The child's right to genital integrity: protecting the child, rejecting harmful practices, and enabling sexual autonomy

Abstract

Children ought to have a right to genital integrity whatever their sociocultural background, sex trait category, or assigned gender. I defend this statement by developing an account of the child as rights-bearer, who I define as a distinct embodied human entity who is profoundly dependent and vulnerable to physical harm, and is becoming autonomous. Children, I argue, are owed at least the same moral consideration as their adult counterparts, but require different treatment because of their uniquely dependent status. The care they require ought to protect them from unnecessary external disruptions to their conditions for becoming autonomous - where becoming autonomous is a necessary precondition for exercising autonomy in adulthood. This commitment need not restrict all parental value-sharing, which is impossible and undesirable, but it should limit parental value-sharing if the shared value requires violating the child’s genital integrity and upsetting their conditions for sexual autonomy for non-medical reasons. If children were physically independent, or assumed to be autonomous rather than becoming autonomous, then the argument against non-medical non-autonomous genital cutting could easily be pitched with reference to the right to bodily integrity. But adults regularly do things to children that they would not do to other adults, because of their physical dependence, and because of their presumed status as pre-, or non-, or becoming autonomous. Any right to bodily integrity they have, then, is conditional on it serving other interests or needs, and routinely violated. The practical conditionality of the child’s right to bodily integrity is the first reason for a need for a distinct right to genital integrity. The second reason is a normative prioritisation of the value of sexual autonomy for all individuals - where the child’s right to genital integrity is an external precondition for the development and exercise of sexual autonomy.