Upper Volta, now known as the country of Burkina Faso.
53. Toubia, Global Action.
54. Cerna and Wallace, “Women and Culture,” in Women and International Human Rights Law, Askin and Koeing, 646.
55. Boyle, Female Genital Cutting, 136–51. While many Muslim practitioners believe that FGM is required by their religion, there is no reference to FGM in the Koran.
56. Ibid., 51.
57. Charlotte Bunch and Niamh Reilly, Demanding Accountability: The Global Campaign and Vienna Tribunal for Women’s Human Rights (New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Women’s Global Leadership, 1994), 10–13. The Global Campaign was co-sponsored by the CWGL, Asian Women’s Human Rights Council, Austrian Women’s Human Rights Working Group, Feminist International Radio Endeavor (FIRE), Human Rights Watch Women’s Project, International Women’s Tribune Centre (IWTC), ISIS International, the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), Women in Law and Development in Africa (WiLDAF), and Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML).
58. Ibid., 10–11.
59. Ibid., 4–5, 103. The 16 Days of Activism begin on November 25, the International Day Against Violence Against Women and end December 10, International Human Rights Day. Their petition drive succeeded in collecting a half-million signatures by June 1993.
60. Ibid., 14–16. The judges included Gertrude Mongella, secretary-general of the UN Fourth World Conference on Women, Justice P.N. Bhagawati, former chief justice of the Supreme Court of India, Ed Broadbent, former Canadian MP and president of the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, and Elizabeth Odio, the minister of justice in Costa Rica and member of the UN Committee Against Torture.
61. Ibid., 11.
62. Nahid Toubia, statement during “Violations of Bodily Integrity” session of the Global Tribunal on Violations of Women’s Human Rights, Vienna, June 15, 1993, in Testimonies of the Global Tribunal on Violations of Women’s Human Rights at the United Nations World Conference on Human Rights, ed. Niamh Reilly (New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Women’s Global Leadership, 1994), 45–47.
63. International Women’s Tribune Centre, Rights of Women: A Guide to the Most Important United Nations Treaties on Women’s Human Rights (New York: Women, Ink., 1998), 92.
64. “Report of the Global Tribunal on Violations of Women’s Human Rights,” in Demanding Accountability, Bunch and Reilly, 132.
65. UN General Assembly, “Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action,” July 12, 1993, A/CONF.157/23, Section I, para. 18; Section II, para. 36–37, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, http://www.unhchr.ch/huridocda/huridoca.nsf/(Symbol)/A.CONF.157.23.En (accessed October 8, 2008).
66. Ibid., Section II, para. 38.
67. Boyle, Female Genital Cutting, 53.
68. Ibid., 56.
69. Ibid., 55.
70. Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992); Gloria Naylor, Bailey’s Café (New York: Vintage Books, 1992).
71. See for example, A. M. Rosenthal, “Female Genital Torture,” New York Times, December 29, 1992, A15; Rosenthal, “The Torture Continues,” New York Times, July 27, 1993, A13; Rosenthal, “The Possible Dream,” New York Times, June 13, 1995, A25; and transcript of “Scarred for Life,” Day One, ABC News, September 20, 1993.
72. Samia Nakhoul, “U.N. Conference Draws Cairo Criticism,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 17, 1994, A9; Conor Cruise O’Brien, “A Holy and Explosive Alliance,” The Independent (London), August 26, 1994, 16; Eugene Linden, “Showdown in Cairo: A Feminist Agenda at Next Week’s Population Conference Stirs Protests,” Time, September 5, 1994, 52; and Christine Gorman, “Clash of Wills in Cairo,” Time, September 12, 1994, 56.
73. UN, “Report of the International Conference on Population and Development,” October 14, 1994, A/CONF.171/13, para. 7.35.
74. Ibid., para. 7.40.
75. Boyle, Female Genital Cutting, 3.
76. Mann, “When Journalists Witness Atrocities.”
77. See, for example, Barbara Crossette, “Female Genital Mutilation by Immigrants Is Becoming Cause for Concern in US,” New York Times, December 10, 1995, http://www.nytimes.com/ (accessed November 28, 2008); Linda Burstyn, “Female Circumcision Comes to America,” The Atlantic, October 1995, http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/fgm/fgm.htm (accessed November 28, 2008); Bettina Shell-Duncan and Ylva Hernlund, eds., Female “Circumcision” in Africa: Culture, Controversy, and Change (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000); Rosemarie Skaine, Female Genital Mutilation: Legal Cultural, and Medical Issues (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland & Co., 2005); Obioma Nnaemeka, ed., Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women in Imperialist Discourses (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005); and Stanlie M. James and Claire C. Robertson, Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood: Disputing U.S. Polemics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002).
