National Legislation on Female Genital Cutting
Overview
Q: Please begin by giving us an overview of the study? What lead you to become involved, what were the nature of the methods, and the findings?
A: Well, the study that I did is on national legislation on female genital cutting. What got me started on that topic is…well, I was really interested in female genital cutting. I had talked to some friends about it and not so much in, sort of, the media reports of it, but just because the issue seems to sit at the crux of so many complicated political issues in the world today. So, it deals with, obviously it has racial aspects, it has gender aspects, it has ideas related to imperialism. There's lots of hot debates that it becomes the center of and so I thought it was a really interesting issue to look at some of the broader sociological problems that we're all trying to answer. So that's how I got involved in the study. In terms of the overall research design, it's a qualitative study. And basically what I started out with was a paradox. Why do countries where 98% of the families practice female circumcision have laws against the practice? When I initially started studying it, I had no expectations that that was going to be the case and I was actually surprised to find that was the case. So then, the question became, "well, how does that come about?" One would expect those are not popularly supported laws based on public opinion in those countries. So, I started out with this question and then I kind of went back to my training in theory development and thought, well, what I really needed to do here is come up with a crucial test, sort of like what Art Stinchcombe talks about. Because it's a qualitative study, I felt it was important to get as much information from as many different sources as I could. Basically, I set up these crucial tests and I said, well, what's happening at the national level with respect to national laws is either they're coming about as a result of local mobilization or they're coming about solely as a result of international pressure, primarily a result of international pressure. Then I tried to set up these propositions as contradictory, so only one could be true. So I said for example, if laws were passed, as a result of local popular mobilization, then we would expect to find laws in countries where less than a majority of women practice female circumcision. If, on the other hand, they're coming about as a result of international pressure, international pressure would be strongest on those countries where female circumcision is the highest and so, it would be the exact opposite–we would expect to find laws in countries where most of them were practicing female circumcision. I set up four sets of propositions that were like that–where either one was true or the other is true, but they couldn't both be true. Then I went out–my co-author is Sharon Preves–we went out and got as much information as we could. First, we started with embassies, country embassies, and that was actually sort of interesting, in and of itself, because the embassies, the African embassies to the United States wouldn't talk to us. We'd get…the phone would mysteriously disconnect, or we'd get transferred to talk to the person who knew about it but there would be no one there. That, in and of itself, I thought was sort of interesting and I would have actually used that as data itself except it was all quite subtle, so you couldn't really tell what was going on, so that was a dead end, that didn't work. Then we went to US State Department reports over in the Law Library. Marcy Thompson put together a very, very comprehensive bibliography of all the legal articles that had been written on the topic. We looked at demographic and health surveys, we looked at world health organization reports, anything the UN had ever done, or any NGO. We put together a list of about 100 NGOs that we got off of websites, and sent out a mailing asking them to send us any information they had. So that was where we got all of our data. And then we really tried to honestly assess these propositions, we had some sense that the international pressure was more important because in a way we sort of knew the end story, but the end story wasn't the interesting part, what was interesting was how you got to the point where these countries had laws that went against popular opinion. And so, we really tried to develop, since we had all this qualitative data, some nuances about the process and how that happened.
Theory
Q: Was there any existing literature on this subject that stimulated your interest, that helped guide you to certain aspects of the problem, or lead you to a certain set of expectations?
A: Well, theoretically we came at it from a neo-institutional perspective with some aspects of the symbolic law literature, Joe Gusfield is symbolic law, and then my thesis advisor at Stanford, John Meyer, in the sociology department, is one of the founders of neo-institutional theory. So those were the theoretical perspectives that we came from and that really drives the research. In terms of whether there's a body of literature on female circumcision, yes there is, and that was very helpful, but this really didn't build on that directly because most of that's anthropological or medical and it's looking at sort of the individual woman and the impact of female circumcision of the individual woman. And there is this whole body of literature too, that's written by the activists, and that kind of has an agenda, and you can see the agenda pretty quickly after you read a couple of paragraphs. So we weren't building directly on that either. Actually there's a lot of literature out there.
Q: Could you explain the neo-institutional perspective and how your study might reflect on it?
