Girls and Boys as Victims : Asymmetries and dynamics in European public discourses on genital modifications in children
Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: This paper starts with a discussion about the symmetrical aspects of circumcision of girls and circumcision of boys. In a brief overview of historical changes in the discourses on circumcision, especially regarding girls, we can see how a conceptual asymmetry was created through the activist claim, introduced in the early 1980s and prominent since then, that one of the phenomena, in whatever form, was to be labelled ‘mutilation’, the other ‘harmless’. The paper will further discuss later developments in the form of an activist movement (the genital integrity movement, intactivists) contending that also boys without decision-making capacity need to have legal protection against non-medical procedures that irreversibly change their genitals. Examples from the academic, medical, and political-legal fields in Europe will demonstrate a general trend in which the symmetries between circumcision of girls and boys are again being brought out, now within a children’s rights perspective.
Author: Sara Johnsdotter
Language: English
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2942609279