Female Circumcision

Life Orientation Research Task

Human rights are the rights that each person is entitled to because everyone is born equal. A person has human rights legally, the basic rights and freedom a person should have.

Human rights violations are anything that abuses the right to a person’s freedom or basic right they have as a human being. Violations can happen between gender, race, religion, education and slavery.

Cultural Relativism:

Cultural relativism is the view that all beliefs are equally valid and that truth itself is relative, depending on the situation, environment, and individual. Those who hold to cultural relativism hold that all religious, ethical, aesthetic, and political beliefs are completely relative to the individual within a cultural identity. Relativism often includes moral relativism (ethics depend on a social construct), situational relativism (right or wrong is based on the particular situation), and cognitive relativism (truth itself has no objective standard).

Religious Relativism is the moral grounding on a religion.

Female Circumcision:

Female genital mutilation is a violation of rights for a number of reasons.

Firstly this is putting the young female at serious health risks or even death.

This is a form of child abuse and violence against women. This takes away women’s reproductive rights as well as their human rights.

They don’t have a choice in weather they want the excision to be done but the father or mother and grandmother make the decision.

Female mutilation is a ritual done by tribal societies in Africa and also some Islamic communities for ethnic identity. This is not a religious ritual but cultural, it’s a rite of passage from one stage of life to another when becoming a woman around puberty. It also stops women from having sexual relationships outside of her marriage.

When having intercourse she does not feel pleasure so she will not have the desire to sleep with other men out of her marriage.

Effects on the society from this circumcision include both emotional and physical effects. Although these girls who live in these communities get high social value and please their parents. If a woman does not have the circumcision she is unable to have a marriage arranged for her and will not be desired from another man.

Few clinical studies have been done to discern the long-term health consequences of FGM. Below I have reported all consequences, whether anecdotal or scientific, in an attempt to give fair time to both sides of the issue. No circumcized woman has all of these consequences, but presumably at least one woman has experienced each of these consequences as a perceived result of FGM. No information yet exists about how many women experience each of these consequences, or even if these consequences are truly caused by female circumcision. I have tried to be clear about where each of these sources came from, so that others can determine credibility for themselves.

• Immediate Negative Physical Consequences can include:

o Death1,7

o Haemorrhage1,7,11

o Shock1,7,11

o Pain1,7

o Infection1,7,11

o Urine retention1,7,11

o Injury to adjacent tissue1,7,11

o Potential spread of HIV1,7

• Long-Term Negative Physical Consequences can include:

o Anemia11

o Intermittent bleeding7,11

o Urinary tract infections1,7,11