Awful, heart-rending photographs in the Sunday Times Magazine today

[squeaver]

5 year old girls undergoing female genitalia mutilation in Indonesia.

Can't get the images out of my head and it's made me think. What, if anything, can I - one individual - do to stop it happening?

I'd join any organisation/sign any petition/ give money. But if it's such a deeply ingrained cultural thing, really what difference would it make?

That should be compared with, not than.

I'm not really agreeing with someguy here btw. I'm in my own little world in regards to this.

Yes it is, we agree.

I hate the excuse that because the infant can't be verbal about or remember the pain that it isn't real. Of course it is, and it's awfully wrong.

I hate that too. It suffers at the time. Surely that matters.

There is a video on YT of a baby being circumcised with no anaesthesia. It is one of the most disturbing videos I have ever seen. The poor baby screams so hard it begins to choke.

It is useful though to show that circumsion isn't just a quick snip as many seem to think. I'm not referring to anyone here when I say that.

SomeGuy - I did not attack you because you are a man (and, as this is an internet forum, I don't know for fact that you are a man). You have (of course) as much right to post here as any other MNer.

What I was doing, was making the general point that one of the reasons that it is so difficult for women, across the world and across history, to make progress on the issues that matter to them (which may or may not be the same as the issues that matter to men) and to make their voices heard is that, when they do raise their voices, they are often patronised and dismissed by the voices of political and economic power (which, generally, are male because that is the way that most societies are structured) telling them that they don't understand the issues and are misinformed and misguided.

There seemed to me to be many elements of that in your posts. You don't agree and that is your prerogative, but that was my experience and my perception.

You raise some very valid points about unnecessary surgery performed on boys. Why not start a thread about them instead of (as it seems to me) trying to close down the discussion here?

I'm not trying to close down the discussion here, I'm trying to correct the incorrect understanding of what actually takes place in the subject of this thread, Indonesia, and which has very little to do with what most people understand as FGM/female circumcision.

And it's not correct to say that the male circumcision is more important to me, because I'm a man trying to oppress women with my 'economic power'. In fact, female circumcision is generally much worse, BUT this is a thread about Indonesia, a country where I've lived and dealt with women who have been circumcised, and given the awful choice it would be my daughter rather than my son who would have this done, if it were according to Indonesian tradition (of course in reality it will be neither).

Gah! SomeGuy. I didn't say that you were wielding your economic power. This isn't about you, actually.

I made the point that what holds back women's political progress in almost any place and at almost any time in history is that their progress is often blocked by the people who currently hold the power, who are often men. That point is so obvious it's really rather banal. Your first posts made me think about how long that has been the case and how long it will be before things are different.

You have sought to convince us that FGM in Indonesia is really no big deal. That's your prerogative but I'm not persuaded.

I'm leaving now.

I ask becasue Durham Uni have been testing these hypothesese for years. I took part in a radomised parent/infant trial at the RVI in Newcastle 5 years ago. They have been working exhaustivly on this for years with hundereds of studies.

Here is the page with links to past trials and current www.dur.ac.uk/sleep.lab/

"The results of this qualitative and quantitative study confirm that bed-sharing is a complex phenomenon, and infants cannot simply be categorised as bed-sharers or solitary sleepers. The intersection of a range of variables causes each bed-sharing infants' sleep environment to be unique. Factors that are intrinsic to the infant (such as incipient illness) intersect with care-giving decisions (such as feeding method) and parental experience and expectations (such as uninterrupted sleep) to determine whether or not a baby will sleep in its parents' bed on any given night. An infant's bed-sharing safety is affected by parental acknowledgement of bed-sharing, understanding of bed-sharing safety, and willingness to modify their own behaviour in deference to their infant's presence in the bed."

Bed sharing

oops, wrong thread sorry!