Africanizing Italy

An unpopular truth

[Reprinted from Issues & Views March 15, 2004]

Oh, what the desire for cheap labor brings! Here are Western countries now facing an influx of cultural practices that belong to mankind's darkest periods. Add to this, accompanying diseases, long considered dormant or eliminated, and we just might be looking into the face of the future. Those alarmists, who predict that the West will be brought down to Third World status, might know something, after all.

In Italy, an enlightened Somali doctor tries to cope with a tradition that should have been left behind in Africa. In "Doctor in Italy Tries to Ease Pain of an African Tradition," (2/1/04), Frank Bruni, in the New York Times, reports on scarred women who come for help to Dr. Omar Abdulcadir's gynecology clinic in Lorence, Italy. The women are immigrants from African countries, who, as girls, were forced to submit to the common ritual of genital mutilation or cliterodectomy. They all suffer from various chronic infections and inflammations. (For information on the practice, see here and here.)

Dr. Abdulcadir is requesting that his hospital allow him to perform a substitute operation on the daughters of these women, which might satisfy the ritualists. Otherwise, the girls will be taken to Africa to have their genitals cut in the traditional manner, which is not only unhygienic, but extraordinarily painful.

Needless to say, the whole subject is creating great controversy in Italy, with some Italians asking just how far Europeans are to bend, in order to accommodate the strange traditions of immigrants. Dr. Abdulcadir admits that his proposal is not an ideal one, and asks, "But is there a better answer for how to save the children?" Frank Bruni writes:

Opponents have denounced the doctor's proposal, calling it an implicit endorsement of an unacceptable practice. . . .

Italians' difficulties in coming up with an answer were reflected in the positions articulated by Cristiana Scoppa, a spokeswoman for the Italian Association for Women in Development, an education and advocacy group.

She adamantly opposes Dr. Abdulcadir's proposal. "It would undermine the fight of hundreds of thousands of women throughout Africa who have said that no form of genital manipulation can be permitted and that it symbolizes a culture that submits women to the control of men," she said.

But she also said she opposed a bill in the Italian Parliament that would explicitly criminalize genital cutting. She said that more general laws against violence covered the situation and that a law against genital cutting would represent "a specific attack against a culture." . . .

It has become enough of a concern in Europe that Denmark, Britain and Sweden, for example, have enacted laws that expressly criminalize it. Broader laws in other countries also serve to ban the procedure. . . . "Whether they live in Italy or Britain or France or America, they don't want to let go of their traditions," [said Dr. Abdulcadir]. "So I'm trying to give them a way to save that tradition."

Copyright © 2008 Issues & Views