AUTHOR=Zsabokorszky Zita , Van de Velde Sarah , Michielsen Kristien , Van Eekert Nina 

TITLE=Exploring the association between perceived male attitudes and female attitudes toward the discontinuation of Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting in Egypt

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Sociology

VOLUME=Volume 8 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2023.1183989

DOI=10.3389/fsoc.2023.1183989

ISSN=2297-7775

ABSTRACT=Introduction: Worldwide 200 million girls and women alive have undergone the practice of Female Genital Cutting (FGC) and 4 million girls are at risk each year. FGC provides no known health benefits, while it puts a plethora of health risks into perspective. One of the countries where the prevalence of FGC is the highest in the World is Egypt. Within the Egyptian context, there are several complex drivers that influence the decision making of the daughters circumcision. Female attitudes hold great significance, because mothers and female family members are typically the primer decision makers at the daughter’s circumcision. However, whilst FGC is often performed to enhance marriageability and address male preferences, in practicing communities there is no or little communication between men and women about the practice. Moreover, little evidence exists on male attitudes towards the discontinuation of FGC in the literature. Even though the connection between female and perceived male attitudes towards the discontinuation was established almost 20 years ago, since then up to our knowledge little is known about this association. Therefore, this study aims to explore this connection on a younger cohort and attempts to provide a more layered picture of it within different levels of education.
Methods: To explore the relation between female and perceived male attitudes towards the discontinuation of FGC we conducted a 3-step binary logistic regression model. 
Results: Our results show that women are significantly less likely to favor a continuation of FGC in case they think men are disapproving of the practice. The strength of this association partially varies between the different levels of education as it is less pronounced at the level of secondary education, compared to the reference group. 
Discussion: The higher chances of women thinking that men want FGC to discontinue makes it also more likely that they want it to discontinue themselves as well and vice versa. At a higher level of secondary education however this association is less pronounced. This result underlines the importance of education and concludes that the role of perceived male attitudes should be an important factor associated with female ones and studied further.