Female Genital Cutting: A persistent and harmful social norm

Traditional norms are an essential part of life in many developing countries. They have a crucial economic role in compensating for market failure (e.g. by supporting informal lending or collective provision of public goods), but they can also be a serious impediment to economic development. International organizations and a body of recent research call attention to the detrimental effects of the so-called "harmful traditional practices", such as child, early and forced marriages, female genital cutting, which affect millions of women in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Middle Eastern countries every day. Harmful norms have direct dramatic implications especially for young women, on their human capital accumulation, empowerment and wellbeing, thus perpetuating gender power imbalance and hindering a country's growth potential.

For example, female genital cutting (FGC), the practice of removing part or all of the external female genitalia for non-medical reasons, has severe health consequences for girls both immediately and in the long run such as pain, excessive bleeding, infections, urinary and wound healing problems, childbirth complications, and mental disorders. According to the Demographic and Health Survey (data from 2013) FGC impacts socio-economic outcomes as well: mutilated women are less likely to achieve secondary education and to have high incomes and more likely to experience domestic violence. Despite these dramatic consequences, over 200 million women are cut worldwide (UNICEF, 2022). The custom is mostly prevalent in Africa and the Middle East and it is almost universal in some countries: more than 90% of women are cut in Somalia, Guinea, Djibouti, Eritrea, Sudan, Egypt and Sierra Leone.

Why does FGC persist over time despite its detrimental consequences on women? One potential explanation relates to the role of people's beliefs in supporting the norm. Social psychologists describe as 'pluralistic ignorance' a setting in which individuals privately want to change their behavior, but mistakenly think that the majority of the other community members prefer to keep the existing one (Bursztyn et al., 2020). Another potential reason underlying the persistence of FGC is that, even if individuals held the correct beliefs, there may be a coordination failure: no one wants to be the first to abandon the prevailing norm, for fear of social sanctions. Another body of research stresses the intrinsic value of cutting as a signal of sexual fidelity, on the presumption that men value cut women more on the marriage market (Chesnokova and Vaithianathan, 2010; Wagner, 2015). Finally, anthropological studies suggest that FGC might be just part of one's religious or cultural identity (Shell-Duncan and Hernlund, 2000) but this idea has not yet been quantitively tested.
A recent study investigates the historical origins of FGC and the link between FGC and the slave trade. Between 1400 and 1900, about 18 million slaves were exported from Africa along four main routes: the Red Sea, the Atlantic, the Saharan and the Indian routes. The hypothesis tested is that women belonging to ethnic groups historically exposed to the Red Sea route of the African slave trade have a higher likelihood to have undergone the practice. In the Red Sea route of the slave trade women were sold as concubines in the Harem in the Middle East and infibulation was used to ensure their chastity and virginity during the long slave journey. This suggests that FGC is deeply rooted in the culture of many communities.

In line with these findings, a recent paper proposes a randomized control trial (RCT) to evaluate a program aimed at reducing FGC while keeping the cultural component. In Sierra Leone, where 89% of women are cut, FGC is part of an initiation ceremony into women's secret societies, called "Bondo", necessary for girls' transitions into womanhood. The RCT involves mothers of girls aged 7-15 and evaluates two typologies on interventions: the first consists of providing visual information on the health and socio-economic consequences of FGC, while the second aims to raise awareness on the possibility of adhering to an alternative initiation ritual for the girls. The alternative, denoted as "Bondo without cutting", is a way to maintain a sense of cultural identity while eliminating the harmful part of the ritual. Both interventions appear to be successful: the percentage of girls cut and the percentage of mothers planning to cut their daughters decreased by 25% in three years.

These results suggest the viability of bottom-up approaches in which communities reflect on the costs of FGC and on alternative rituals that preserve cultural identity.