There has been countless news reports and television programming
             discussing the horrors of female circumcision or female genital mutilation.
             However, there has been very little in the main stream press regarding the
             practice of male circumcision. Female genital mutilation is no more of a
             human rights violation than male circumcision , therefore both should be
             Although, genital mutilations are usually referred to as a cultural
             practice, there is increasing evidence that this innocent and benign label
             actually evades, dismisses and covers-up the horrific effects these
             mutilations have upon a child's psyche and soma, and, moreover present a
             very real danger to the child's health.[1] Thus, one wonders how such a
             practice ever began in the first place. People or cultures who engage in
             such practices view them as an essential right of passage and often an
             important requirement for a marriage partner, while those who do not
             practice genital circumcision view the practice with disbelief, horrified
             that any human would willingly permit such a thing to be performed on his
             or her child.[2] So, just where did these practices originate'
             According to history and archaeology, together with the "global
             distributions of male and female genital mutilations among native, non
             Western people, suggests their genesis in the deserts of Northeast Africa
             and the Near East, with subsequent diffusion outward into sub-Saharan
             Africa, Oceania, and possibly into part of the New World."[3] The practice
             migrated due to military conquest of cultures that did not mutilate by
             cultures that did, or by "voluntary adoption in association with other
             cultural changes of an anti-sexual and anti-child nature," similar to such
             practices as "infant cranial deformation, swaddling, virginity taboo,
             vaginal blood taboo, and male domination of kinship and inheritance."[4]
             Incision, which is considered ...