From 1997, onwards, Rights and Humanity articulated the health and human rights arguments for combating violence against women and overcoming such cultural practices as FGC.

Violence against women and FGC have many immediate and long term health consequences, including the risk of death. Emphasising the health consequences for women and girls formed the basis of many strategies to combat violence, particularly FGC. Addressing FGC through the lens of health can be a suitable strategy, particularly as FGC is a highly sensitive issue.

Rights and Humanity joined with many other human rights groups to argue that it was also essential to acknowledge that violence against women and FGC were violations of women’s human rights. This focused attention on the obligations that states have undertaken by ratifying international human rights instruments. Such an approach empowered women to appreciate that they are entitled to be free from violence and that girls had a right to be protected from FGC.

Rights and Humanity advocated combining these two approaches into “a health and human rights approach” to eradicating violence against women and FGC.

Violence Against Women: A Human Rights Concern
States are obliged by international law to provide legal protection of women’s rights. They must provide the legal and social environments in which all individuals can freely and equally enjoy their rights.

Until the 1990s, violence against women in general, and Female Genital Cutting in particular, were often considered to lie outside the scope of human rights. The World Conference on Human Rights, in Vienna, 1993, confirmed that violence against women was a human rights issue rather than simply a private matter. This incontrovertibly brought violence against women and the practice of FGC within the scope of human rights.

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women
States Parties shall take all appropriate measures:
“to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women, with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and customary and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women.” (Article 5)

The Convention on the Rights of the Child obliges states to “take all effective and appropriate measures with a view to abolishing traditional practices prejudicial to the health of children.” (Article 24 (3))

FGC violates the rights of girls and women to physical integrity and to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, and sometimes violates the right to life itself. The difficulties of eliminating FGC are exacerbated by the inadequacy of effective legal frameworks for the protection of women and girls from this violation of their human rights.

However, rather than addressing violence against women and FGC solely as a human rights concern, Rights and Humanity advocated that a joint health and human rights approach be adopted. This combined the benefit of public awareness campaigns on the negative health consequences of all forms of violence with the legal protection of the rights of the girl child and women.

Rights and Humanity participated in many meetings and conferences to advocate this approach.

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