Learning through social interaction: Kenyan women against female genital cutting in Kenya

Abstract

Female Genital Cutting (FGC) is a human rights issue that involves the partial or total removal of the external female genitalia for non-medical reasons. Drawing on in-depth interview data collected in 2017 with 20 women from three FGC-practising ethnic groups in Kenya, I argue that informal learning through social interaction plays a critical role in the ability of Kenyan women to oppose and work against FGC in their communities. In addition to knowledge gained through formal education such as schooling and anti-FGC campaigns, women learned about FGC and ways to resist the practice through social interaction with family members, role models and peers from non-FGC practising communities. These interactions have framed challenging FGC as a worthy behaviour to pursue. They also helped women reframe ‘success.’ While a hallmark of being a successful woman has traditionally been tied to FGC, through these interactions, women learned that they can achieve a respected status as a woman without undergoing FGC. Finally, they provided support for women to stay resilient in resisting FGC. Overall, informal learning is important for understanding how some Kenyan women resist FGC.

Keywords:

• Culture
• female genital cutting
• education
• activism
• Kenya

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Christie Sennott for her patience, support and guidance during the course of this research. Thanks also to Ellen Gruenbaum and Daniel Winchester for their close engagement at various stages of this article. I thank Peter Aggleton and three anonymous reviewers for their comments. Thanks go to the Department of Sociology, College of Liberal Arts, Purdue University for the support that enabled earlier versions of this article could be presented at following conferences: Sociologists for Women in Society, Southern Sociological Society, International Sociological Association, Association of Korean Sociologists in American and American Sociological Association. Finally, I express my gratitude to the research participants who shared their experiences with me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 To be consistent with the scholarly literature, I have referred to the practice as FGC, although I also used the term FGM in the interviews. FGC was also referred to as ‘circumcising’ or ‘cutting’ by the study participants. I described women who have undergone FGC as ‘cut’, and women who have not undergone FGC as ‘uncut.’

2 While I looked for the differences across three ethnic groups, the ways in which participants discussed their education in the context of social interaction was similar across three ethnic groups.

3 Study participants described the ‘anti-FGC camp’ as an NGO sponsored event where young uncut girls are gathered to be educated about the negative effects about FGC to increase awareness.

4 Participants used the word ‘girl’ to indicate a child and ‘woman’ to indicate an adult. This distinction is not necessarily made according to age but depends on whether an individual has gone through a rite of passage such as FGC, or something equivalent, to become a wife and mother.

5 Because of the risk of revealing participants’ identities, pseudonyms are used for all names of people. Because participants used their Christian/Western names in interactions with me, I have adopted English pseudonyms for all participants.