FACTORS ASSOCIATED WITH PERCEIVED CONTINUATION OF FEMALES’ GENITAL MUTILATION AMONG WOMEN IN ETHIOPIA

Abstract

nd children. It has a long-term physiological, sexual and psychological effect on women. Females’ genital mutila-tion still remains to be a serious problem for large proportion of women in most sub-Saharan Africa countriesincluding Ethiopia. The objective of the study was to identify the main factors contributing to the support for thecontinuation of female genital mutilations in Ethiopia.Methods: This study was conducted based on secondary data obtained from the Ethiopian Demographic andHealth Survey 2005. A two-stage stratified cluster sampling design was applied for selecting the sampling units.Both descriptive and binary logistic regression analyses were used to analyse the data using SPSS for Windowsversion 16.Results: The results on both descriptive and logistic regression model revealed that predictor variables like edu-cation, religion, residence, knowledge on ways of HIV transmission and region play significant role in determiningthe dependent variable. As a result, all predictor variables were strongly associated with the dependent variable.Regarding the fit of the model, support for the continuation of FGM, decreased with increase in education status.Furthermore, Muslim among other religions, and Somali and Afar among other regions, were more likely to sup-port for the continuation of FGM.Conclusion: There was low awareness with less education status, Somali and Afar regions, rural residence, andMuslim religion were predictors of continuation of females’ genital mutilation.