Traditional norms are an essential part of life in many developing countries. They have a crucial economic role in compensating for market failure (e.g. by supporting informal lending), but they can also be a serious impediment to economic development. International organizations and a body of recent research call the attention on the detrimental effects of the so-called “harmful traditional practices”, such as child, early and forced marriages, female genital cutting (FGC) and breast ironing, which affect everyday millions of women in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Middle Eastern countries. Child marriage, defined as a marriage before the age of 18, is estimated to affect more than 700 million women alive today and is especially pronounced in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where the prevalence is 56% and 42%, respectively. Female genital cutting (FGC) comprises all the procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs. FGC brings no medical benefit whatsoever. The custom is present in 29 African and Middle Eastern countries and in some of these countries is almost universal: cut women are 98% in Somalia, 96% in Guinea, 93% in Djibouti and 91% in Egypt and Sierra Leone, for more than 125 million women cut worldwide (UNICEF, 2013; Camilotti, 2016; Yoder et al., 2013). Breast ironing (or flattening) involves the use of tools such as spatulas, hot stone and hammers to massage, pound or press the breast as a means of delaying pubescent girls’ development. The practice is currently widespread in Guinea Bissau, Chad, Togo, Benin and South Africa and appears to be most prevalent in Cameroon where available estimates indicate a prevalence of 24% (Tapscott, 2012). Harmful traditional practices have in common three main features. First, they are generally performed on young girls without their consent and so perceived as a human rights violation (UNHCR, 2013); second, they include a component of physical and psychological violence and third, they have been committed in certain communities for so long that they are considered as part of accepted cultural practices and therefore not questioned.
The economic and social costs of harmful traditional practices are enormous. Harmful norms have direct dramatic implications for women’s wellbeing, empowerment and autonomy, so perpetuating gender power imbalance and poverty. Previous literature on the harmful consequences of breast ironing is very limited. Suggestive evidence reveals that breast ironing exposes girls to numerous health problems such as preventing milk production, breast infections and breast cancer (US Department of State, 2011).
Far from taking harmful traditional practices as a non-modifiable feature of our social and economic environments, the challenge for development researchers and policymakers lies in finding ways to eradicate or change them to break the vicious circle of poverty. While previous studies mainly focus on investigating the economic and social consequences of harmful practices, we know remarkably little on the reasons behind their persistence, their historical origins and on policies able to eradicate them.
This proposal will help fill this gap. I will attempt to answer two research questions: i) How did harmful traditions originate and why do they persist over time (despite their proved dramatic consequences)?
ii) Given that simply legislating against harmful traditions is often ineffective (as the experience from child marriage reveals), can we design policy interventions able to change or eradicate them in a way to promote development?
The results of this agenda should advance our knowledge on the historical and more recent factors driving the persistence of harmful norms and eventually open the avenue for a new array of policy interventions: interventions that may change harmful norms, empower women and shift societal behaviours towards virtuous equilibria. The research program had two main objectives. The first aims at explaining the origin and the persistence of harmful norms. The emphasis on this goal is dictated by the fact that it is a relatively understudied topic within economics and by the awareness that to design and implement effective policies to change harmful norms, we first need to understand why they exist and persist. The second objective aims at shedding light on effective “tailored” interventions designed to change harmful practices in different contexts and countries.
