News this week included: a roundup of Budget 2026; the tragedy of a six-year-old Indonesian girl killed by a seemingly reckless driver who’s now under investigation; publication of Policy, Fairness and Compassion, a collection of speeches by K Shanmugam, home affairs minister; debates about Shanmugam’s financial “sacrifice” when leaving legal practice for public service; a student-led survey that found that one in three employers do not regularly provide rest days for their foreign domestic workers; an Iranian TikToker’s comment about this “toxic city” sparks a debate about Singapore’s social norms and work culture; and our fab disease-fighting scientists have just published an article, “Dengue Suppression by Male Wolbachia-Infected Mosquitoes”, in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Below are the issues we chose to explore in more depth.
Society: The movement to end female genital cutting (FGC)
The Goodman Arts Centre straddles Singapore’s multitudes. Humble 1960s Jalan Batu flats on one side, Mountbatten mansions on the other. Narrow-laned, gritty, gentrifying Geylang to the north, and the lush, broad ECP superhighway between Changi and CBD to the south. Last Sunday, as kids kicked footballs around its green lawns, three floors up, in a dance studio, Malay Muslim women recounted the moments when they discovered their infant genitalia had been cut. Such intimate sharing might suggest a protected space. But this was a celebratory, open session, allies of all ethnicities and genders welcome.
At a registration table were books and pamphlets detailing the practice, as well as a guide on supporting survivors, alongside more light-hearted fare: a pink, “Protect all vulvas” bookmark, the organ illustrated nestled in a strawberry; and stickers with liberating mantras like “Wild & Free” and “Women deserve sexual pleasure too”. Guests ambled over to a table overflowing with curry puffs, chicken rendang, cupcakes, kuih, and teh tarik. Panel discussions were followed by a participatory dance work, for the fifth birthday bash of the End FGC Singapore movement.
Saza Faradilla, one of the group’s co-founders and its recognisable, effervescent face, opened with acknowledgements to Singapore’s ancestral stewards, early feminists, survivors and others; notes on safe spaces; and a trigger warning. The group’s pilot 2020 study found that 75 percent of 360 Muslim women surveyed have been cut. As troubling was the uncertainty. What was done? What was cut? What equipment was used? A plurality, if not majority of respondents, said “I don’t know.” For so many women, an early violation of their bodies will forever remain a mystery.
It is a fiendishly challenging issue for them to address. Why doesn’t a developed, global city simply ban the practice? The state prefers non-interference, under a misguided conception of CMIO multiculturalism, in what’s seen as a religio-cultural practice of Malays. (Muslims’ personal and family matters are governed under a separate, Islamic jurisprudence in Singapore.) If a religion practised child sacrifice, would Singapore allow it, deadpanned Vivienne Wee, a co-founder of AWARE and author of a seminal 2016 paper on FGC, to chuckles from an audience by then primed for absurdity. For the “crime” of distributing pamphlets at a Ramadhan bazaar, Saza recalled, three cops interrogated her for 90mins, asking 90 odd questions, many inane, and trying to get her to rat on the others involved. (She reported the lead and he was taken off the case.) Muslim conservatives accuse the group of Islamophobia. The embarrassment and backlash is worsened when some foreign media objectify “primitive” practices for, perhaps, their own saviour narratives.
Diana Rahim, editor of Beyond The Hijab, spoke about the base struggles of marginalised people, who lack resources to organise, but also have to contend with societal conditioning around productivity. Work harder! For activists, this translates into insufficient sensitivity for comrades’ capacity and accessibility. Muslim women's groups, resisting those impulses, ground their activism in an ethics of care for each other. Though much work remains, there’s been clear progress over the past five years: more government channels open, 15 lobbying-meetings with political office holders, 4,000 booklets distributed, and a larger philosophical shift, “from silence and denial into public, critical dialogue, reframing it as a gendered and ethical issue rather than an unquestioned tradition.” Others wondering how social change can be effected would do well to learn from this triply-minoritised group. Follow them on Instagram and/or donate to their cause.
Some further reading:
“Let’s talk about sunat perempuan [female genital cutting]” is available on End FGC Singapore’s site. Among other things, it explores the pre-Islamic history of the practice, and the reasons why only some schools here (exclusively to Malay Muslims) still follow it.
In “CEDAW and the battle for gender equality”, an essay for Jom, Saza wrote about the Singapore government’s complicated relationship, particularly vis-a-vis the rights of Muslim women, when it comes to the UN’s Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
