Cultural Beliefs, Media Influence, and Attitude Toward Female Genital Mutilation and Body Enhancement Practices Among Female Undergraduates in Southeast Nigeria: Implications for Counseling

With the post-Millennial generation, conceptualized as digital natives whose worldviews are substantially shaped by pervasive social media exposure, shifting cultural paradigms, and evolving constructs of body image and traditional practices, critical reflexivity is increasingly contested in contemporary discourse. It therefore becomes academically imperative to interrogate a latent yet pervasive phenomenon that remains largely underexplored and the interrelationship between cultural beliefs, attitudinal orientations, media exposure, and body enhancement practices in shaping female undergraduates' perceptions and dispositions toward Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) becomes important. This study investigated the cultural beliefs, attitude, media influence exposure, and body enhancement practices of female undergraduates regarding female genital mutilation (FGM), with implications for counselling. Four research questions guided the study. A descriptive survey design was adopted. The population comprised 4,850 female undergraduates in two public universities in Imo State, Southeast Nigeria, from which a sample of 380 was drawn using proportionate stratified random sampling. Data were collected using a 25-item researcher-developed questionnaire titled "Cultural Beliefs, Media Influence, Attitude and Practices Questionnaire (CBMIAPQ)," validated by three experts in Guidance and Counselling and Measurement and Evaluation, and trial-tested to obtain Cronbach alpha reliability coefficients of 0.79, 0.81, 0.84, and 0.78 for the cultural beliefs, attitude, media influence, and body enhancement practices sub-scales respectively. Data were analyzed using mean and standard deviation, with a criterion mean of 2.50 adopted for decision-making. Findings revealed that female undergraduates moderately hold cultural beliefs that sustain FGM, display a moderately favourable attitude toward FGM and related body enhancement practices, are highly exposed to media content promoting FGM and body enhancement practices, and moderately engage in body enhancement practices themselves, with media influence recording the highest overall mean of the four constructs examined. The study concluded that female undergraduates' orientation toward FGM, and their own body enhancement practices, are shaped by a combination of inherited cultural belief and pervasive media exposure. It was recommended, among others, that university counselling units integrate culturally sensitive, media-literacy-informed psychoeducation into student orientation and wellness programmes