You're listening to serious inquiries only. Oh, Hello and I'm your host Thomas Smith.

Today.

Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries only.

This is episode 73 and I'm your host Thomas Smith.

Today I'm speaking with Chantel Baudewell. She's a friend of mine and she just graduated

from the University of Kent with a degree in human rights law and for her thesis she took on the subject of

FGM in the UK. We talked about a lot of the tough ethical questions involved in this.

Some might not be so tough, but some are pretty tough.

How exactly do you try to stop this?

To what degree should we be willing to give up our civil rights or the civil rights of even

one segment of our community in order to ensure this isn't happening to young girls.

It's a really interesting, difficult, ethical topic and

Chantel has the expertise to kind of take us through it. So with that said, let's get

over to the interview.

I'm joined by Chantel. How are you doing?

Good, how are you doing?

I'm doing great. It's great to talk to you again.

This is not the happiest of topics, but I wanted to ask you how did you get started on this like what made

you choose this as your thesis yeah so I was doing my master's thesis and originally I wanted to do something about this sort of

dichotomy between cultural relativism and universalism in human rights field.

So it's a subject that comes up a lot and I think we've seen it in the news a lot trying to decide whether human rights should be universal and applied to everybody or if there are differences between different cultures and if human rights is sort of a symptom of like

cultural imperialism which is something I saw a lot. So originally I wanted to focus on

...