Zsabokorszky Zita, Van de Velde Sarah, Michielsen Kristien, Van Eekert Nina
International Centre for Reproductive Health, Department of Public Health and Primary Care, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
Data Science Institute, I-Biostat, Hasselt University, Hasselt, Belgium.
Front Sociol. 2023 Jul 13;8:1183989. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2023.1183989. eCollection 2023.
There are 200 million girls and women alive worldwide that have undergone the practice of Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C) and 4 million girls are at risk of undergoing the practice each year. FGM/C provides no known health benefits, while puts a plethora of medical, psychological, and sexual health risks into perspective. One of the countries where the prevalence of FGM/C is the highest in the World, even though local authorities legally banned the practice in 2008, is Egypt. Within the Egyptian context, there are several complex socioeconomic, religious, and cultural drivers that influence the familial decision making of the daughters being cut. Female attitudes hold great significance in the process, because mothers and female family members are typically the prime decision makers at the daughter's circumcision. However, whilst FGM/C is often performed to enhance marriageability and address male preferences, in practicing communities there is little to no open communication between men and women about the practice, making women rely on their perceptions on FGM/C related expectations of men. Even though the connection between female and perceived male attitudes toward the discontinuation was established almost 20 years ago, since then to our knowledge little is known about the further characteristics of this association. Therefore, this study aims to explore the association between female and perceived male attitudes within families of a younger cohort and moreover attempts to provide a more layered picture of it within different levels of education.
To explore the relation between female and perceived male attitudes toward the discontinuation of FGM/C we conducted a 3-step binary logistic regression model.
Our results show that women are significantly less likely to favor a continuation of FGM/C if they think men are disapproving of the practice, compared to women that think men want it to continue. The strength of this association partially varies between the different levels of education as it is less pronounced at the level of secondary education, compared to the reference group.
In alignment with previous findings in the literature, women were more likely to support the discontinuation of FGM/C if they believed that men want the practice to discontinue as well and vice versa. At a higher level of secondary education however this association is less pronounced. This result concludes that the role of perceived male attitudes should be an important factor associated with female ones and studied further, and underlines the importance of education in women empowerment.
全球有2亿女童和妇女经历过女性生殖器切割/环切术（FGM/C），每年有400万女童面临接受该手术的风险。女性生殖器切割/环切术没有任何已知的健康益处，反而带来了大量的医学、心理和性健康风险。埃及是世界上女性生殖器切割/环切术发生率最高的国家之一，尽管当地政府在2008年依法禁止了这种做法。在埃及的背景下，有几个复杂的社会经济、宗教和文化因素影响着对女儿进行切割的家庭决策。女性的态度在这个过程中具有重要意义，因为母亲和女性家庭成员通常是女儿割礼的主要决策者。然而，虽然女性生殖器切割/环切术通常是为了提高婚姻适性并满足男性偏好，但在实行该习俗的社区中，男性和女性之间几乎没有关于这种做法的公开交流，这使得女性只能依靠自己对男性对女性生殖器切割/环切术相关期望的看法。尽管女性与男性对停止该习俗的态度之间的联系在近20年前就已确立，但据我们所知，此后对这种关联的进一步特征了解甚少。因此，本研究旨在探讨年轻人群体家庭中女性与男性态度之间的关联，并进一步尝试在不同教育水平下提供更全面的情况。
为了探讨女性与男性对停止女性生殖器切割/环切术的态度之间的关系，我们进行了一个三步二元逻辑回归模型。
我们的结果表明，与认为男性希望继续实行女性生殖器切割/环切术的女性相比，如果女性认为男性不赞成这种做法，她们支持继续实行该手术的可能性要小得多。这种关联的强度在不同教育水平之间部分有所不同，与参照组相比，在中等教育水平上不太明显。
与文献中先前的研究结果一致，如果女性认为男性也希望停止实行女性生殖器切割/环切术，那么她们更有可能支持停止该手术，反之亦然。然而，在中等教育水平较高时，这种关联不太明显。这一结果表明，男性态度的作用应该是与女性态度相关的一个重要因素，需要进一步研究，并强调了教育在增强妇女权能方面的重要性。
