Last Tuesday night I was watching the television program Insight, which is premised on a forum: the audience, made up of divergent but interested parties and a panel of two or three people who have personal experiences of the topic being discussed. The program is hosted by journalist Jenny Brockie, who facilitates the debate. The week’s program was titled “Clear Cut” and was on the topic of female circumcision. The debate was fascinating to watch, most particularly because of the difference in view of those who had actually undergone circumcision who all happened to be of African descent and those viewing the practice from a western standpoint. For example, an Anglo-Saxon male lawyer in the audience was quite emphatic that the correct term was female genital mutilation and not circumcision, because the practice is in his view
“a breach of women’s human rights and girls human rights.”
Another Anglo-Saxon woman in the audience raised the point that all children having undergone the operation of female circumcision had been sexually abused. However an audience member who had undergone the procedure was asked to respond and had this to say:
“I was a child when I underwent initiation, I was eight and I don’t need psychological therapy. I wasn’t abused, I didn’t experience sexual abuse… it just isn’t my experience.”
In another parallel, this very woman’s sister who had also undergone the procedure by choice when she was 21 recounted to the audience that it was a very empowering moment for her and was an experience she will be forever proud of. Although I don’t personally agree with the practice I couldn’t help thinking, as I watched these differing points that this was much like the colonial argument. The Anglo-Saxon argument mirrored a colonial discourse in the sense that they pitied these African women as if they were victims who just didn’t realise the grim reality of their experience. As though they needed to be saved from a greater peril, as though they needed rescuing from the trees they swung from and the nakedness they ran about in, as though they needed to be rescued from a quagmire of crap they were unaware they were trapped in.
Don’t get me wrong, as I said my personal beliefs don’t align with the practice but I think it is crucially important not to define someone else’s experience for them. It’s pointless being indignant about something that the person who you view as a victim is staunchly proud of. Especially when their experience was had only after reaching adulthood and making a conscious decision and the giving of informed consent.
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