A: Well, the neo-institutional perspective…there's a couple of different components to it. The first is it emphasizes the social construction of reality. What I mean by that is in the world there's certain things that we tend to take for granted, like marriage, or race, but in fact, if you sort of imagine that we were all born on a different planet, or all born at a different time, it's possible that those things would have emerged in a completely different way. So we wouldn't have a concept of race and maybe people wouldn't be married, we would do procreation in some other way. So, a very fundamental aspect of neo-institutional theory is this emphasis on social construction. Another thing that's important about neo-institutional theory is it takes the social construction and it takes it to a higher level of analysis. That is, it's not looking at individuals; it's looking at the international system. And so it's very interested in how nation-states construct a social reality, which, you know, we treat the United States of America as if it's a real thing, when in fact, you know, I was just up in Canada last week and all you had to do was row your boat across the lake and there you were in Canada and nothing happened and it didn't seem all that different, but we treat it as if it's a very real difference, whether you're in the United States or you're in Canada. And so, neo-institutional theory emphasizes the social construction of the nation-state system and that has some very important implications. It means that nation-states are not necessarily representing local cultures and local interests; in fact, they're working on constructing the reality of being a nation-state. And what that means is that there are certain aspects to them that are all the same. There's an article in the American Journal of Sociology, I think it was last year or a couple years ago, that John Meyer and others wrote, that says that if we found a new nation-state, if we found a desert island that no one had ever seen before we know what would happen with that desert island–it would get a flag, it would get a constitution, it would have its own currency and it would construct its history in a particular way, involving heroism and different things like that. This would happen regardless of who the people were who were part of that new nation-state. That seemed to very much be the case with female circumcision; that it's not part of the modern national project to cling to traditional practices and consequently, it made sense from an institutional perspective, that these nation-states would want to look modern. They'd want to look like legitimate nation-states and consequently they'd be forced in whatever way is possible to abandon these sorts of traditional practices that weren't acceptable in the international system.
Design
Q: Please explain the importance of the international versus national origins of legislation in this area?
A: Well, I'm a sociologist of law and I have a law degree–I got a law degree before I became a professor and practiced law for awhile–so I'm interested in law. But, there's, I think in the law area, there's a particularly strong emphasis on the reality of law and the reality of democracy. I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago and a large number of the papers were devoted to democracy and the rule of law in developing countries. The idea was that these countries, if they truly became democratic and they were truly representative, then they would be able to develop a rule of law and that goes along with all sorts of other things, like economic development and rights and so on, and so forth. And what was really holding them back was sort of, dictators. Now, I think that's absolutely true; these governments are not representative and dictators are definitely a problem in a lot of developing countries. But there's this whole other aspect of what's going on, where the international system is. By the international system I mean the United Nations and international organizations like World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. They're promoting a particular picture of a country and they want countries to look democratic and represent the people. But in fact, with respect to certain issues, like female circumcision, they don't want that to happen, they want the country to look like every other country. And it's not just female circumcision, it's all sorts of worthwhile issues; it's the environment, it's women's rights in general, child labor, in general the human rights issues often contradict the idea of democracy. And that's not a new thing, that was true in the United States; that's why we have a Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is not about democracy; the Bill of Rights is about rights and protection from the tyranny of the majority. And so, I think, although we sort of sorted that out in United States history, it seems like in the international system, that's not as sorted out. So we have this notion that if you do democracy, you do rights and in fact, those things often contradict.
Q: What were the central hypotheses of your study?
