An ancient practice with no single origin
Nobody knows where or when female genital cutting began. The oldest written evidence is a Greek papyrus from Egypt dated 163 BC, which mentions the cutting of a girl from Memphis as a normal step before marriage; the geographer Strabo, a century later, notes that the Egyptians "circumcise the boys and excise the girls". In Sudan the most severe form, infibulation, is still called "pharaonic circumcision". The practice therefore predates Christianity and Islam, and spread along the Nile, the Red Sea and the trade routes of the Sahel without ever covering a whole religious area: it is almost unknown in the Maghreb, Turkey, Iran or South Asia, and widespread among Christian, Muslim and animist populations of the same region.
The West was not exempt. In the nineteenth century English and American doctors performed clitoridectomy as a treatment for masturbation, "hysteria" or epilepsy; the London surgeon Isaac Baker Brown made it his speciality in the 1860s before being expelled from the Obstetrical Society in 1867, and cases are documented in the United States into the 1950s. The idea that female pleasure is a danger to be reduced belongs to no culture in particular.
What communities say about it
When the families who practise it are asked, the answers revolve around five ideas. The first, and by far the strongest, is the social norm: where almost all women are cut, a girl who is not is considered dirty, immature, unworthy of marriage, and her parents are seen as negligent; consenting to cutting is then, from the parents' point of view, protecting their daughter's future. The second is control of sexuality: cutting is supposed to calm desire, guarantee virginity before marriage and fidelity afterwards, and make a woman "docile". The third concerns aesthetics and cleanliness: the clitoris is described as a masculine growth, ugly, dirty, even dangerous to the unborn child. The fourth is the rite of passage, with its celebrations, gifts and the new status it confers. The fifth is religion: many sincerely believe it is prescribed, although no sacred text mentions it and the major religious authorities, including Al-Azhar in Cairo, have condemned it.
Behind these discourses lie concrete interests: cutters draw income and prestige from the practice, elder women see in it the transmission of what they themselves underwent, and men, often absent from the decision, accept its result because they cannot picture marrying an "incomplete" woman. Surveys show, moreover, that in several countries a majority of men and women now want the practice abandoned — but that each believes the others are attached to it.
Female desire at the heart of the practice
Cutting is one of the few customs whose declared aim is to reduce women's sexual desire. What does it actually produce? The studies gathered in systematic reviews show on average more pain during intercourse, less desire and less satisfaction among cut women than among others, with gaps that widen as the mutilation is more extensive — infibulation being the most destructive. But they also show that many cut women retain the capacity for orgasm: the visible part of the clitoris is only a small fraction of it, its internal roots and bulbs are spared by most mutilations, and arousal depends as much on the brain, the context and the relationship as on tissue. The practice therefore achieves its goal only incompletely and at the cost of suffering it does not announce — and it fails entirely on the other count: no study has ever shown that it makes women more faithful.
What the women concerned say varies greatly. Some have no memory of it and no identified difficulty; others describe pain, fear of intercourse, a feeling of being "different" or "incomplete" that sets in especially after migration, when they discover the practice is not universal; others again live a satisfying sexuality and refuse to be reduced to what was done to them. None of these experiences delegitimises the others.
Why it persists despite the laws
Most of the countries concerned have passed prohibition laws, sometimes decades ago. They have not been enough, for a reason the political scientist Gerry Mackie formulated in 1996 by comparing cutting to foot binding in China: it is a convention. A family that alone gives up cutting its daughter condemns her to finding no husband; all families have an interest in the practice ending, but none has an interest in stopping first. Prohibiting without changing the collective expectation displaces the practice — to earlier ages, into hiding, across the border — or medicalises it: in Egypt more than three quarters of cutting is now done by health workers, which changes nothing about the lasting consequences.
Foot binding, though a thousand years old, disappeared from China within a generation at the start of the twentieth century, through societies of families who pledged together neither to bind their daughters' feet nor to marry their sons to girls with bound feet. That is the model followed since 1997 by the public declarations of abandonment organised in Senegal and then in other West African countries by the organisation Tostan: whole villages, after an education programme on rights and health, announce together that they are stopping — and since everyone stops at the same time, nobody has to fear for their daughter's marriage any more.
How it is declining
The practice falls wherever girls stay in school longer, wherever women have an income of their own, wherever the media and diasporas show that it is not universal, and wherever men say publicly that they will marry uncut women. In several countries teenage girls are now cut markedly less often than their mothers: Kenya, Burkina Faso, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia have seen prevalence fall among 15 to 19-year-olds. But the decline is slow — to meet the United Nations target of elimination by 2030 it would have to be twenty-seven times faster — and it suffers setbacks: in The Gambia a bill to reinstate the practice was debated in parliament in 2024 before being rejected.
On this site the country pages say, for each country covered, what the law provides, how to protect a child before a journey and where to find help.
What it changes for a couple
The first thing is to talk about it. Many women never raise the subject, with their partner or with a health professional, and many professionals never ask. Yet pain, infections or difficulties during intercourse have precise causes and solutions: deinfibulation, a simple surgical procedure, reopens what was closed and immediately relieves urinary, menstrual and sexual pain; clitoral reconstruction surgery, developed by the French urologist Pierre Foldès and evaluated in 2012 on nearly three thousand women, reduces pain and restores clitoral sensation for most of those followed up a year later; and sexological or psychological support, alone or combined with surgery, is what makes the biggest difference to desire and pleasure.
For the partner the rule is simple: do not pretend nothing happened, do not reduce the other to what was done to her either, and look together for what feels good — the erogenous zones are not limited to one, and the sexuality of a cut woman is not condemned in advance. Desire, here as elsewhere, is built more than it is observed.