Mick Hartley

Jo Bartosch on those academics in the Journal of Medical Ethics:

Academics from some of Britain’s most prestigious institutions have crossed a moral boundary that would make even the edgelords lurking in the darkest recesses of the internet blanch. A group of 25 scholars, including researchers from the University of Cambridge, the University of Bristol, and Brighton and Sussex Medical School, have published a paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics which appears to recast female genital mutilation not as abuse but rather as a misunderstood cultural practice in need of gentler language….

We are invited to believe that the real scandal is not what is done to girls’ bodies, but in fact the bad manners of Western activists, journalists and policymakers who insist on calling it mutilation. Laws designed to protect children are said to undermine the “privacy, autonomy and self-determination of individuals, families and communities”. To labour the point, the authors draw an equivalence between FGM in Africa and the Western fashion for cosmetic labiaplasty. Both practices are undeniably shaped by sexist myths about what female bodies are supposed to look like. Only one, however, is imposed on girls who have no capacity to refuse.

And, more often than not, without anaesthetics.

Once you accept the premise that cultural meaning can redeem any practice, FGM becomes just one entry in a catalogue of global female suffering that we are apparently no longer permitted to judge, lest we be accused of racism or, in the authors’ words, aligning with “neocolonial development frameworks”. Yet a defining characteristic of racism is precisely this refusal to apply moral norms equally: treating some people as so culturally delicate, or morally other, that basic standards of bodily integrity and child protection are said not to apply to them. Such dangerous cultural relativism ensures that Western girls are safeguarded, while non-Western girls are “contextualised”.…

The fashionable position among certain academics is that moral judgement itself is the real violence. Harm lies not in what is done to girls’ bodies, but in how loudly outsiders object to it. Thanks to them today, the knife is no longer only in the cutters’ hands, but in the footnotes, carving away the idea that some things are wrong everywhere, always, and especially when done to children.

What strange and alarming subcultures have developed in our universities, such that academics now argue how mutilation of young girls can be excused in the name of opposing racist stereotypes, while slapping themselves on the back for being progressive.