A: Well, we had four major hypotheses, or four sets of hypotheses. And each hypothesis had a proposition in which the international norm, or neo-institutional perspective, would be proven true, and a complementary proposition, or contradictory proposition where the local constituency view of the world would be true. The first one was that, I mentioned it earlier, it's the proposition that countries in which most women are circumcised are going to be either the most likely or the least likely to have laws against female circumcision. The second proposition was the timing of laws; if laws happen as a result of an international normative influence, then they are all going to happen at the same time. If, on the other hand, they happen as a result of local mobilization and local constituencies, then they would correspond with important local events within countries. The third proposition had to do with the wording of statutes; are the statutes tailored to the specific circumstances of the country or do they all look the same? And then the final proposition was when individuals mobilize do they look to national actors, the local, do they try to change things at the local scene or do they mobilize and immediately start dealing with the international system to get change nationally? So, the first proposition about the percentage of women who were circumcised: well, the first thing we had to do was find out who had laws and that was not as easy as one might think; you can't just go to LEXIS-NEXIS and look up laws in Kenya. So, we had to do some searching. We found a good book by Jacqueline Smith, who works at the Defense of Children International, which is a Danish NGO. She'd written a book that talked about laws, so we got some information from her. We got additional information from US State Department reports. We called embassies and that was a dead end, as I mentioned earlier. In that way we were able to construct what countries were doing and we found that in fact, that most countries where female circumcision was prevalent and practiced by over 50% of the women did have laws against it. Then the second proposition on the timing: we thought well, everyone talks about how the Western countries are getting laws because of immigration, and so there's this need for regulation, say in the United States because there's a massive influx of immigrants from practicing cultures. And we thought well, is that in fact true? And so we looked at immigration statistics and we got those from the United Nations primarily, but to some extent from national censuses and we found that prior to the passage of laws, there tended to not be increases in immigration from practicing cultures. So, for example, the United States, the law was passed in 1996 and for 20 years before that, immigration from African countries, where FGC is practiced, was only about 3%, less than 3% of immigration. And if you look at states where laws were passed, most of the states where laws were passed had only about 4 African refugees per 10,000 population, or considerably less in some states. Actually, Minnesota was the state with the highest level of immigration that had a law. And Minnesota was also interesting because it was the only state that tied education to its statute. The other states simply banned the practice. So that was the second proposition. Then the third proposition–and I should say on that immigration, that surprised us because we didn't expect to find that–the third proposition about wording, we looked at the wording of the different statutes we could find and they were all, they all were exactly the same. Not only did they cover the same things, they were literally word for word the same statutes. And then, with respect to mobilization, the last proposition, was that activists will go to the international community or they'll go to national politicians to get change. We found there that there was very much a connection between local and international and then after local, and this could be Western local activists or African local activists, they would talk to the international community and then the international community would talk to the national actors and try to get things to change.
Measurement
Q: Your data are relatively qualitative. I know you did some counting, but for the most part the variables were qualitative. What were some of the difficulties in drawing inferences from such data? Did you apply any statistical techniques? Were there any difficulties with missing data?
A: Well, I see it as a little bit different from doing the inferential aspects of statistics because the world is open to you and you can find your information anywhere. So, for example, when you ask about missing data, the important thing to know there would be is there any country we don't know about the laws, for example. And in fact, since we didn't rely on one source and since basically, in a way you sort of have to be relentless, I mean you just can't quit until you have information. And then if the information comes from a source that you're not familiar with or you just don't trust 100%, you have to go out and make sure that you find support in another place, that in fact, yes there is this law and it was passed then and this is what it looks like. And another thing we really had to be careful about and sort of, what you might call missing data, although at the time I wasn't thinking of it that way, is there's this tendency, when you have a large literature like this, for someone to cite someone else and not necessarily say it. So okay, there was a law in Kenya in 1906 and you see that in one place and then you go someplace else a couple years later and you see and they also say there was a law in 1906, but you don't know for a fact that they didn't just get that information from this other author. So, not only do you have to find it in different places, but you also have to find out where they found it out and where their information is coming from. So, yeah, I mean, there's always missing data, we don't know everything about female circumcision, but we were able to really, sort of, minimize those problems by going to as many sources as possible. In terms of sort of generalizability, another issue that you're raising, I think generalizability becomes important in this context. Theory becomes very important in terms of being able to generalize. So we pick up, I guess there's a couple of ways one could talk about generalizability here, is what we found and read about, in respect to laws, in fact, if we did know everything about laws, would it be consistent with that, so there's sort of generalizability at the level of this issue of female genital cutting. And there, I feel fairly confident that that's true because we tried to get representation of so many different interests, you know, we read the activists, we read the government documents, we read the international documents, we talked to African women, we talked to American activists, so we really tried to get all of the different perspectives. We read local newspapers in the African countries. So, I feel fairly confident that we can generalize at the level of female genital cutting, but then the other question, of course, is now we've chosen this issue of female genital cutting, does that issue generalize to other issues. So, what we found in respect to this particular human rights issue, does that interaction between the international system and national political systems generalize to other political scenarios. And there I think we have to be a little more cautious and that's where I think the theoretical background is really important in order to be able to go forward. We're embedding our research in this neo-institutional idea, and what we've found is, in a sense, consistent with some other research and that gives us some confidence in being able to generalize to other issues. Also, just in sort of reading about the international system and the interplay between the national and international, it also seemed to be important to look at other issues and think about female circumcision and how it was the same or different from other issues. So, for example, I'd be a little hesitant to say that this would generalize in economic spheres. There's an important book out by Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth called Dealing in Virtue, where they talk about the emergence of an international arbitration network. In that circumstance, economics is driving a lot of what's going on and now, I don't know. I can see connections but I'd be hesitant to say that this applies in the economic realm. So at this point I'd be saying that the generalizability would go to with respect to other human rights issues.
