Hollow Commitments. Female Genital Mutilation

There is a stark contrast between the views of western observers who feel themselves gagged and bound by the need to respect cultural tradition and the views of victims, who want justice and accountability.

Take just two statements from The Guardian as an example:

"We know it happens here although we have no official statistics, but we have seen very successful partnerships and we don't want to alienate communities through heavy-handed tactics." - a detective responsible for investigating cases of female genital mutilation (or FGM) in London

"Culture should not be about torture." - a Somalian victim of FGM now unable to have children, when at age 12, doctors discovered "several years of period blood that had been blocked from leaving her body"

By being 'soft-handed' when facing something as inhuman and terrible as forcefully cutting off part of a little girl's vagina, British authorities have their ear turned more towards the adults in cultural communities complicit in committing this atrocious practice, rather than the children who are subjected to it against their will.

It's a story repeated time and time again, like when westerners are so keen to insist on negotiation and power-sharing agreements with the Taliban in Afghanistan, while Afghan women- those with the most to lose from any such deals- look on with horror and anxiety. The Afghan women's movement has occasionally been fractured and uncoordinated, but they are united on this: that their rights must not be sold away, and the specter of Taliban deal-making presents a strong likelihood of this happening.

During the London Conference in January, then later the Kabul Conference this month, statement after statement released by networks and coalitions of women's organizations in Afghanistan warned of the dangers to their newly gained rights in deal-making with the Taliban, demanded that the Afghan Constitution and Afghanistan's international legal obligations in human rights not be jeopardized, and reminded the international community of all the promises that had been made to them.

There was little coverage of any of their efforts in the western media, while over the last year many prominent western commentators filled editorial pages pushing for Taliban negotiations, regardless of the human rights costs to women or anyone else. One often detects an underlying tone of sympathy to the Taliban, and eyes rolling over all the fuss about women.

Katharine Viner is annoyed by feminism used as "imperialism" in Afghanistan and York University’s Krista Hunt wrote, critical of what she felt was unjustified media attention to women's rights back in the early days of the post-Taliban Afghan government, “the primary reason for this coverage of women in Afghanistan is that it provides further evidence that vilifies the Taliban and justifies the Bush administration’s goal of ‘hunting down the terrorists and those that harbour them’.” Well yes, exposing recent history's most brutal systematized form of gender segregation, a system that included stoning women to death in sports stadiums, might result in the perpetrators being viewed as villains. Because they are villains.

Why do we worry so much about alienating people who hold down screaming little girls and butcher their vaginas? Why are we so keen to be friends with the Taliban? Why do we allow the voices of the misogynists bearing the instruments of torture to drown out the voices of their victims?

It's time to pop the bubble of cultural relativism and check our premises so that we understand more fully what we are actually endorsing and who we are further victimizing in our soft-handed passivity.

Lauryn Oates is a contributing writer for The Propagandist.