A/HRC/4/34 page 13 3. The harmful traditional practices agenda 32. The most concrete expression of the evolving normative framework with respect to culture and violence against women is found in the agenda on harmful “traditional” practices affecting the health of women and children that was formalized through the establishment in 1984, by the Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities of the Commission on Human Rights, of a working group on harmful traditional practices. In 1988 a Special Rapporteur was appointed to monitor and report on the issue.17 Within this context, although several traditional practices were identified, the main focus was on female genital mutilation (FGM).18 33. While this agenda has helped to identify types of violence against women formerly not recognized and mobilized international and local constituencies for their eradication, it also contributed to essentializing certain cultures as the source of the problem. As one writer put it, the harmful traditional practices agenda “unfortunately reinforced the notion that metropolitan centers of the West contain no ‘tradition’ or ‘culture’ harmful to women, and that the violence which does exist is idiosyncratic and individualized rather than culturally condoned”.19 A 1995 United Nations publication on harmful traditional practices, for instance, seems to juxtapose non-Western traditional practices with “non-traditional practices, such as rape and domestic violence” (sic).20 This classification is dubious and highlights the problem the concept of “tradition” entails. Since high rates of domestic violence and rape persist in the Western world,21 17 Study on traditional practices affecting the health of women and children; final report of the Special Rapporteur, Mrs. Halima Embarek Warzazi (E/CN.4/Sub.2/1991/6). 18 Any procedure involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for cultural, religious or other non-therapeutic reasons and thereby causes physical and/or psychological harm must be regarded as female genital mutilation, regardless under what medical conditions it is carried out. Some have argued that the treatment of female genital mutilation as a harmful practice to women is an ethnocentric stand that ignores the fact that the practice provides women with more sexual power over her partner and makes them more proactive in sex. Such notions could have been entertained if we were to assume that women are free agents and do not behave under severe patriarchal constraints. Paradoxically, such claims are themselves ethnocentric and are advanced by taking women’s subordination as a given. 19 B. Winter, D. Thompson and S. Jeffreys, 2002, “The UN Approach to Harmful Traditional Practices”, International Feminist Journal of Politics, vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 72-94. 20 Harmful Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children, Human Rights Fact Sheet No. 23, 1995. 21 See the reports on my missions to Sweden (A/HRC/4/34/Add.3) and the Netherlands (A/HRC/4/34/Add.4).