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IJIR publishes special/guest-edited issues and topical collections. The peer review process for articles included in topical collections/special issues is the same as the peer review process of the journal in general. Additionally, if the Guest Editors author an article in their topical collection/special issue, they will not handle the peer review process.
Collection
Child genital cutting and surgery: focus on non-intersex (“endosex”) female and male modifications
In this article, I argue that the moral and legal distinction between “female genital cutting” and “female genital cosmetic surgeries” cannot be maintained without recourse to racist distinctions between the consent capacities of white women and women of colour. The physical procedures involved in these surgeries have significant overlap, as do their motivations, yet they are treated differently in everyday discourse and the law. This paper lays bare this double standard and presents and interrogates some of the reasons commonly given to justify their separate treatment. It concludes with the recommendation that the distinction be dropped in favour of more consistent consent-based stance, which avoids the racism and ethnocentrism that underwrites the present regime. According to this position, the only defensible moral and legal distinction is between those who can consent to these procedures, and those who cannot.
It is widely reported that ‘tens of thousands of girls’ are living in the UK with the risk of experiencing Female Genital Cutting or Mutilation (FGC/M). This paper reviews the data on which such claims are based. It finds that the data available with which to establish the scale of such risk is both sparse and problematic, and that the numbers claimed to be at risk are considerably over-inflated. For example, data collected by the National Health Service suggests that as few as eight girls had FGC/M while resident in the UK since their records began, with as few as one or two experiencing FGC/M types 1, 2 or 3. Other data publicly available or retrieved from Freedom of Information requests to the Home Office, Crown Prosecution Service, Ministry of Justice, Department for Education, National Health Service and academic sources also suggest that the ‘tens of thousands of girls’ claim is misplaced. Current UK FGM-safeguarding approaches, though well-intentioned, appear to be based on inaccurate estimates of FGC/M prevalence and risk. Existing research shows that these approaches directly harm communities, contributing to institutional discrimination, racially/religiously-motivated victimisation and the criminalisation of innocent families. This is an issue which must be urgently addressed.
Tye and Sardi present an extensive critical overview of the sparse and inconsistent literature on the psychological, psychosocial, and psychosexual impact of penile circumcision (PC) with a clear aim of achieving a framework for policy considerations and future research. With this perspective I humbly propose to step back and ask some deeper questions about PC, being this a politicized topic we should ask ourselves whether we can engage with a literature so full of polemical publications and polarized opinions. Even when presenting “straightforward” empirical data we can stimulate very different interpretations based on the previous beliefs or convictions of the reader, generating an undesirable sociocultural division. While PC is becoming a hot topic, we are falling far from reaching a consensus towards a medical policy framework to counsel families and individuals searching for answers; it actually seems to become a politicised philosophical battle between medical and health providers, researchers, psychologists, anthropologists, and activists. At this point, can we disentangle this ball of twine, asking the same questions and searching for the same answers—or should we call for a time-out and revaluate what we want to figure out about human sexuality in relation to cultural modifications of the genitals?