Brussels Collaboration on Bodily Integrity

The Brussels Collaboration on Bodily Integrity is a collection of ninety-one mostly academic individuals of various nationalities who seek to advance the bodily integrity of children. The group describes itself:

We are physicians, ethicists, nurse-midwives, public health professionals, legal scholars, political scientists, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and feminists from Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas with interdisciplinary expertise in child genital cutting practices across a wide range of cultural contexts. Although we do not necessarily share a single policy perspective with respect to such practices, nor a uniform moral assessment of every feature of them, we are united in a concern about widespread inaccuracies, inconsistencies, double standards, and Western cultural bias in the prevailing discourses on genital cutting of children.

The conference was convened at Brussels in the Fall of 2019 by Attorneys for the Rights of the Child. More than 90 papers were presented. The groups argues that male, female, and intersex cutting must be considered together.

Dr. Shimon Samuels, Director for International Relations for the Wiesenthal Center, in a letter to J. Steven Svoboda of Attorneys for the Rights of the Child, expressed concern that the Brussels Collaboration threatened the now debunked Abrahamic covenant, however, he failed to acknowledge that boys born into Jewish families would be major beneficiaries of bodily integrity derived from the protection of their human rights.