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CULTURES
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Comment Sometime in to our working as a group we began to realise just how much ‘stuff’ was interconnected and linked into this horrendous issue of trafficking. This section probably contains material that doesn’t quite seem to fit under any obvious headings other than perhaps the one we ended up choosing: cultures. Some of that is about practices within particular ethnic cultures and some of it is about particular societal attitudes that are not always commonly shared. Some of it is about practices amongst certain groups of people – such as businesses and the hospitality they provide to managers or the armed forces and expectations of how they find recreation – and the cultures that they develop within those groups, including the expectations on newcomers to conform. The ones chosen here seemed to us to assist in constructing a society in which one person views another as either of less value or as a commodity and therefore leaves open the possibility of trafficking. How do we tackle these issues? Do we even have any right to question other people’s cultures? Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered in 2004 for a film about Islam written with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has herself received death threats for her outspoken views of that religion’s treatment of women. On the other hand, Dr. Ahmadu, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago raised in America, went back to Sierra Leone as an adult to undergo FGM along with fellow members of the Kono ethnic group. She has lamented that her Westernised “feminist sisters insist on denying us this critical aspect of becoming a woman in accordance with our unique and powerful cultural heritage.” So does it become a question of choice? Is it alright if people choose to participate in various cultural practices? Do we only have the right to speak out when others coerce people into such practices? Or can we question what is actually ‘free choice’ – when other sections of this website look at media pressure and aspiration? The founder of Methodism, John Wesley, maintained that one of our characteristics is that ‘we think and let think’ and so what we must do is to explore these issues, listen to all sides of an argument and engage in debate; then decide where we are prepared to challenge attitudes, practices and expectations. What we should not do is to ignore things, just because they are difficult or uncomfortable.
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