Female genital mutilation (FGM) presents multiculturalism with a philosophical problem that cannot be solved by another diversity slogan. A liberal society says that different cultures should be respected, that immigrants should not be required to abandon their heritage merely because they cross a border, and that cultural diversity enriches the receiving society. We know the lines. Yet the same liberal society is committed to individual bodily autonomy, equality before the law and the protection of children from irreversible harm. What happens when these principles collide? How is the philosophical conflict dealt with?
Female genital mutilation provides one of the starkest possible examples. Let's consider Europe where this is a pressing issue indeed. The latest French government estimate is that approximately 139,000 women in France have undergone FGM. Importantly, this does not mean 139,000 mutilations occurred in France. The French government says no active practice is currently recorded on French territory and identifies overseas travel as a continuing risk for girls and young women.
The geographical concentration is nevertheless striking. The Remix report draws on the MSF-PREVAL study to report an estimated prevalence of about 7.2 per cent among women aged 18 to 45 in Seine-Saint-Denis, the heavily multicultural department surrounding northeastern Paris, amounting to approximately 22,500 adult women. Among surveyed women originating from countries where FGM is prevalent, the estimated prevalence was much higher.
Germany tells much the same story. In 2020, the German Federal Family Ministry estimated that 66,707 women and girls living in Germany had undergone FGM, an increase of 40 per cent over its 2017 estimate. The ministry itself explicitly attributed the increase to greater migration from countries in which FGM is practised. The largest groups of affected women originated from Eritrea, Somalia, Indonesia, Egypt and Iraq.
This matters because it prevents the debate being dismissed as simply an invention of anti-immigration commentators. The relationship between migration and European FGM prevalence is acknowledged by the governments attempting to combat the practice. France told a UN committee that the increase in its estimated affected population partly reflected migration flows and the inclusion of asylum-seeking women in the statistics.
Yet there is an important distinction. Migration brings both victims and, potentially, the cultural practice that created those victims. A Somali or Eritrean woman arriving in Europe after having suffered FGM is not responsible for Europe's FGM problem. She is herself its victim. Indeed, European countries may offer her medical treatment, reconstructive surgery and psychological support unavailable where the mutilation occurred.
The harder problem concerns the next generation. FGM is illegal in France and Germany. But law has difficulty controlling behaviour that occurs beyond national borders. The French government's current prevention campaign is built around precisely this danger. Its message before the summer holiday period is effectively that excision must not become part of an overseas trip, because girls living in France can be taken abroad to countries where the procedure continues.
Here the philosophical contradiction of multiculturalism becomes unavoidable. Suppose a society imports substantial numbers of people from cultures containing practices the receiving society regards as profound violations of human rights. The government announces that those practices are illegal. But some families retain the underlying cultural beliefs strongly enough to evade the prohibition by travelling overseas. Has integration actually occurred?
A multiculturalist might answer that FGM is not a legitimate component of culture at all. It is simply abuse, and therefore multicultural tolerance does not extend to it. That is morally attractive, but philosophically it evades part of the problem. Practices do not cease being cultural merely because outsiders find them abhorrent. Foot-binding was cultural. Child marriage is cultural in some societies. Honour codes are cultural. Human sacrifice has been cultural. Culture describes socially transmitted beliefs and practices; it does not certify their moral worth.
This is where a liberal society must establish a hierarchy of principles. If individual rights and bodily integrity are fundamental, then cultural tolerance must be subordinate to them. That means there are limits to multiculturalism.
The point seems obvious when the subject is mutilating a girl's body. But once conceded, it raises the much larger question of where the boundary lies. Forced marriage? Polygamy? Religious tribunals? Honour-based restrictions upon women? Educational practices that isolate children from the surrounding society? What about beliefs that are themselves lawful but provide the cultural environment from which unlawful practices emerge? There are no effortless answers. But pretending that every culture is equally compatible with liberal society cannot be one of them.
The FGM problem also reveals the weakness of treating integration as merely economic. A migrant can have employment, housing, citizenship and fluent French or German while retaining moral beliefs radically at odds with those of the surrounding society. Integration therefore cannot simply mean participation in the labour market. At some level it requires acceptance of the host society's fundamental civic rules.
This is particularly important where children are involved. An adult may voluntarily preserve almost any harmless custom brought from another country. Food, dress, festivals, music, language and religion can flourish within a plural society. But a child cannot consent meaningfully to irreversible genital mutilation. The parents' cultural freedom consequently ends where the child's bodily integrity begins.
Nor can the liberal state be satisfied merely because the cutting occurs somewhere else. If parents resident in France or Germany arrange for a daughter to be mutilated during an overseas holiday, the geographical location of the knife changes nothing about the moral character of the act.
This creates difficult enforcement questions. Governments need to identify genuinely endangered children without treating every family from a high-prevalence country as presumptively criminal. Schools, doctors and social workers need sufficient awareness to recognise warning signs. Families need to understand that taking a child abroad does not create a moral or legal exemption. At the same time, women from affected communities who oppose FGM can be among the strongest allies in eliminating it.
That last point matters. This cannot sensibly be framed as Europeans against immigrants. Many of the people fighting hardest against FGM are immigrants and descendants of immigrants who know exactly what the practice does. The relevant conflict is between the protection of individual human beings and a tradition that violates them.
But multicultural societies must also be prepared to draw the conclusion that follows. Immigration does not merely move workers from one economic jurisdiction to another. It moves human beings carrying languages, religions, customs, loyalties, family structures and moral assumptions. Most of these may be harmless or beneficial. Some may conflict fundamentally with the receiving civilisation.
The larger the migration flow, the more important this question becomes. A state cannot assume that every imported cultural practice will automatically disappear upon contact with liberal values. Germany's official figures demonstrate that migration from FGM-practising countries can increase the population living with its consequences. France's summer campaign demonstrates that authorities remain concerned about girls being taken abroad to undergo it.
The lesson is not that immigrants are collectively responsible for FGM. That would transform victims into defendants and obscure enormous differences between individuals and communities. The lesson is that multiculturalism cannot be morally unlimited.
A civilisation that believes in bodily autonomy, equality and children's rights must be willing to say that some practices are not merely different. They are wrong. They remain wrong when culturally sanctioned, wrong when performed overseas, and wrong when generations of tradition stand behind them.
Cultural diversity can exist within a liberal society only inside the boundaries established by fundamental individual rights. Once multiculturalism demands that those rights retreat before cultural sensitivity, it has reversed the proper relationship between culture and civilisation.
The French and German experience with FGM therefore poses a question extending far beyond this particularly horrific practice: does multiculturalism mean that the host society must accommodate every culture, or that newcomers are free to preserve their cultures only insofar as they respect the fundamental rights upon which the host society itself is built? If multicultural Europe cannot confidently answer the second, it has a much larger problem than female genital mutilation.
https://rmx.news/article/genital-mutilation-crisis-hits-multicultural-paris-neighborhood-nearly-140000-women-affected-across-france/