Extension I – Additions to the questionnaire

Here you will find a selection of more questions which have been asked in other surveys about FGM. You will also find some guidelines who to phrase your own questions if you don’t find them among our list.

We selected questions which yielded interesting results. There are also a number of indirect questions or “back-up” questions: The results of these tell you if your general outcome is correct, e.g. if only 10% of women say they would circumcise their daughter, but 90% say it is still done in the family, you know there is something wrong.

How to phrase good questions and answers

• Be clear: Questions and answers should be simple in wording. Ask for something which cannot be interpreted in different ways. For example: If you ask: “Are you happy with being married?” – this could be interpreted as happiness in marriage but also as being glad to have found a husband and not staying a spinster (and thereby not being really happy at all with the husband). So it would be better to ask: “Are you happy in your marriage/with your husband?” Or if you want to find out how important marriage is: “Do you think it is necessary for a woman to get married?”

• If you suspect that people will not answer straight or may want to hide something you should use indirect questions or ask for something connected. In the above example many women may say they are happy in marriage because it is frowned upon in their society to not be happy. So to find out how good the marriage really is you could ask how often they fight with their husbands, if they sometimes cry after a fight, if he beats them etc. But don’t jump to conclusions: It may be possible, that a woman who fights a lot with her husband is still happy with her marriage. So when you ask this questions you find out how often a couple fights, not more, not less.

A Selection of additional questions

Please open the extension I questionnaire now. We will explain in the following the purpose of each question.

1.Is Khatana still practiced in your family? / 2. Do some of your neighbors practice FGM?

When asking about FGM there can be multiple reasons why people don’t answer straight or want to hide something – this depends on your target group and you will have to get a feel for taboos if you want to work around it. If FGM is illegal in your country, a mother may not reveal her plan to circumcise her daughter. If you want to find out how common FGM still is you can ask her if neighbors or family still practice it.

3. If your daughter was circumcised who took the decision? / 4. If your daughter was not circumcised who took the decision?
For any campaign it is important to know who is the driving force for the girls to be cut. If the grandmothers demand it then they definitely have to be included in discussions. Men are usually not the driving force, but they can still play an important role when it comes to deciding AGAINST FGM. If the community or the grandmothers demand it to be done a mother can stand against it if she knows her husband supports her. There have been studies which show that the decision AGAINST FGM was taken by wife AND husband while the decision for FGM was almost always ONLY taken by women.

5. Who in your community supports FGM?
This question gives you a clear answer who are the groups a campaign must target.

6. Where do you hear about FGM?
The answers to this question can tell you multiple things. If people have heard about FGM in local media or on the internet, this may alert you that there is somebody, maybe just an individual speaking out against it. If people have heard about it in the mosque, in school or from neighbors you don’t know if they have heard something positive or negative, but you know now where people talk about it. If it is talked about it in the mosque or in school, these places could be a promising starting point for a campaign!

7. What instrument was used?
It would be very interesting to get information about the type of FGM practiced in your community: How much do they cut? However, it is difficult to ask straight about that because knowledge and perception will not be clear. Many women may not know what a “clitoris” or a labia minora is. Especially if they have been mutilated they may have no idea what their genitals should usually look like.

Other survey have shown, that women may say they had a symbolic circumcision or a sunnah circumcision, but when medically examined it was found that they had a type III (or pharaonic) FGM. So one way of approaching the topic is to ask for the instrument. This doesn’t tell you much, but enough to make good guesses: With a needle there was probably just a prick, with scissors or nail clippers something was definitely cut, razors are usually used to cut more severely. However, they are in some regions just used to scrap. You could add other questions here which get you a bit closer to what actually happened, e.g. if there was blood, a lot of blood. How long it took for the wound to heal etc.

8. Is Khatana in accordance with Islamic teachings? / 9. Which of the following statements do you agree with?
These two questions are additions to the question about motivations. The first tells you something about the relation to religion. If a woman has said her motivation is tradition it is interesting to know if she thinks that her religion supports this tradition. This question can also be posed to women who have not undergone FGM. If the question is often answered with yes, there is a need to talk to religious leaders about FGM, no matter what the results on motivations were. You can exchange Islamic for any other religious group, but to our knowledge no one claims that it is in accordance with Christian, Jewish or other teachings.

Next

You want to find out even more or the topics you are interested in were not included in these additional questions? Check extension II for more ideas what to ask.

If you are happy with the questions you have by now, read how to conduct the interviews in the section going to the field.