Q: How many systems are included in your study? And for what period of time?
A: One of the issues that we were dealing with was Western versus African countries and sort of, how the process happens differently in the two groups of countries. And it did happen differently. The African countries, trying to the get the correct sample, was pretty simple there because basically we just took countries where females circumcision was practiced. There is 25 where female circumcision occurs, and there are, I believe, 10 countries where it is, in fact, practiced by a majority of women. And so, it was fairly simple to say those are the countries that we need to look at there. Western countries, and then countries where the you know, for example, Asian countries, which their role is interesting but very hard to get information on. Those were trickier in terms of getting the right sample. We eventually decided to just focus on OECD countries in 1980, that is, countries who were members of the Organization of Economically Developed Countries in 1980. And the reason we chose 1980 is because Eastern European countries are now part of the OECD, but they have so many internal problems, they tend to be less involved in the international system. So we thought the OECD was a good representation of countries who are kind of driving issues in the international system. So that's how we came up with that sample. So we went through all of those countries to find out whether or not they had laws or whether or not they'd done mobilization. Then we didn't just want to ignore these other countries that were not part of the OECD and weren't these 25 African countries. And we did go out and try to get information on those and whether or not they were doing anything about female circumcision, whether they were involved in the debates and it seemed pretty clear that they were not passing laws and they weren't very active in the international debates. And we, in fact, talk about that a little bit in the paper because their absence, of course, has important implications for what the international system is and what it means, and they're not very involved in this particular issue and that could have implications for whether or not they're involved in other issues as well. So, in a way, we were sort of counting their absence.
Data Analysis
Q: I know in this case you had nearly all the cases of the two types of systems included in your study. But what would have happened if you had missed a few cases? And what kind of inference problems would that have created?
A: Yes. Well, we in fact, weren't missing any cases in the African context or the OECD context. We had information on all the countries. But nevertheless, the question is still relevant because you're making inferences about information that you don't necessarily have. I mean, you read one local newspaper story, but maybe there was one you missed and you're trying to make inferences about what's happening in 1996 and talk about how that's relevant in 1999. So, you're still making inferences. And you asked about the time period too and basically we were looking at any laws from whenever and we found that the first law was passed in Kenya in 1905, or actually there's some contest whether it was passed in 1905 or 1906, but in the very early part of the century, so that is essentially the time period that we're looking at. But in terms of making inferences, I think we're sort of making inferences about what the world might look like in a sort of post-colonial, post-World War II…
Q: Do you consider your study to be a test of the neo-institutional framework or merely an application and illustration of it?
