Saida Hodžić is an assistant professor of Anthropology and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. Her forthcoming book, “Of Rebels, Spirits, and Social Engineers: The Awkward Endings of Female Genital Cutting,” examines the logics and effects of surprisingly successful Ghanaian NGO interventions against cutting. She has also written an article in Cultural Anthropology about the making of global data on cutting.
Hodžić responds to this week’s new UNICEF report on female genital cutting:
“The new UNICEF report on female genital cutting has numerous problems. For one thing, the report admits that educational level and wealth are strongly associated with lack of support for cutting (in most but not all countries studied). But rather than promoting formal education and opportunities for ending poverty, the report obfuscates the implications of this finding and claims that the only relevant education is about the harmful consequences of cutting and levels of social support for it.
“The data in the report also has issues:
“The report admits that it cannot evaluate the efforts that have taken place in the last decade.
“The authors assume that surveys yield ‘real’ truths about women’s and men’s deepest and most ‘hidden’ beliefs and values – that they don’t share with each other. They do not. Other kinds of research are necessary for this – for instance, ethnographic research, and even that has its limits.
“And finally, since the data aimed at national representation, it is stronger for countries in which cutting is practiced evenly throughout the country than for those where cutting has been practiced only in some pockets of the country. The report considers the importance of disaggregated data one of its largest findings, but does not take the next step –which would be to say that it needs thicker data from the pockets where cutting is practiced, rather than thinner nation-wide data.”
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