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Female Genital Cutting in Sudan

Young girl

Fe­male gen­i­tal mu­ti­la­tion/cut­ting (FGM/C) con­sti­tutes a se­ri­ous health risk for mil­lions of girls and women world­wide. Al­though con­sid­ered a vi­o­la­tion of hu­man rights, it re­mains high­ly preva­lent in many de­vel­op­ing coun­tries as part of tra­di­tion­al prac­tices mo­ti­vat­ed by a sys­tem of be­liefs, from re­li­gious creed to mar­riage­abil­i­ty con­cerns.

The Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment Goals of this Pro­ject
no povertygood health and well-beeingindustry, innovation and infrastructurereduced inequalitiespartnership for the goals

A promi­nent view of FGM/C is that this prac­tice per­sists be­cause of co­or­di­na­tion prob­lems: in­di­vid­u­als would pre­fer not to par­tic­i­pate but would be worse off if they were to aban­don the prac­tice uni­lat­er­al­ly due to fac­tors such as rep­u­ta­tion­al con­cerns for par­ents - who fear be­ing stig­ma­tized for not con­form­ing to lo­cal tra­di­tions - or wor­ries that the girl will not be able to find a good hus­band - in the case that she is one of few un­cut fe­males in the com­mu­ni­ty. Ac­cord­ing to that view, a tip­ping point would be reached when enough in­di­vid­u­als aban­don FMG/C in a com­mu­ni­ty. Af­ter that point is reached, so­cial in­cen­tives to con­form to the prac­tice would no longer dom­i­nate and FGM/C would no longer be preva­lent in the com­mu­ni­ty. This is the view be­hind com­mon in­ter­ven­tions spear­head­ed by in­ter­na­tion­al or­ga­ni­za­tions, such as pub­lic de­c­la­ra­tions, which try to get a crit­i­cal mass of fam­i­lies to let the com­mu­ni­ty know that they will no longer con­form to the prac­tice. Such ap­proach­es, how­ev­er, have met lim­it­ed suc­cess over in re­cent decades: FGM/C has been re­mark­ably sta­ble in de­vel­op­ing coun­tries like Su­dan. Why?

In a first study, we in­ves­ti­gat­ed whether FGM/C in­deed ex­hibits the prop­er­ties nec­es­sary to be con­sid­ered a so­cial co­or­di­na­tion norm. This study took ad­van­tage of the fact that, in Su­dan, girls who are cut have hen­na tat­toos ap­plied to their feet, right be­fore they reach school age. By part­ner­ing with lo­cal schools, we ob­tained anonymized pic­tures of fe­male stu­dents’ feet to com­pute the share of girls across dif­fer­ent vil­lages. If the co­or­di­na­tion the­o­ry is cor­rect, then the study should doc­u­ment only two types of vil­lages: those with 100% cut­ting (above the tip­ping point) or with 0% cut­ting (be­low the tip­ping point). Nev­er­the­less, the study doc­u­ment­ed that the preva­lence of FGM/C varies tremen­dous­ly from vil­lage to vil­lage, with no trace of a tip­ping point across vil­lages.

In a sec­ond study, we in­ves­ti­gat­ed what sources of mo­ti­va­tion were more like­ly to ex­plain sup­port for FGM/C, fo­cus­ing on re­li­gious be­liefs and mar­riage­abil­i­ty con­cerns. For this study, four ver­sions of a fic­tion­al movie were pro­duced us­ing lo­cal tal­ent. All ver­sions showed a fam­i­ly who had a girl right be­fore the typ­i­cal age for FMG/C. One ver­sion in­clud­ed a seg­ment dis­cussing how FMG/C is not nec­es­sar­i­ly man­dat­ed by re­li­gion. An­oth­er ver­sion in­clud­ed a dis­cussing how FGM/C is not nec­es­sar­i­ly a pre­req­ui­site for find­ing a good hus­band down the line. Yet an­oth­er ver­sion in­clud­ed both seg­ments. Fi­nal­ly, a con­trol ver­sion in­clud­ed nei­ther. Dif­fer­ent ver­sions were ran­dom­ly as­signed to dif­fer­ent vil­lages in Su­dan. Af­ter watch­ing their as­signed movies, par­tic­i­pants un­der­took an im­plic­it as­so­ci­a­tion test (IAT), which re­vealed that the movies which ques­tioned sources of ex­trin­sic mo­ti­va­tions for FGM/C sig­nif­i­cant­ly im­proved at­ti­tudes to­wards girls who re­main un­cut.

To­geth­er, those find­ings show­case the lim­i­ta­tions to the pub­lic de­c­la­ra­tions ap­proach and high­light the po­ten­tial of edu­tain­ment for chang­ing at­ti­tudes to­wards FGM and ul­ti­mate­ly re­duce cut­ting in the long run.

The loop: un­der-de­vel­op­ment of girls due to tra­di­tion­al prac­tices like FGM/C.

Break­ing the loop: Un­der­stand­ing the mech­a­nisms be­hind sup­port for the prac­tice high­lights which ap­proach­es are promis­ing and which are not, with the po­ten­tial to de­crease vi­o­lence against girls

Fe­male Gen­i­tal Cut­ting in Su­dan

The study shows that movies have a pos­i­tive in­flu­ence on at­ti­tudes to­wards un­cut girls and there­fore re­peat­ed ex­po­sure could be an ef­fec­tive in­ter­ven­tion to re­duce fe­male gen­i­tal cut­ting.

Your In­volve­ment
  • Sta­tusRe­sults
  • Coun­trySu­dan
  • Pro­gram areaHealth Well­be­ing, Gen­der Equal­i­ty, Re­duced In­equal­i­ties, Part­ner­ships
  • Top­icsFe­male Gen­i­tal Cut­ting, So­cial Norms
  • Part­nersUNICEF Switzer­land, UNICEF Su­dan
  • Time­line2015
  • Study TypeRan­dom­ized Eval­u­a­tion
  • Sam­ple Size2,260 house­holds across 45 com­mu­ni­ties / 7,729 sub­jects across 122 com­mu­ni­ties

Re­search Team

Prof. Dr. Charles Efferson

University of Lausanne

More Infos

Hilal El Fadil Ahmed

Amy Elhadi

Nadia Ahmed Mohmmed Zaid

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