Protecting girls from FGM should never be up for debate

A recent article in the BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics—presented as a reflection on the unintended consequences of anti-FGM policies—has reignited debate about how the global campaign to end female genital mutilation or cutting (FGM/C) should be pursued. Framed through concerns about racial profiling, punitive safeguarding, and trust in healthcare systems, it asks whether protection itself can become harmful.

These concerns are real. Survivors and activists have raised them for decades. And a growing chorus of survivor-led organisations across Africa and the global movement has been deeply troubled by how these debates continue to unfold—often without us.

Because something essential is missing.

When violence against girls is abstracted into an ethical puzzle, those who endure it are pushed to the margins. When harm becomes a thought experiment, urgency collapses. Accountability dissolves.

FGM/C is not a cultural ‘practice’.

It is not a medical ‘procedure’.

It is not an ‘ethical dilemma’.

It is violence against women and children.

That is not rhetoric. It is legal, moral, and human rights fact. Any ethical discussion that fails to begin there is already on unstable ground.

Yet when FGM/C enters elite bioethical and academic spaces, this clarity is repeatedly eroded. Violence is softened into context. Harm is reframed as complexity. Girls’ bodies become sites of speculation rather than subjects of urgent protection.

Imagine if these debates were about the sexual assault or rape of children. There is no plausible universe in which such violence would be treated as ethically ambiguous or open to contextual negotiation. And if the children concerned were white girls in the Global North, their abuse would never be framed as a moral dilemma. It would be named plainly for what it is: a crime demanding unequivocal response.

This is where race enters the ethical frame.

The bodies of African and racialised girls are repeatedly treated as exceptional - available for debate, qualification, and reinterpretation in ways that other children’s bodies are not. What is recognised as undeniable violence in one context becomes an ‘ethical tension’ in another. That is not nuance. It is a racial double standard, laundered through the language of ethics.

Nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in the Global North.

Across Europe, the UK, and North America, anti-FGM regimes have produced systems of racialised surveillance. Families face passport confiscations, intrusive monitoring, and repeated genital examinations of children—sometimes without credible evidence of risk. Entire communities are treated as suspect, criminalised not for what they have done, but for who they are.

At the same time, labiaplasty, clitoral hood reduction, and other forms of female genital cosmetic surgery are legal, commercialised, and marketed to girls and young women as empowerment or self-care. Anatomically, many of these procedures closely resemble what the World Health Organization classifies as Type I or Type II FGM/C.

When an African girl is cut, her family is prosecuted.

When a white girl pays for it in a private clinic, it is called choice.

This is not protection.

It is racial hierarchy disguised as feminism.

Survivor-led organisations, including The Vavengers, alongside others across the global movement, have been unequivocal in their alarm at how these contradictions persist—and at how often survivor voices are excluded from the ethical and policy spaces that shape our lives.

At AWRA, we work daily with women and girls who live at the intersection of these harms: survivors of cutting who are then subjected to suspicion, control, and institutional violence in the name of safeguarding.

A mother who fears her child will be examined without consent avoids the clinic.

A girl whose culture is labelled ‘barbaric’ disengages from services meant to support her healing and autonomy.

These systems do not keep girls safe. They fracture trust, silence communities, and undermine prevention.

But the answer to racialised harm is not to weaken moral clarity about FGM/C. It is not to intellectualise violence against children or to treat abolition as ethically suspect.

The answer is to confront the colonial logics embedded in how protection is enforced—logics that criminalise communities instead of investing in care, healing, and community-led change.

We know what works. Decades of African feminist organising—largely survivor-led and chronically under-funded—have transformed social norms, supported the abandonment of cutting, and protected millions of girls through dialogue, trust, and collective accountability.

Ethics should confront power, not obscure it.

We can - and must - hold two truths at once: zero tolerance for FGM/C, and zero tolerance for racism in the name of protection.

Violence against girls is not a thought experiment. Justice must be universal - or it is not justice at all.

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Naimah Hassan is the Co-founder & CEO of African Women’s Rights Advocates (AWRA).

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