Kindly Academic Enablers
There is much to be said for a nation's need to heal itself. For a culture, a historical and ethnic group to realize that there are some traditions which prove in reality to be unjustifiably harmful to a great proportion of their population. The subjugation, lack of empowerment and commodification of women is one outstanding example.The need for women to be "protected" against abuse, for example, leading to far greater abuse against women. Women are seen to be so little trusted that they are to be held from public view lest they stir bestial compulsions in the hearts of men. Who are obviously so little to be trusted that they cannot, are not expected, to control their baser instincts.
A society that finds itself unwilling to instruct men in decent social behaviour, will find itself resorting to other means. Men will be free to pursue all the avenues that society opens to them so generously, from seeking higher education, to pursuing business interests and simply going about a normal lifestyle. While women are constrained from appearing in public unaccompanied by a male relative.
And even when in the company of a protector, they must be oppressively clad from head to foot in climates not known to welcome complete cover. And all the better if the face is sheltered also from the gaze of men. Pursuit of a career is not possible, nor is the pursuit of a higher education. Work of a humble type may be permitted, but interaction between genders is unseemly and illegal.
While during the Middle Ages in Europe chastity belts were often forced upon women, ostensibly for their own protection, but in reality to protect a male's property from use by other males, a practise even more pernicious and harmful to women's health continues to be practised in female genital mutilation. The removal of the clitoris to ensure women will not be tempted to sin.
Worse, the practise of infibulation where the clitoris, and inner labia are surgically removed, (with crude cutting implements) with the assurance that a lifetime of urinary tract infections will plague women, as well as sterility and occasionally death. In some instances the vagina is then crudely sewn together with thread, or fastened loosely together with thorns, to ensure entry is impossible without detection.
To ensure that when a bride is claimed to be virginal it can be proven. And any young woman who refuse to submit to tradition assures herself of unmarriageability. Muslim societies, in particular those of Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Indonesia practise the most brutal types of infibulation. Human rights defenders have always protested these practices.
Amnesty International calls this practise violence against women. What else is it? The World Health Organization called for the complete abolition of the practise in the 1970s. Prominent Somali women activists work assiduously to try to persuade women against the practise. But in these societies women are considered to be possessions. And they also represent the tradition of male-dominated societies whose word is law.
For it is not the Koran, nor Islam itself that demands that women relinquish control over their bodies in this way. It is a male society that demands purity and the satisfaction of sole possession of ownership. Yet the intellectual left falls all over itself to defend a custom of brutality that has its genesis in ownership and subjugation of half of a country's population.
To protest, to attempt to alter the situation through education is to interfere.
They recommend that the Western world look away, not become involved, not indulge in any kind of moral persuasion or economic or political pressure to mould these societies in a manner more enlightened-aligned with what is taken for granted elsewhere. Thus can the chair of anthropology at the University of Toronto preach:
"There are good reasons within the society for the operation to continue, but these are cultural reasons. They are not scientific ones," according to Professor Janice Boddy, author of Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan. The empire-building British did badly in the 1920s in attempting to re-educate Sudanese midwives, it would seem; their pressure leading to Sudan outlawing the practise in 1946.
Laws aside, the culture and the tradition and the rationale behind it haven't changed. But Professor Boddy feels Western interference to be unnecessary and indeed deleterious to the society it seeks to lead away from traditional practise. Professor Boddy insists the Sudanese, as a guarded culture, view the practise as a defence of their people against outsiders.
"The cultural context in which this practise takes place supports the idea of enclosing the body against harm", she writes. "The idea of closing the womb, which is the most precious organ of the female body is very highly supported by other kinds of practises." It will not easily be amenable to eradication.
And the science, she argues, against the practise leaves much to be desired.
She does not herself believe in the incidence of shock and death resulting from the most severe types of genital mutilation. She likens the uproar against the ongoing tradition of female genital mutilation as another manifestation of British imperialism.
It would be most interesting to hear people of her ilk defend genocide on the basis of traditional hostilities playing out to their natural conclusion.
On the other hand, it would add nothing to solving an intractably harmful practise that boasts so many vulnerable victims.
Labels: Traditions, Viewpoint
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, August 25, 2007
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