Interventions to Stop Female Genital Cutting and the Evolution of the Custom: Evidence on Age at Cutting in Senegal

Giulia Camilotti

Journal of African Economies, 2016, vol. 25, issue 1, 133-158

Abstract: Legal sanctions and awareness campaigns are increasingly used to try to reduce female genital cutting (FGC). In this article, I show that these interventions against FGC, rather than leading to the abandonment of the practice, can have unintended and potentially harmful effects on the way FGC is performed. Using DHS data from Senegal, I find that girls born in a year and a region where the law against FGC has been legally enforced are cut almost one year earlier. No significant effect of the law is found on the prevalence of FGC. Using a unique dataset from the region of Kolda in Senegal, I find a decreasing trend in age at cutting after the year of the introduction of the law sanctioning FGC. In both cases, I interpret the decrease in age as the result of a process of de-ritualisation and individualisation of FGC due to the push towards the secrecy of the practice.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jae/ejv013 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jafrec:v:25:y:2016:i:1:p:133-158.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of African Economies is currently edited by Francis Teal

More articles in Journal of African Economies from Centre for the Study of African Economies Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().