Preface -- Tortured Bodies, Tortured Doctrines: Informed Consent as a Legal Fiction Inapplicable to Male Circumcision -- Routine Infant Circumcision: Vital Issues Circumcision Proponents May Be Overlooking -- The Smart Penis -- The Harm of Circumcision -- Evolution of Circumcision Methods: Not "Just a Snip" -- Penile Wounding: The Spectrum of Complications of Routine Male Circumcision as Seen in a Typical American Family Medical Practice -- Male Circumcision and the Potential for Unexplained Male Adolescent Suicide in Northern Ireland -- Healing the Harms of Circumcision: A Nursing Case Study -- Ten Years of Training: Family Medicine Residents as Conscientious Objectors to Circumcision -- Intersex Surgeries, Circumcision, and the Making of “Normal” -- Intersex Genital Autonomy: A Rights-Based Framework for Medical Intervention with Intersex Infants -- The Sar/Rohan (The Possession): A Response of Somali Women To Pharaonic Circumcision/Infibulation (PhC) -- Genital Stretching Among the Venda Ethnic Group (South Africa) -- Male Circumcision Among the Venda of Limpopo (South Africa) -- Critique of African Circumcision and HIV RCTs, A Poster Presentation -- Randomized Controlled Trials for HIV/AIDS Prevention Among Men in Africa: Untraced Infections, Unasked Questions, and Unreported Data -- Dangerous Myths and Tragic Misconceptions: Fighting HIV and AIDS Cases in Africa with Male Circumcision Strategies -- Defying the Enlightenment: Jewish Ethnicity and Ethnic Circumcision -- Circumcision: Gender and Power -- Reclaiming Circumcision: Armenian Stories -- Self-made Intactivism in the Middle East -- Genital Autonomy: A New Approach. .

Every year, across the globe, an estimated 13.3 million boys and 2 million girls are involuntarily subjected to genital cutting. Both male and female genital cutting persist, generating a multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry that is defended by its proponents with dubious studies, manipulated statistics, and an appeal to “custom.” Physicians and parents alike have been misled into believing that these mutilations are beneficial, necessary, and harmless. Today, flawed studies have allowed the promotion of circumcision as a way of combating HIV/AIDS in Africa, an experiment that failed in the USA, where a half-million circumcised males have succumbed to AIDS. These facts notwithstanding, the public and legal outcry against these abuses is increasing. For instance, the high court in Cologne, Germany ruled in 2012 that circumcision harms the child, that the harm is irreversible, that it denies the child the right to his own body, and that circumcision denies the individual the right to choose his own religion. Thus, the issue of circumcision has expanded beyond the arena of medicine and is firmly established as a human rights and legal problem. The contributors to this volume, an international panel of experts in the fields of medicine, law, ethics, anthropology, sociology, history, religion, and politics, thoroughly examine and elucidate this violation of human rights.