Abstract
Female genital mutilation (FGM) has been the target of significant transnational activism over the past several decades, prompting the development and promotion of a strong international norm against the procedure. However, groups that perform FGM generally view it as a requirement of their culture—they are subscribing to a strong local norm in favor of the practice. What happens when the international and local norms collide? Under what conditions are individuals and communities most likely to abandon the local norm and embrace the international one? The article lays out a theoretical framework for thinking about local-level norm change. I argue that the normally high barriers to defecting from the local norm supporting FGM are more likely to be overcome when there are non-circumcising groups living nearby and when there are local elites among the group of first movers. To evaluate this argument, I administered an original representative survey about FGM among Maa-speaking peoples in three rural Kenyan communities.
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Notes
I define a norm as a “shared standard of behavior appropriate for actors with a given identity” (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, p. 891). People comply with norms in order to meet others’ expectations, though they may also have been socialized to believe that those norms are correct or morally imperative. Individuals may comply with a norm through force of habit, but they can also choose to comply with (or defect from) a norm through a process of rational decision-making.
There is significant terminological debate among activists and academics about whether to refer to the practice as female genital mutilation, female genital cutting, female genital surgeries or operations, or female circumcision, or to use a hybrid term such as female genital mutilation/cutting. In order to remain as neutral as possible, I have elected to use FGM when referring to the campaign against the practice (since it continues to be the most widely utilized term among activists) and to use female circumcision when referring to the beliefs and behavior of practitioners. Though the latter term equates the procedure with the significantly less severe practice of male circumcision, this is how the communities I study genuinely view it.
Where scholars have begun to consider the extent to which non-state actors are susceptible to international norms, they have concentrated on structured non-state organizations such as corporations and insurgent groups, rather than on individuals, families, or loosely bound communities. See, for example, DeSombre (2006), Greenhill, Mosley, and Prakash (2009), and Jo and Thomson (2014).
I do not directly address the drivers of attitude change in this article in order to keep its scope manageable, but I recognize that individuals’ attitudes and behaviors are dynamically interrelated.
Northeastern province, a Somali-dominated region in which FGM is nearly universal, was not included in the 1998 DHS. Thus, the true nationwide prevalence of FGM in 1998 was almost certainly higher than 38 %.
Anti-FGM campaigning in Kenya actually dates back to the colonial period, when Protestant missionaries attempted to prohibit the practice among their converts (Robertson 1996, p. 623). However, these early efforts were largely unsuccessful.
This suggests that a bit of caution is warranted before interpreting the decline in reported FGM prevalence across the three rounds of the DHS as a decline in the actual prevalence of the practice—it could just reflect increased reporting bias following the introduction of the Children’s Act. That is, women who participated in the 2003 and 2008–2009 rounds of the DHS might simply be disinclined to admit that they underwent an illegal practice. However, a closer look at the survey data suggests that while some such misrepresentation may be occurring, it can account for very little of the overall decline. Specifically, restricting the datasets to include only the age groups present in all three survey rounds—women between the ages of 25 and 49 in 2008–2009, between the ages of 20 and 44 in 2003, and between the ages of 15 and 39 in 1998—causes the decline in FGM prevalence across surveys to shrink significantly. Among respondents in these age cohorts, 34 % in 2008–2009 reported having undergone FGM, compared to 35 % in 2003 and 36 % in 1998. Thus, reporting bias alone cannot explain the 11 percentage point decrease in reported FGM prevalence across the entire sample between 1998 and 2008–2009. It is reasonable to conclude that most of the temporal decline is the result of younger women entering into, and older women exiting out of, successive rounds of the survey.
Kenya introduced a new constitution in 2010, which included a conversion of the country’s administrative divisions from districts into counties. However, at the time of research, Kenya was administratively organized into (in descending order) provinces, districts, divisions, locations, and sub-locations.
In the interest of parsimony, I will model decision-making about behavior at the individual level—the decision-maker is a generic parent. However, across families, the specific people involved in the family’s decision-making process, and the relative impact each person has on the ultimate decision, will likely vary. In many families, fathers will have total decision-making authority—especially in Maasai and Samburu communities, as described above—but in some other families, mothers, other family members, and perhaps girls themselves may exert a measure of influence. Nonetheless, I treat any internal negotiations within a family as a black box, since their existence does not fundamentally alter the theory’s expectations: girls, especially if they are older, may be able to influence their parents’ decisions, but they generally cannot disregard those decisions once made, short of running away from home to avoid circumcision.
I assume that the family decision-maker (or decision-makers) is considering the social and intrinsic costs and benefits for the family as a whole.
Alternatively, such individuals may have the resources to marry co-ethnics in other regions who have already engaged in norm change.
Living near normative out-groups may also be beneficial because it can provide information about alternative local norms. If other domestic groups have divergent norms, this can serve as a foil for charges that transnational activists are engaging in some form of Western imperialism and trying to impose new norms from above. Domestic normative out-groups may be viewed as more relatable than international activists, and any disdain or disapproval that these out-groups express for practices like female circumcision and early marriage may resonate more strongly with practicing groups. However, this does not mean that the presence of normative out-groups “causes” norm change in a direct sense. Though normative out-groups may lower average barriers to defection, transnational activism is still essential in order to make the contrast between different local group norms relevant.
In later work, Mackie and LeJeune (2009, pp. 21–23) acknowledge that FGM can be maintained by a marriageability convention, a social norm, or both, but this does not change their expectations about the required process for abandoning the practice.
