This handbook looks at cross-cultural work on harmful cultural practices considered gendered forms of abuse of women. These include Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), virginity testing, hymenoplasty, genital cosmetic surgery and child marriage. Bringing together comparative perspectives, intersectionality, and interdisciplinarity, it uses feminist methodology and mixed methods, with ethnography of central importance, to provide holistic, grounded theorizing within a framework of transformative research. Taking Female Genital Mutilation, a topical, contested practice and making it a heuristic reference for related procedures, makes the case for global action based on understanding the complexity of harmful cultural practices that are contextually differentiated and experienced in inter-sectional ways. But because this phenomenon is enshrouded in matters of sensitivity and prejudice, narratives of suffering are muted and even suppressed, dismissed as indigenous ritual, or become ammunition for racist organizing. Such conflicted and often opaque debates obstruct clear vision of the scale of both problem and solution. Divided into 6 parts: • Discourses and Epistemological Faultlines • FGM and Related Patriarchal Inscriptions • Gender and Genitalia • Female Bodies and Body Politics: Economics, Law, Health, and Human Rights • Placing Engagement, Innovation, Impact, Care • Words and Texts to Shatter Silence and comprised of 24 newly written chapters from experts around the world, this book will be of interest to Scholars and students of nursing, social work, and allied health more broadly as well as sociology, gender studies and postcolonial studies.

Blood Stains, a best-seller in France, is a Diaspora memoir about growing up in a traditional family in Senegal and emigration to Paris. Its feisty protagonist, Khady, suffers genital mutilation at age seven, a brutal rite that entails lifelong distress, sexual trauma and harrowing childbirths. Married off at thirteen to a man two decades older, the teenager bears five children, and, as a battered wife, blows the whistle on an immigrant community that serves men's interests. Not content to remain a victim, however, the young woman fights for education, earns an independent living and becomes an activist. Her courageous battle against FGM as founder and president of the European Network brings her to the U.N. to urge international support.

"One afternoon, a patient who had been in three times weekly ... psychotherapy ... left my office after her session, drove down to the train tracks half a mile from my office, and sat down facing an oncoming train." This tragic event opens the essay by psychoanalyst Susanne Chassay who explores the relationship between private and political terrorism. Her viewpoint complements analyses of violence - that 'mercurial gestalt' - by other contributors to this collection derived from a 2003 Cultures of Violence conference held at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, organized by the Inter-disciplinary Net. From fields as diverse as philosophy, sociology, psychology, history, political science, literary criticism, and forensics, authors consider, for instance, hostility to European minorities; military training and torture; the 'endemic violence' aesthetically recorded by Haitian novelists; child abuse in film; female genital mutilation in fiction; or the massacre of Koreans during the 1923 Japanese earthquake. Violence in contact zones in Northern Ireland or in the memory of South African museum directors trying to comply with Truth and Reconciliation Commission mandates is also an object of scrutiny here. Finally, that vexed, primordial issue of violence - nature or nurture? - is probed.