UAB anthropologists achieve commitment from Gambian government to prevent female circumcision

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Adriana Kaplan, an Anthropologist at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, has achieved a commitment from the Minister of Health and the Vice President of the Republic of The Gambia to draw up a joint plan to prevent female genital mutilation in the country. The move comes after a proposal was drawn up for an alternative ritual procedure that enables female circumcision to be avoided. The proposal was made while maintaining respect and sensitivity towards Gambian culture.

The Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona anthropologist and researcher for the “Ramón y Cajal” scientific programme Adriana Kaplan has achieved a commitment from the Minister of Health and the Vice President of the Republic of The Gambia to draw up a joint plan to prevent female genital mutilation. The move comes following several years of work in the country and the drawing up of a proposal for an alternative ritual procedure that enables female circumcision to be avoided. The proposal was made while maintaining respect and sensitivity towards Gambian culture.

Ten years ago the Government of the Republic of The Gambia made it illegal to carry out any kind of awareness campaigns about the different types of female circumcisions that take place as part of initiation rites for young girls in the country. The stance taken was in response to the aggressiveness used by some NGOs fighting against the practice, which tried to impose their position and were quick to accuse those carrying it out without taking into account the reasons why they did it or the context in which it took place.

Since 1989, Adriana Kaplan, a professor for the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, has maintained cooperative relations with the Gambian government, especially with the Ministry of Health and the Women’s Bureau, which comes under the President’s Office, as well as with various United Nations agencies and NGOs. Her aim has been to tackle the problem of female genital mutilation from a more respectful and realistic position. One of the main priorities for the researcher has been the problem of girls of Gambian descent born in Spain that travel to The Gambia on holiday and are stigmatised and caught up in a situation that is illegal in Spain: their parents are put in prison and the young girls come under the charge of social services in Spain. As Dr Kaplan affirms, the girls are “victims of tradition and the law”.

Dr Kaplan filmed a documentary called “Initiation without mutilation” with the support of the producers Ovideo TV. The documentary takes an anthropological look at the problem, highlighting the fact that female circumcision is a ritual marking a girl’s coming of age, analysing the different phases of circumcision and suggesting an alternative procedure that maintains the ritual’s meanings of cultural transmission and social belonging without the need for the physical mutilation of the girl.

After seeing the documentary the Vice President of The Gambia, Isatou Njie-Saidy, and the Secretary of State for Health, Yankuba Kassama, have stated in writing an historic commitment to begin to draw up a framework for the prevention of female genital mutilation in The Gambia. These mutilations include clitoridectomy (removal of the clitoral hood), excision (removal of the clitoris and labia minora) and infibulation (removal of the clitoris, the whole of the labia majora and minora and the suturing of both sides of the vulva).