A Review of Female Genital Cutting (FGC) in the Dawoodi Bohra Community:
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".