Multiculturalism

About 25 years ago, a young physician told me how distressed she had been when attending the extremely difficult labour and delivery of a baby born to a teen-aged girl who had been subjected to radical genital mutilation. When she was a child, the girl's entire vulva had been excised and stitched together, leaving a scarred, deformed perineum with a small hole for menstrual fluid. Her husband had presumably battered his way through this to impregnate her.It seems unlikely that sexual intercourse could have been enjoyable for him and it was extremely painful for her. The scarred perineum had to be cut open to permit the passage of the baby. What distressed my young friend was that this 17 year old girl and her mother who accompanied her, were demanding that the girl's vulva must be stitched together again after childbirth.

The barbaric practice of radical genital mutilation, a rare and horribly perverted tribal custom, is a dark aspect of Canadian multiculturalism. An even darker aspect was brought into public view in the widely publicized trial of an Afghan man, his second wife and their oldest son, which has just ended with conviction of all three for the carefully planned murder of the man's first wife and three teen aged daughters who were said to have besmirched his honour by wearing provocative clothing, using makeup, and flirting. This was at least the third so-called honour killing to come to public notice in this part of Canada in recent years. Honour killings, in which girls and women are murdered because they have violated traditional patriarchal cultural values by asserting their autonomy, and radical female genital mutilation, are evil aspects of Canadian multiculturalism. These ancient tribal customs are not Islamic although many but not all the perpetrators and victims happen to be Muslims.

Arranged marriages in which parents select the marital partners for their marriageable children, are a feature of many traditional cultures. They generally seem to work at least as well as marriages based on love or mutual attraction. They are common and usually accepted willingly among South Asian migrants to Canada, even among Canadian born offspring who have been here long enough to have marriageable children of their own.

Arranged marriages aren't always cheerfully accepted by all parties. I have a vivid memory from my brief life as a family doctor in South Australia more than fifty years ago of a girl born and raised in Australia by Southern Italian parents. This girl came home from high school one day to find her parents entertaining a man more than twice her age who had recently arrived from Calabria as her prospective husband. I was called in when she tried to kill herself rather than accept him and give up her boy friend, a high school classmate.

Migrants tend to perpetuate the customs of their country of origin. Wendy and I did this benignly when we settled first in Scotland and then in Canada. For example we never ran out of Vegemite and Wendy’s pavlova desert was renowned for decades among our friends. We even carried one or two adopted Scottish customs such as fondness for haggis, as well as Australian and New Zealand customs, with us to Canada!

Despite the hideous dark side of multiculturalism I believe its benefits far outweigh its flaws. These benefits include widening of everyone's cultural horizons, encouragement and acceptance of cultural and ethnic differences, and creation of tolerance for these differences. These are values worth living for.