Abstract
ARTICLE HISTORY We discuss Dutch general practitioners’ responses to patients, mostly women of migrant background, with needs related to Harmful Cultural Practices. Our aim was to discover whether they encounter these kind of health issues and how they respond. We suspected that the patients concerned would not get the care they needed. We found that there is reason for concern, as based on general practitioners’ own accounts we conclude that notwithstanding their great commitment to these patients they were disinclined to intervene, because they were cautious to judge other cultures and because they may have overor underestimated the women’s autonomy. How do general practitioners (GPs) respond to patients, mostly women of migrant background, with health issues related to so-called Harmful Cultural Practices (HCPs)? HCPs are cultural practices that harm the rights and well-being of a person, because of that person’s gender. They are grounded in traditional cultural gender norms and unequal power relations. The majority of people subjected to these practices is female (UN, 1995; UN, 2014). HCPs include a wide array of practices; paradigmatic examples are female genital cutting (FGC), forced marriage and honor related violence. In 2018 virginity testing was added as a harmful practice by the World Health Organization (WHO) (World Health Organization, 2018). Whilst HCPs were believed to exist primarily in countries in the Global South, they are now a global problem, as due to migration HCPs have also emerged in societies in the Global North, including the Netherlands. The number of genitally cut women in the Netherlands is estimated at 41.000 with 4200 girls at risk of being cut (Kawous et al., 2019). Other practices are for example honor related violence with about 3000 cases per year (Janssen, 2017). In the Dutch big cities 600-900 so-called hidden women are forced by their partner or CONTACT Sawitri Saharso s.saharso@vu.nl Sociology, VU amsterdam fSW, amsterdam, netherlands © 2021 the author(s). Published with license by taylor & francis Group, llC this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons attribution-nonCommercial-noDerivatives license ( which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. HeAltH CARe fOR WOmen InteRnAtIOnAl 1043 family (in law) to live in isolation, locked up in the house. (Ministerie Volksgezondheid & Welzijn en Sport, 2020). Health professionals have encountered health issues related to HCPs, because migrant women have requested medical interventions related to HCPs, like a hymen reconstruction or a virginity certificate (Crosby et al., 2020; Van Moorst et al., 2012). Also, harmful practices have found to be at the root of the medical symptom, like d