Monthly Archives: June 2026

When female genital mutilation becomes human trafficking

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Summary: An overlooked category of enslavement.

I caused some surprise recently when, speaking to a group of anti-trafficking professionals, I mentioned that female genital mutilation can be a form of human trafficking. I was somewhat surprised at the surprise so I thought it might be useful to set out the basis for my statement.

First, the definition of human trafficking is set out in various international conventions including the Palermo Protocol and the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings. 

But, put most simply, human trafficking may be thought of as the process of rendering a person into a situation of exploitation, that is, at minimum, “the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.”

The list of exploitative purposes in these instruments should not be read as exhaustive. The language is expressly framed as a minimum. The question, therefore, is not simply whether female genital mutilation is named in the conventions. It is whether, in particular factual circumstances, the acts and means required by the trafficking definition are present, and whether the purpose is one of exploitation. My argument is that, in many cases, FGM does meet that test.

Many forms of female genital mutilation involve the partial or total removal of the clitoral glans – the external and visible part of the clitoris, which is itself a larger organ extending internally. So, when a child has been recruited, transported, transferred, harboured or received for that purpose, then the Convention elements of child trafficking may be satisfied. 

Where those same trafficking acts are carried out in relation to adult women, and where FGM is imposed by trafficking “means” such as force, coercion, deception, abuse of power, abuse of vulnerability, or payments to a person exercising control over them, then the Convention elements of trafficking may also be satisfied. 

The absence of FGM from the usual examples of trafficking should not be mistaken for its incompatibility with the legal concepts of trafficking, slavery or slavery-like practices. And the trafficking argument is only part of the issue. FGM should also be understood as a slavery-like practice of coercive sexual control. 

The 1926 Slavery Convention defines slavery as “the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.”

The World Health Organization notes that “FGM is often considered a necessary part of raising a girl, and a way to prepare her for adulthood and marriage. This can include controlling her sexuality to promote premarital virginity and marital fidelity.”

Where individuals or groups within a community claim the power to impose permanent control over such a fundamental aspect of a girl’s or woman’s humanity as her sexuality, they are, in effect, exercising powers attaching to the right of ownership. Put bluntly, this is the sort of power human beings more commonly claim over livestock: the power to alter bodies, control sexuality and regulate reproductive capacity in the interests of those claiming ownership-like powers over another body.

Hence female genital mutilation is not simply a harmful traditional practice or an assault on bodily integrity. It is a coercive process by which adults exercise permanent control over a girl’s sexuality, marriageability and social status. At minimum, the omission of FGM from the Global Estimates of Modern Slavery – produced by the International Labour Organization, Walk Free and the International Organization for Migration, and focused on forced labour and forced marriage – exposes a serious gap in how ownership-like control over women and girls is counted.

Here Where We Live Is Our Country, by Molly Crabapple

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Summary: Recovering a forgotten Jewish history, vital for our times

At the end of the nineteenth century, Zionism emerged both as a response to European antisemitism and, in a fundamental way, as an acceptance of one of antisemitism’s central claims: that Jews could never truly belong in Europe. Its answer was a Jewish “homeland,” ultimately to be established in Palestine, with catastrophic consequences for the people already living there. After the briefly entertained East Africa scheme, the Balfour Declaration gave imperial force to this idea, helping to condemn Palestinians to dispossession in the name of Jewish refuge.

Among the earliest and most strenuous opponents of this idea were European Jews themselves. For example, Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India in Lloyd George’s British government, while perhaps not an opponent of colonialism per se, was a fierce opponent of Zionism, viewing it as an antisemitic concept that would jeopardize the status of Jews in Britain. 

In Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Molly Crabapple focuses on a different group of Jewish anti-Zionists: the Bund – the name translates from German or Yiddish as “union” – a Jewish social democratic movement that grew in Eastern Europe, particularly in the old Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. The Bund, as Crabapple shows, was fiercely opposed to colonialism and rejected Zionism’s plain implication that Jews should answer European exclusion by displacing others. Instead they insisted that their culture, including the Yiddish language and literature, should be nourished and respected in the countries in which they lived. For decades they organized to achieve this. 

There is an echo of Mark Kurlansky’s Basque History of the World in Crabapple’s gripping work. Both books show how a people often treated as peripheral profoundly shaped wider political history.. In the case of the Bund, Crabapple traces their influence from the Russian Revolution, where they allied with the Mensheviks, to resistance against the Nazis alongside the Polish Socialist Party, and finally to the radical Jewish politics of New York City that formed part of the coalition behind Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty..

Like Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, it is also a book that made me rethink large portions of history that I had previously thought myself relatively familiar with. For example, no other history of Eastern Europe that I have read – even Timothy Snyder’s superb Bloodlands – has quite so forensically itemized the scale of antisemitic atrocity that plagued Eastern Europe from the end of the First World War to the destruction of Warsaw. 

But, in describing all of this, Crabapple’s purpose is not special pleading to show antisemitic atrocity as something unique. Rather she strives to show, as Seamus Heaney reflected, that all “Human beings suffer,/ They torture one another./ They get hurt and get hard.” And so, Zionism was born as a result of European violence and, as the Jews suffered in Europe, so the Palestinians now continue to suffer at the hands of the state and settlement project that Zionism produced. Palestinian armed groups have also committed atrocities, sometimes with comparable levels of cruelty, though without comparable power. This will inevitably continue until the cycle of violence can be broken. 

The Bund sought to break this cycle through solidarity. That they lost, in the face of the monstrousness of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany does not negate their message. As Crabapple writes, “solidarity is fragile and frequently betrayed, but it is all we have. It is the only thing that can save us. There is no other earth after all. We are trapped together on this one. It belongs to us all as an inheritance and prison.” The alternative is the morality of the bully with the strong doing what they wish, while the weak endure what they must. 

Molly Crabapple’s book is an outstanding work of narrative history, elegantly written, compelling and deeply moving – it made me cry more than once. It is a fierce assertion that another world is possible in which we all try to take care of each other instead of honouring the worst instincts of the cruel and the greedy.