News

Laura MacDonald
(This page does not contain medical advice)

Man jailed for child circumcision

Thursday 25th March 2010
A Canadian man has been sentenced to a year in prison for the circumcision of his four year old son on a kitchen floor. This will be followed by two years probation.

The court heard that the 34 year old man, identified only by the initials DJW, was a former Jehovah's witness who now followed the Old and New Testaments of the Bible and believed circumcision was a religious requirement.

Following a tradition still applied today in many Jewish rituals the child was given alcohol but no pain relief. Despite the evident pain and damage and noting the lack of consent the judge threw out a charge of assault and the case revolved around the process the father followed. This process involved excising the boy's foreskin with a rather blunt razor blade on a chopping board, using a sawing motion. A veterinary medication was used to try to control the subsequent bleeding, but the boy's wound later re-opened and he was taken to hospital.

It appears that only a partial circumcision was carried out - evidence was heard from a Dr Afshar of Vancouver's Children's Hospital who ensured that once in hospital the boy was 'properly circumcised'.

[It's possible that what the parent achieved with his primitive method was an amputation rather similar to his antecedent, Abraham. Evidence suggests that - like some communities in Africa today - the original biblical circumcision removed only the overhang of the foreskin. More radical ritual surgery('Brit Per'iah) was instituted by religious authorities in 140 AD to try to prevent or discourage foreskin restoration.]

As in the UK there is no specific Canadian law against forced circumcision in any environment, and many are undertaken entirely without pain relief.

The Prosecutor in this case told the court that the man had "abused that sacred trust" a child has in a parent, and that a jail sentence was necessary as a deterrent. It does seem ironic however that the trust a child has in an adult cannot include the expectation that they won't forcibly remove the most sensitive part of his penis. According to the judgement in this case a child can trust only that the excision of this primary erogenous zone will be done by a reasonably skilled amateur...

However inadequate a response to wilful child wounding this may seem, it is an improvement on the situation in Britain. Here the authorities appear resistant to prosecuting any circumcision. This extends even to cases like that mentioned on More4 News in September 2008, where a mechanic amputated the foreskin from a fully sentient three year old - using a soldering iron.

Or those cases reported in East London (and still occurring across the capital according to information NORM-UK has received) where brothers of five and ten were held down by six people for their unanaesthetised genital cutting. This event, resulting in a ten day spell in hospital isolation for the five year old - and presumably lifelong traumatic memories for both - was described by the BBC report as a "consensual assault".