Female circumcision focus of ferocious debate in Egipt

READING REPORT 25


Source: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/19/africa/egypt.php
Date of publication: September 19,2007

Vocabulary: 1- Seethe: to be violently agitated
2- Outrage: an act of extreme violence and viciousness
3- Loophole: a means of evasion
4- Render: to submit or present
5- Contentious: quarrelsome
6- Botch: to ruin through clumsiness
7- Advocate: one that argues for a cause
8- Forefather: an ancestor
9- Inflate: to raise or expand abnormally or improperly
10- Swipe: a critical remark

Main ideas: - A big controversy was created after the death of a girl after going under female circumcision.
- The government has shut down a clinic to prevent this to happen again.
- What is more incredible is that men support this agent practice.
- Egyptian girls between ages of 7 and 13 are taken to have the procedure done sometimes by a doctor or whoever else would do it.
- A movement against this practice is becoming stronger since it is no longer considered a taboo to discuss it in public.
- Lately there has been a drop in urban areas along with villages but the government wants to take it down 20 percent nationwide.
- A supporter of the movement against female circumcision says that how you raise your daughter is the main factor in everything, not mutilating your daughter.
- She also says that it is a male society and they took parts of the Koran that helped men and ignored parts that helped women.

Personal Reaction: The debate that this subject brings to the population of Egypt is not familiar to the people who live in Occident. We do not have religious rules to follow as aggressive as they have. The fact that they have male society represents a disadvantage to women, because they do not have the right to protest against this kind of practices. Girls that have not mature yet are taken to a doctor to go under this procedure, so they are not able to decide for themselves yet, their parents are the ones that take that decision for them. It is such and traditional society that they can not change their rules from one day to the other, it will be a great challenge to transform the way they think.