Feminist Opposes Mutilations, Calls for International Outcry

Only a concerted international effort will reduce the prevalence of genital mutilation of females throughout Africa, Fran P. Hosken, editor of the Women's International Network News, told a small crowd at the Science Center yesterday.

"Female circumcision" operations--the removal of most or all of the external genitalia of female children--occur throughout continental Africa, as well as in the southern Arabian peninsula, Hosken said.

No Choice

These societies traditionally teach women that the operations are necessary before marriage and fertility, Hosken said. "We wish to lay to rest the fiction that women want to have these operations," she said, adding "In fact, the women have no choice."

Beside psychological damage to women resulting from these operations, Hosken cited hemorrhage, dangerous infections, scars severe enough to prevent normal childbirth and sterility as "quite common."

Hosken said the recommendations of the World Health Organization last year to adopt national policies abolishing female circumcision have not reduced the problem.

Attitudes

"Sexual castration of female kids on a wholesale level is still prevalent in Africa," Hosken said, adding that elimination of the problem requires "a change in the attitudes of men, because it is men that make the decisions for these women."

A film on genital mutilation of African women shown at the Peabody Museum in January sparked a controversy between the anthropologists who screened the film and S. Allen Counter, associate professor of Biology.