A Review of Female Genital Cutting (FGC) in the Dawoodi Bohra Community:
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of this first review out of a three-part series is to provide an overview of the practices of genital cutting including male circumcision, genital alteration of children with ambiguous genitalia, and clitoral hood reduction in Western societies; and type IV FGC in Southeast Asia. Examination of these procedures provides context for the practice of Khafd, female genital cutting (FGC), in the Dawoodi Bohra community. In 2018, a Sri Lankan Parliamentary Sectoral Oversight Committee on Women and Gender (PSOCWG) heard the confidential testimonies of 15 women. Subsequently, a circular to medical professionals advised them to refrain from FGC. In September 2018, there was a call by multiple Islamic organizations to medicalize the practice and remove the circular that doctors should refrain from FGC. In this review, the WHO terminology for FGC classification is evaluated, and criticisms published online from the Dawoodi Bohra perspective are underscored. Practices pertinent to Khafd are scrutinized. Western practices, male circumcision, genital surgeries for children with ambiguous genitalia, and clitoral hood reduction, are described to further contextualize Khafd. Position statements from professional medical societies on male circumcision are reviewed. Type IV genital cutting is widely practiced in Southeast Asian Muslims and is largely medicalized. The review paper highlights two studies. Interviews with 262 Malay women from Malaysia comprise the first study. The second is a qualitative study conducted by Islamic Relief Canada, an advocacy organization aimed to end the practice, with data collected from Indonesian women in 2013. Interestingly, all of the above practices of genital cutting adhere to social norms and are largely accepted within the communities that practice these different forms of genital cutting.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it