FGM

According to this research, FGM serves as a type birth control and a form of encouragement for the man who is the most powerful family member, also known as patriarchal family system. FGM also serves as a symbol for the transition from being girl to a woman making girls believe that FGM is necessary for them to be a proper woman. FGM stands for purity and high social status because only families with good incomes can afford circumcision of their girls. This all leaves a huge mental pressure on the women.
In the research, 500 Nigerian women were asked different reasons for why women should undergo FGM. What I found very disturbing about the result was that 11% of women thought that FGM prevents the death of male newborns (Utz-Billing & Kentenich, 2008). What was so disturbing was that not only is their belief the complete opposite of reality but it is focused on male newborns. Mutilated women live in a society where men are the dominant sex and where women wish to give birth to only sons. This is because men are primarily the only ones allowed education and to work, thereby having an income. Most importantly, the family with a son will receive money from another family if he will marry their daughter. This shows how discriminative and prejudiced these societies are towards women.
This research also examines the mental and social consequences of FGM, which is what I find very important in this study. According to the research, FGM leaves the women with a feeling of incompleteness, fear, inferiority and suppression. Many women lose trust in humanity because they were never informed about the FGM procedure before it was performed. Factors like these make the women very susceptible to depression, psychosis, neurosis and psychosomatic...

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...r that should be considered is that FGMs can be very traumatic and the human brain works in a way where it purposely forgets traumatic events to protect the mental health of the person. This is also known as motivated forgetting (Deprince, Brown, Cheit & Freud). The only reason that I could accept these complicated numbers as being true is if most of the females had undergone type I FGM, which is the least invasive FGM type decreasing the risk of complications.
What made me very upset about this research was that around 35% of the women in the sample planned on mutilating their daughters (Yasin, Al-Tawil, Shabila & Al-Hadithi, 2013). I understand that they fear that they would cause shame to the family if they did not do it, and that they want make sure that they can find their daughter a good husband. My issue with this is that the daughters have no choice.