NORM-UK

Abstract

A positive or negative image can have a huge impact and greatly influence how people think. In a fast-moving, short-attention-span world, first impressions play a major role. Should we be advocating the phraseology of “ anti-circumcision” or “pro-foreskin”? Both are equally valid but create a vastly different impression in the mind of the public. We explore the ethics and ethos of this question from the British perspective through the foundation and development of NORM-UK. “There is hardly a reason to circumcise a little boy for medical reasons because those medical reasons don't exist,” Dr. Michael Wilks, Head of Ethics at the British Medical Association, said on a BBC World Service program, who admitted that doctors have circumcised boys for “no good reason.” He also said that the majority of people who have been circumcised in the past, for what were put to them or their parents as good medical reasons, probably were no such thing, and those people certainly have a right to make a claim that what was done to them was an unnecessary and premature intervention at a time when they had no capacity to object or no say in the matter.