Senegal Moves Toward Ending Female Circumcision
In the past 15 years, the Senegalese group Tostan, or “breakthrough,” has succeeded where other international organizations have failed, with most of the nation’s villages where genital cutting was common pledging to stop it. The organization was formed 20 years ago by Molly Melching, an educator from Illinois, Demba Diawara, an imam from Senegal, and Gerry Mackie, an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego. Eventually the three found each other through their work to stop genital cutting, and they determined that rather than targeting individual towns, villages whose young people intermarried should be targeted and pushed to abandoned the practice at the same time. They also took into account that while genital cutting harms girls, like the old practice of Chinese foot binding, parents do it out of love for their daughters. Unlike foreign programs, Tostan explains the consequences of the practice without using the term “female genital mutilation,” which some find offensive.
Now more than 5,000 Senegalese villages have ended the practice. Unfortunately, since Tostan’s two to three-year programs run about $21,000 per village, it’s too expensive to adopt in every area where female circumcision is still practiced. However, it still provides a useful example of the importance of cultural understanding in the fight to ending genital cutting