According to an article in the Guardian about the schoolgirl who campaigned for more information on FGM in schools, there are up to 66,000 victims of female genitial multilation in the UK. If you count circumcision as male genital mutilation, then according to a couple of sources, there are roughly 31,000 victims of male gentical mutilation per year.
And the rate of circumcision has been falling for decades; according to an article on the prevalence of male circumcision, the average rate of male circumcision approximates about 10% which would mean that there are in total approximately 2.7 million men who have been circumcised.
Let’s perform a little experiment with those figures. Let us assume that a victim of MGM suffers 1/100 of the agony of a victim of FGM. This is of course nonsense as different kinds of FGM are practiced and how on earth do you measure the level of agony for any victim? But let’s crunch those numbers …
It turns out that using those assumptions there are the equivalent of 27,000 victims of FGM amongst the male population!
Now in case anyone misunderstands me, I’m fully behind the campaign against FGM. It’s a primitive and barbaric custom practiced for reasons that are probably due to religious fanatics being terrified of female sexuality.
But we shouldn’t ignore MGM just because it seems less severe and is practiced for less repressive reasons – for mistaken health benefits, spurious “aesthetic” reasons, or just to mark someone as a member of a tribe. Whilst it may seem a little extreme to call male circumcision MGM, it is worth pointing out that there is a reason for calling it male circumcision. In the past FGM was called female circumcision; changing attitudes have relabelled it FGM. There is no reason to suppose that in the future, male circumcision will be universally reviled as MGM.
There is something else that is overlooked too. There is nothing wrong with genital mutilation if it is freely chosen by a responsible adult … for themselves. In other words there is nothing wrong with either FGM or MGM.
What is wrong is any kind of childhood mutilation – genitial mutilation or otherwise. Nobody has the right to make that sort of decision on behalf of another, not parents, nor religious leaders. At one time, paedophiles were labelled “kiddie fiddlers”, well it’s time to label practitioners of CGM (FGM+MGM) “kiddie fiddlers” too.