Introduction

Criminalisation of female circumcision combined with heightened media attention in the West has meant that it has come to be seen as a universal wrong within the public sphere (Walley 2002). Specific laws prohibiting the practice exist in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States, while general criminal and/or child protection laws have been applied to female circumcision in Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands and New Zealand (Rahman & Toubia 2000). All of these countries have large immigrant communities and have been compelled to address female circumcision as it is seen as a threat not only to the ‘victims’ of the practice, but also the cultural integrity of the individual countries (Dembour 2001).

In 1999 the largest ever case against female circumcision was made as French courts convicted Hawa Greou, an exciseuse (woman who performs circumcisions) from Mali, of ‘voluntary bodily injury causing mutilation or permanent disability’ against a girl who had been circumcised at the age of eight. Through the course of the investigation dozens of girls were found to have been through the hands of Greou, and their parents were consequently also brought to trial. Although France does not have specific laws pertaining to female circumcision, action was taken under general criminal law. Greou was found guilty of circumcision of 48 girls. A total of 23 mothers and three fathers received prison or suspended prison sentences. The initial complainant's mother was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment (Reproductive Freedom News 1999; Dembour 2001).

The movement towards the criminalisation of female circumcision, however, is not a new phenomenon, nor is the resistance that it has met from those still involved in the practice. Colonial administrations and missionaries enacted laws against female circumcision in Kenya, Sudan and Burkina Faso as early as the early 1900s. These attempts were unsuccessful and protest grew over foreign intervention in the population's tribal and cultural affairs. Jomo Kenyatta, later president of Kenya, in his ethnography of Kikuyu people and society, Facing Mount Kenya (1965 [1938]), provided detailed descriptions of the practice of male and female circumcision, and the significance behind it.