Sande's initiation curriculum has never been static, and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries brought the society's clearest point of controversy: in many, though not all, Sande practicing communities, initiation has historically included female genital cutting as part of the physical marking that accompanies entry into womanhood. This is a documented and widely discussed fact in the ethnographic and public health literature on the region, not a peripheral detail, and it has made Sande a focus of national debate in Sierra Leone and Liberia over recent decades, with governments, women's organizations and Sande officials themselves taking a range of positions from defense of the practice as central to Sande identity to active campaigns to end it.
The society's own leadership is not uniform on the question. Some sowei and Sande chapters have publicly committed to dropping genital cutting from initiation while retaining the society's other functions, education, mediation, dance and the transition rites that mark a girl's passage to adult status, a shift several researchers document as already underway in parts of both countries. Other chapters continue the practice largely unchanged, and national legislation in the region has moved unevenly.
This atlas records the practice as a documented historical and ongoing fact about many, not all, Sande initiations, following the scholarship rather than either defending or condemning it, and notes that the society's own internal debate about its future is real and active rather than settled. Sande's other roles, as the primary institution training women in adult knowledge and as one half of a paired system of governance with Poro, continue regardless of how any given chapter resolves the question of cutting.