The motive for the mutilation is always the same:
The desire to control girls and women in the area of sexuality, and that they should be innocent, chaste and loyal in a marriage.
In such a society, women are completely discriminated, oppressed and for the most part viewed as objects and property.
A large number of myths, religious explanations and ideological concepts of purity and aestheticsare given as the justification for violence (for example that the clitoris could grow down to the knees, could kill a newborn infant, or cause a man to become infertile just by touching it. Or that the mutiliation actually makes the woman more fertile and eases childbirth, or that the vagina is ugly and only the excised genitals are beautiful and pure, or that the woman with intact genitals will cause food to spoil or endanger the harvest and so on and on…).
The perfidious combination of social taboos and a general climate of discrimination and marginalisation of women makes it difficult to break out of this circle of violence.