Harmful Labelling Practices
For some years, the concept of “harmful traditional (or cultural) practices” has been well-known to human rights and development workers. The term is used to describe such gross violations of rights, often of women’s and children’s rights, as Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting; Female Infanticide; Forced Marriage; and Forced Prostitution.
Nothing should distract us from our efforts to put an end to such practices, but we should be careful not to lend ourselves to attacks on traditional culture while doing so.
Language matters; we should distinguish clearly between our rights-based struggle against harmful practices and the neo-colonialist assault on traditional culture and practice.
In October 2009, the UN voted on a resolution “Promoting human rights and fundamental freedoms through a better understanding of traditional values of humankind in conformity with international human rights law”; although passed by 26 states to 15, opponents included the UK and the US, concerned that support for “traditional values” somehow implied support for harmful practices – despite the specific reference to human rights law.
While many have argued that the support for harmful practices from community leaders within a traditional authority structure automatically defines those practices as “Traditional”, we must not forget that there are many traditional community leaders who have been in the forefront of the fight against such practices.
Moreover, the “Traditional cultures” referred to by the term have, of course, one thing in common: they are non white and non Christian; Europe has its fair share of “traditions” and manifestations of “culture” harmful to women, but they are excluded from the debate.
Most harmful of all are practices which lead to murder; and, statistically, one of the most common harmful traditional practices leading to community-sanctioned murder has been the European Christian tradition of witch burning.
No-one knows just how many people – some 75% of them women – were burnt by Christian witch hunts in Europe between the 14th and 18th centuries, but academic estimates have ranged from 50,000 to several million. What’s just as disturbing is that the practice has been exported and continues in several parts of the world to this day. From the Pacific Islands, to Papua New Guinea, to South Africa, often disempowered communities have turned to a theology whose intolerance of traditional spirituality has led them to view others as Satanists or devil worshippers, and whose brutal murder has been justified as a result.
So are we to label witch burning, whether historical or contemporary, as a “Harmful Christian Practice”?
Or, for that matter, should we be calling the support from Ugandan – and American – Evangelical preachers for a Bill to sanction homosexuality with life imprisonment (or, for “aggravated homosexuality” with death), as an example of “harmful Evangelism”?
We oppose harmful practices because they are harmful, not because they have or haven’t anything to do with traditions.
There are other voices which prefer other terms; in Egypt, for instance, there’s the “Egyptian Society for Prevention of Harmful Practices to Woman and Child”; the Innocenti Reseach Centre, in its investigations on behalf of UNICEF, uses “social practices and norms”.
Language helps frame our thinking; so let’s think again about the terms we use!