A: That's a good question. The theoretical framework that I'm using is neo-institutional theory and I see that as a meta-theoretical perspective, that is, it's…. Well, by meta-theoretical, I mean it's how it frames my way of thinking about the world and things that are good about a meta theory are not necessarily good about a theory. So, for example, a meta-theory, is sort of by definition, tautological, it sort of explains everything and it's not directly testable because it's a worldview, it's a way of thinking about the world. And so that helps me to ask particular questions. But, the questions that I ask, do sort of feed back on sort of thoughts about the overall correctness of this world perspective. And so I was directly testing sort of, variants of neo-institutional theory by looking at the importance of international influence versus the importance of national political systems. But, actually, there were a couple of other things that we were trying to gain in this paper. One is, that neo-institutional theory is better known in some literatures, such as the organizations' literature than in others, like the law literature. And so, it really hadn't made its way into the sociology of law literature very much at all and so we thought that was an important gap in the literature and we were trying to introduce the theoretical concepts to the sociology of law people. But a second thing it does is that it also informs, right now in the sociology of law there's a debate going on about the evils of globalization and how globalization strips power away from individuals and that one has to look at what's happening at the individual level to really understand what's going on with respect to globalization. And we were countering that argument in particular–we were saying that power doesn't just happen, or, globalization can be empowering as well as disempowering and it's too simplistic to simply say that globalization strips power away. So, in this particular case, there are people who see the international mobilization about female genital cutting as imperialistic–Western imposition of Western ideas on African cultures. And so there is kind of a power issue going on there. Who's more powerful, the international system or national political systems? But at the same time, there's a lot of people that see this global discourse as empowering the women who are in those countries. So, at the same time that globalization is taking power away from nation-states, one could see it as giving power to women. While not really resolving that issue, we use this as an example to say that this view of power in globalization is too simplistic and we really need to think about it in a more complex way.
Interpretation
Q: Why did you decide to place your paper on this subject in the journal Law and Society? What kinds of considerations did you take into account?
A: Well, we were directly addressing these issues in the sociology of law and, as I said before, this seemed to be an area where institutional theory had really not been... had not been as informed by institutional theory as some other areas. Actually, Law and Society Review is an interdisciplinary journal as well. And so we were not only bringing neo-institutional ideas to sociology of law folks, but also to lawyers and anthropologists who are interested in law, and that seemed important. I guess, the Law and Society Review has something of a reputation for being open and amenable to qualitative research methods because it is interdisciplinary. And so if ones gets very sophisticated in the statistical techniques that one uses, the audience isn't necessarily going to understand it, so they appreciate qualitative research, so that was another consideration. It's the top journal in the law and society field, so it's also visible and of course we want people to see the article because we think it has important things to say.
Q: Where does your research head from here? What set of projects are suggested by this study?
A: I'm actually working on a research project now that's looking at whether women… it's going into the countries and looking at whether women are changing their opinions about female circumcision. So, we're doing, I switched between qualitative and quantitative research and this is a quantitative study based on demographic and health survey data in four African countries. And it's surveys of about 36,000 women, asking them whether they favor the continuation of the practice and then another part of it is a behavior aspect, asking them whether they have or they intend to circumcise their daughters. And what we're interested in looking at there is the influence of individual level factors and regional factors on whether women are changing their attitudes toward female circumcision, so we're doing a hierarchical linear model to look at the impact of two different levels of factors on whether women are changing their attitudes. And our theory is that women who have more exposure to the international system are going to be more likely to change their attitudes and that's going to have more of an impact than simply their structural position in the society, for example whether they work outside the home and things like that. So, it's sort of access to ideas versus these notions of freedom from the family that are going to be more important.
Q: You pursue both quantitative and qualitative research. Are there any general guidelines you use in deciding which approach to take?
A: Well, it depends, I guess, on the question and the data that's available. I really started out as a quantitative researcher. I went to the University of Iowa, got my M.A., and then I went to Stanford, and both of those places very much emphasize quantitative research. And so I started doing my dissertation proposal and I had this chapter, and I thought, oh well I have to be qualitative because the n is too small–I can't run a regression, it's too small. And then I got into it and I realized, oh qualitative research is so much more than just not being able to count. When you're trying to understand a process, when data is coming from all sorts of different sources, that's when you want to do qualitative research. And when you do qualitative research, if you treat it as if "I'm doing this because the n is too small and I can't run a regression" you miss, I think, a lot of the important nuances, which really are the… nuances are why you do qualitative research. I think in qualitative research it's particularly important that you vigorously try to disprove your theory and you really look for every possible conceivable bit of evidence that would say your theory isn't true. Because what that does is it gives you in the end a more textured understanding of what the process is that's been going on. But, in terms of choosing of whether to do quantitative or qualitative, it really depends entirely on the question that I'm asking and the data that's available