L'excision (document en anglais)

Theophile Ye

Professeur Bush

English 1301-71030

November 22, 2013

Essay 3 - Process

There is a cultural ritual practiced in 27 countries of Africa and Asia which is not really know by Americans called Excision. Excision is a female genital mutilation for non-medical reasons. This practice involve the removal of all or part of the clitoris. Excision is a very bad practice that should be stopped.

Excision is a part of traditional rituals that used to be practiced in most of the countries, especially in Africa. People used to practice excision in order to prevent the girl from having sex before the marriage and to provide a kind guaranty to the family and an honor for the future husband. This practice had a lot to do with the perpetuation of the tradition of one culture and to protect their identity. Habitually, the practice of excision is done before the age of 5. For example, in Burkina Faso, mostly in the South West of the country, this practice has been used especially on the girls around the age of 4 years old.

Regarding countries and ethnicities or cultures, the practice of excision can occur in different ways and at different ages. Habitually, excision is practiced by old women who got this knowledge from their mothers. They take young girls to some special places or in the girl's family house (in most of the cases, these places are sacred and only reserved for traditional things) where they proceed with the surgery using knives or razor. The surgery involves partial or total removal of the glans of the clitoris and the outer labia with or without the removal of the inner labia. Excision is sometimes practiced in hospitals. For example, in some village in Burkina Faso, they used to do excision on the third Friday of each month, because Friday is consider as the ancestral days.

Even though these practices had significant meaning in each country or culture where it used to be done, they have many consequences. Excision has some immediate consequences such as acute urinary retention, urinary infections, wound infections, septicemia, and transmission of hepatitis or HIV if the instruments used are non-sterile or reused. In addition, the vulva, the labia and the clitoris are parts of the body are very vascularized and innervated, thus excision is always accompanied by bleeding and can sometimes produce serious hemorrhages. Excision can also have some late complications. The physical strength and the pain used to practice excision produces a trauma to most of these young girl, which gives to these girl the fear to have sex with their husbands later. Also excised girls bleed most of the time that they have sex and have serious difficulty in giving birth; sometimes they are just infertile.

Excision is a bad traditional practice and it is a violation of the women's and children's right. It is considered as a serious mutilation punished by the law in most countries, but in others it is tolerated because of the tradition. In Burkina Faso, excision is a practice punished by the law since 1996. But some people still practice it clandestinely. In 1996, the government started a program of sensitization and a judicial sentence

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