This is not to downplay the very real social costs of early unilateral defection. As discussed above, uncircumcised girls and their families may be subject to a range of local social sanctions separate from the inability to marry within the normative in-group. In the scenario I describe, defection becomes possible, but it is not suddenly attractive.
Mackie and LeJeune (2009, p. 16) recognize the value of an out-group demonstration effect, but conclude only that this makes coordinated defection easier to facilitate, and not that it might enable unilateral defection.
Kuran (1995, p. 27) has called this same concept reputational utility, but this term is not sufficiently descriptive, because the concept actually encompasses both reputational and tangible costs and benefits imposed by society.
While a campaign against FGM is not the only possible catalytic event, it is the most likely one, because it creates a focal point for anti-FGM sentiment. An independently generated, broad local opposition to the practice is unlikely for two reasons. First, where public opinion about a norm has historically been unanimous, individuals are never really forced to think about the content of the norm. As a result, most people will not even recognize the harmful consequences of a practice like FGM because it simply will not occur to them that there is any alternative. Second, any individuals who do harbor reservations about the practice will be unlikely to share these thoughts openly, since they would have no reason to believe that anybody else agrees with them. The introduction of a campaign against FGM provides an opportunity for people to realize that their private opposition might be shared by others, and, moreover, it creates a public discourse that allows potential norm leaders to actually identify like-minded others.
This bandwagon can occur even if there are no further changes in the intrinsic utility for defection of the norm followers; they can be induced to change their own behavior without a change in their own thresholds but instead solely through the change in social costs that results from the previous shift in public behavior. Of course, norm followers’ intrinsic utility for defection may increase over time as a response to the campaign, but it is not necessary.
Mackie actually acknowledges that overlapping marriage markets exist, but for him, these markets are class-based, such that the richest individuals introduce FGM to control multiple wives, and the next richest take up the practice in order to have a chance at marrying into the richest group (1996, p. 1008). This pattern of class-based diffusion continues down to the poorest groups. In this story, the group engaging in FGM is always the dominant group, so the non-circumcising group always has an incentive to take up the practice. But not all inter-group interactions conform to this dynamic; sometimes, the group engaging in FGM is of lower or equal status relative to non-practicing groups. This leaves open the possibility that intermarriage will produce more non-practitioners rather than more practitioners.
While the eventual outcome of a bandwagon against female circumcision will almost certainly be complete group-wide abandonment, rapid change is not a given. In Mackie’s account, FGM’s status as a convention means that there are only two possible equilibria—one at full compliance and one at full defection (1996, p. 1012). If we relax the convention assumption, however, we can recognize a number of avenues by which those who are truly committed to circumcision can hold out against the tide of norm change. First, they can exit through intermarriage with other circumcising groups. Second, they can coordinate to form a sub-group of circumcision supporters. And third, they can continue to marry their circumcised daughters to the sons of non-circumcising families. While uncircumcised girls in circumcising groups may not be able to marry, the reverse is unlikely to be true, at least initially. Non-circumcising families may embrace a norm stating that they will not circumcise their own daughters, but there is no reason to assume that they will also adhere to a norm stating that their sons cannot marry circumcised women. Given these options, it may take a generation or two before the entire group moves to a zero-FGM equilibrium.
The survey employed a multi-stage sample. The case study area was the primary sampling unit, the sub-location was the secondary sampling unit, the household was the tertiary sampling unit, and the individual was the final sampling unit. I contracted the Steadman Group, a survey research firm based in Nairobi, to manage the survey’s field administration. A field supervisor accompanied the enumerators on 6.3 % of all interviews and back-checked 11.2 % of all interviews with the respondents.
The survey questionnaire was predominantly original but contained some questions borrowed from Afrobarometer and the Demographic and Health Surveys.
Table 1 includes descriptive statistics for the full sample as well as for a restricted sample. This is because the survey also contained an experimental element (see Cloward 2014) to test respondents’ willingness to misrepresent their behavior—the restricted sample includes only those individuals in the control group.
I do not include a control for education because of a selection problem. Since neither secondary nor primary education are universal, certain types of people are more likely to achieve higher levels of education than others. However, the inclusion of an educational attainment variable does not affect the significance of other right-hand-side variables. Moreover, one should not expect that educated people are significantly more immune to community pressure than the uneducated.
In any case, there is no way to independently verify elites’ true attitudes, because if they are willing to misrepresent themselves to their own community, they are likely also willing to misrepresent themselves to external observers. Indeed, community members’ reports about elite attitudes are almost certainly closer to the objective truth than elites’ self-reported attitudes, since it is undoubtedly harder to hide one’s true beliefs from friends and neighbors than to hide them from a foreign researcher.
Women were more open to change than men but less likely to meet members of other ethnic groups, probably because they are less likely than men to travel from home on a regular basis.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Susan Hyde, Donald Green, Frances Rosenbluth, Christopher Blattman, Elisabeth Wood, Aili Mari Tripp, Catherine Weaver, three anonymous reviewers, and the editors of Studies in Comparative International Development for their comments on earlier versions of this article, and to Pierre Landry, Robert Person, Mario Chacon, and Ryan Sheely for their suggestions during the research and writing process. I thank the Yale Institute for Social and Policy Studies, the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University, and the Southern Methodist University Research Council for research support.
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Cloward, K. Elites, Exit Options, and Social Barriers to Norm Change: The Complex Case of Female Genital Mutilation. St Comp Int Dev 50, 378–407 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-015-9175-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-015-9175-5