In the continuing fight to eliminate female genital cutting worldwide, a new study found that the prevalence of cutting is not just because of social influence.
A team from the University of Zurich said that based on their findings, cutting is still being practiced in many communities because of individual values as opposed to social norms. With these findings, the team hopes that more effective interventions for educating communities may be found.
It was once thought that the prevalence of genital mutilation is due to shared social beliefs among families in a community. Experts once believed that if a large group of them can be educated and then showed to others that they are against cutting, other practitioners will follow suit and eventually eradicate the practice.
However, the study would later prove that convincing other supporting families will not be that simple; results showed that families base the choice to continue female genital circumcision based on personal beliefs like fidelity, tradition and religious values.
"Our results don't support the notion that there are endogenous forces pushing all families to be alike, and that you can reliably appropriate these forces in a straightforward way," said one of the researchers, Charles Efferson. "Such forces may be present to some extent, but there are also important decision-making forces that vary tremendously at the family level."
The researchers visited 45 communities in Sudan, one of the countries that widely practice female genital cutting, and counted the number of girls who have been "purified" by circumcision. They found that the number of cut girls were neither remarkably low nor high, which should not be the case if female genital cutting were a social practice as once believed. Researchers gathered that practices and perception toward cutting varied among families and communities. They even found families who practice cutting live next door to families that do not.
"Because there's so much individual heterogeneity, public declarations run the risk of simply collecting the families already inclined to abandon cutting," explained Sonja Vogt, one of the study's co-authors.
She added that practicing families will not be convinced to stop cutting by a public declaration because they are motivated by their own beliefs unaffected by social motivation. While the study does not test current intervention effectiveness, they believed that their findings will guide support groups to tailor new frameworks to better fit target families.
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