Activism and Journalism

Recently, I have been writing a paper for my African Law and Society class and found myself writing about some of the questions we confronted in class. While I still haven’t taken a stance on the issue of female genital cutting (FGC), I used a NYT article that related to a lot of the material we covered. Whether you think the issue is relative to the culture or morally wrong, this article is a part of a canon that has shamed women in Africa and increased impotent legislation on a national level. Even with  the use of trained medical personnel to battle infection and other health ramifications, FGC is still being pursued as a backward and unhealthy decision. In our aims to protect women we may also be projecting our interpretations of the rule of law. What I think the article also does is increase traffic about FGC only happening in African countries, without considering how it is also affecting children in America; the practice is usually referred to as gender fixing at birth if a child’s genitals do not fit the ‘norm’. Is this right if we can eliminate more extreme cases? Do we have a right to speak out about it knowing we have a larger of  privilege and media outlets to our devices? 

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