Female Genital Mutilation
A practice affecting hundreds of millions of women, and population growth is outpacing decline.
Severity score
31.6
Limited · default weighting
Trajectory
Worsening
What this is
More than 230 million women and girls alive today have undergone FGM. Prevalence rates are falling in many countries, but the absolute number is rising because the populations where it is practised are growing faster than the practice is declining.
Score breakdown
Each factor is a 0–100 relative severity index, not the raw figure or a specific time period. The actual counts and periods are listed under "Standardized Impact" on the right.
Loss of life
20Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
72People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
20Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
1Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
34Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.
Audit trail
Everything this entry has been through — when it was first searched for, queued, reviewed and approved, and how its figures and rank have moved since.
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