78. Mann, “When Journalists Witness Atrocities.”
79. Smolowe, “A Rite of Passage—or Mutilation?” 65; and Boyle, Female Genital Cutting, 5.
80. Senator Harry Reid, speaking on September 21, 1994, to express the sense of the Senate condemning the cruel and tortuous practice of female genital mutilation, S. Res 263, 103rd Cong. 2nd sess., Congressional Record, 140, pt. 133: 140 Cong. Rec. S. 13100, page 2 of 5 (from LexisNexis Congressional, accessed October 2, 2008).
81. Anika Rahman and Nahid Toubia, eds., Female Genital Mutilation: A Guide to Laws and Policies Worldwide (London: Zed Books, 2000), 237. However, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) began to provide assistance to prevent FGM in Africa in 1993, and, after the public outcry over FGM that followed the Cairo conference, USAID formed a Working Group in 1994 to integrate efforts to eradicate FGM into existing reproductive health programs (Rahman and Toubia, 240).
82. Reid’s bill was co-sponsored by Senator Carol Moseley-Braun (D-IL) and Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN), while Rep. Constance Morella (R-MD) co-sponsored Schroeder’s bill in the House.
83. Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, speaking on introduced bills and joint resolutions, 103rd Cong. 2nd sess., Congressional Record, 140 Cong. Rec. S. 14244, page 6 of 9 (from LexisNexis Congressional, accessed October 2, 2008).
84. U.S. Congress Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act of 1997, HR 3610, September 30, 1996, Pub. L. 104–208, 110 Stat. 3009, 104th Cong., 2nd sess.: sec. 579, 645. The law identifies “international financial institutions” as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Asian Development Fund, the African Development Bank, the African Development Fund, the International Monetary Fund, the North American Development Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (sec. 352(b)).
85. “House Passes Schroeder Resolution on Female Genital Mutilation,” Congressional Press Releases, June 7, 1995.
86. Rahman and Toubia, Female Genital Mutilation, 237.
87. “In re: Fauziya Kasinga, Applicant,” Interim Decision #3278, File A73 476 695—Elizabeth, Decided June 13, 1996, U.S. Department of Justice, Executive Office for Immigration Review, Board of Immigration Appeals: 1–22; Corinne A. Kratz, “Seeking Asylum, Debating Values, and Setting Precedents in the 1990s: The Cases of Kassindja and Abankwah in the United States,” in Transcultural Bodies: Female Genital Cutting in Global Context, ed. Ylva Hernlund and Bettina Shell-Duncan (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 167–201; Charles Piot, “Representing Africa in the Kasinga Asylum Case,” in Transcultural Bodies, Hernlund and Shell-Duncan, 157–66; Equality Now, “Women’s Action 9.3,” June 1996, http://www.equalitynow.org/english/actions/action_0903_en.html (accessed June 18, 2008); Celia W. Dugger, “Woman’s Plea for Asylum Puts Tribal Ritual on Trial,” New York Times, April 15, 1996, A1, B4; Pamela Constable, “INS Says Mutilation Claim May Be Basis for Asylum,” Washington Post, April 24, 1996, A3; and Patricia D. Rudloff, “In Re Oluloro: Risk of Female Genital Mutilation as ‘Extreme Hardship’ in Immigration Proceedings,” St. Mary’s Law Journal 26 (1995): 877.
88. Rahman and Toubia, Female Genital Mutilation, 101–41.
89. A Malian woman was allowed to stay in France under a humanitarian exception to French asylum law, see Bronwyn Winter, “Women, the Law, and Cultural Relativism in France: The Case of Excision” Signs 19 (1994): 939. A Somali woman was given refugee status in Canada after she fled there to prevent her daughter’s infibulation, see Clyde Farnsworth, “Canada Gives a Somali Mother Refugee Status,” New York Times, July 21, 1994, A14. Fauziya Kasindja was granted political asylum in a precedent-setting case in the United States in 1996 because she feared she would be subjected to FGM if sent home to Togo, and Lydia Oluloro of Nigeria received asylum so that she could protect her two daughters from undergoing FGM if sent back home. For these two cases, see note 87.
90. IWTC, Rights of Women, 64; and Isabelle R. Gunning, “Female Genital Surgeries: Eradication Measures at the Western Local Level—A Cautionary Tale,” in Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood, James and Robertson, 114–25.
91. “Man Sentenced for Mutilating Daughter,” Washington Post, November 2, 2006, A2.
92. Nahid Toubia, for example, uses the term “female genital mutilation.” See Toubia, Call for Global Action. See also Skaine, Female Genital Mutilation. Others, however, still use the term “female circumcision.” See Nnaemeka, Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: and Shell-Duncan and Hernlund, Female “Circumcision” in Africa. Still others prefer the terms “female genital surgeries” and “female genital cutting.” See James and Robertson, Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood; Gunning, “Female Genital Surgeries” in Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood, James and Robertson; and Boyle, Female Genital Cutting.