From Tanzania:
Bukoba. The drive to circumcise about 9000 men living on the islands of Lake Victoria and surrounding environs in Kagera region has started in earnest, expecting to thwart the spread of HIV/Aids in the area, where prevalence of the disease is as high as 35 per cent.
As of January this year, about 1158 men of the target group aged between 10 and 50 years were circumcised, according to statistics provided by the International Centre for Aids care and Treatment Programmes (ICAP).
The target group of “men” includes 10-year-old children. This isn’t surprising, as the expressed idea of voluntary, adult male circumcision is always meant to signal a nonexistent commitment to ethics. It’s also rare that this blatant disregard for ethics is hidden. The disconnect is so strong that the presence of potential benefits is viewed as a guarantee that any non-voluntary recipient will acknowledge the gift upon proper reflection. This is a large factor in the blindness to the obvious ethical flaws of non-therapeutic child circumcision in the United States (and other Western countries).
What’s not usually quite so blatant is this level of open contradiction within a single article:
Among 1158 people circumcised towards the end of this year in the Lake Victoria islands, 317 were children aged between one and14 years, while those aged 15 to 25, the group thought to be most sexually active, were 551. Others who agreed to be circumcised included 260 men aged between 26 and 50 years.
More than 27% of the males “aged between 10 and 50 years” who were circumcised were children between one and fourteen years old. I’ve never met a 10-year-old man, but there can be signs of manhood. Perhaps the voluntary consent necessary to make non-therapeutic circumcision ethical is possible. The pretense that 1-year-old men exist and that these minors consent to surgical alteration is a disturbing, all-too-common trend in public health fanaticism.
When public health officials say voluntary, adult circumcision, they never mean voluntary or adult.