End harmful practices

Harmful practices and international human rights law

Discover how Equality Now combats other harmful practices like abduction for forced marriage, breast ironing, and the husband stitch through legal advocacy, norm change, and survivor-centered justice.

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Understanding harmful practices

Harmful practices are socially entrenched behaviors that disproportionately affect women and girls, often justified by tradition, culture, or religion. These practices violate bodily autonomy, perpetuate gender inequality, and cause lasting physical, psychological, and social harm.

Under international human rights law, harmful practices are explicitly condemned for infringing on rights to health, security, dignity, equality, and freedom from violence and discrimination. Despite legal prohibitions, many such practices persist across regions due to legal loopholes, patriarchal norms, and weak enforcement.

Examples of harmful practices

In addition to FGM and CEFMU, Equality Now is looking to expand our campaign to address a range of harmful practices, including:

  • Abduction for Forced Marriage (“Bride kidnapping”): Involves abducting girls or women, often with violence or coercion, to force them into marriage. Prevalent in parts of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Africa, amongst others.

  • Wife inheritance: Common in parts of Africa, this practice forces widows to marry a relative of their deceased husband, undermining their rights to consent and independence.

  • Breast ironing: Practiced in some regions, including in parts of Latin America and West Africa, to delay puberty and prevent early marriage, this form of body modification is painful and harmful.

  • Dowry and bride price systems: Fuel transactional views of women and often expose them to violence and exploitation as well as facilitate child marriage.

  • The “husband stitch” and related practices: This is a medical practice of placing an extra stitch during vaginal repair after childbirth, and is rooted in patriarchal control over women’s bodies and sexuality.

  • Forced marriage of lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LBT) women: Used to enforce heteronormativity and suppress sexual and gender identity.

Legal obligations under international law

States are obligated to eliminate harmful practices under instruments such as:

  • Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) requires States to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women, with a view to eliminating customary practices which are discriminatory based on sex. 
  • Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) requires States to take effective measures to abolish traditional practices harmful to the health of children. 
  • The Maputo Protocol requires States to prohibit and condemn all forms of harmful practices. It has the most progressive standards of any regional or international treaty relating to harmful practices, and mandates a wide range of comprehensive measures including public awareness campaigns, prohibition through legislation, provision of support services to survivors and protection of women and girls at risk.

These frameworks affirm the right to be free  from harmful practices, protection from gender-based violence, and equal enjoyment of rights without discrimination.

What is Equality Now doing about it

Equality Now is working with local partners, regional experts, and survivors to dismantle the social and legal systems that allow harmful practices to persist.

  • Advocating for comprehensive laws to cover all forms of harmful practices, including for example, specific criminalization of abduction for forced marriage; or expanding the scope of FGM laws to include practices like the husband stitch 
  • Raising awareness on the lesser known forms of harmful practices, including through survivor story-telling. Survivors’ voices are central to our advocacy. Their stories reveal the emotional, physical, and legal consequences of harmful practices and help drive public support for change.
  • Partnering with civil society to shift social norms:
    We work with local activists, traditional leaders, and legal professionals to challenge harmful customs and transform attitudes that normalize these practices.
  • Supporting accountability:
    Our legal experts support engagement with human rights bodies and regional mechanisms to strengthen state accountability for preventing and addressing harmful practices.
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