FORWARD calls to make female genital mutilation history
FORWARD calls to make female genital mutilation history
Female genital mutilation (FGM) is a violation of human rights and poses immediate and long-term health consequences to girls and women. It currently affects 140 million women and girls (1). In the UK alone, it is estimated that over 24,000 girls are at risk of FGM. (2).
Despite this, there remains little awareness, particularly amongst young people, or engagement with communities and families.
Success in reducing the prevalence of FGM can only be achieved by actively working in partnership with communities and families, and empowering young people to speak out.
“Community engagement is a vital to change this complex practice of female genital mutilation. Creating spaces and dialogue to discuss and build skills of community stakeholders will help strengthen change and safeguard rights and well being of affected communities.” said FORWARD Executive Director Naana Otoo-Oyortey.
International Zero Tolerence to FGM Day provides an opportunity for everyone to raise their voices to Make FGM History.
FORWARD and its partners will continue to work to make this a reality and to safeguard the dignity and advance the sexual and reproductive health and human rights of African women and girls.
(1) World Health Organisation
(2) FORWARD study
About FORWARD
The Foundation for Women’s Health Research and Development (FORWARD) is an African Diaspora women’s campaign and support charity. Our work responds to the need to safeguard dignity and advance the sexual and reproductive health and human rights of African women and girls. We work with individuals, communities and organizations to transform harmful practices and improve the quality of life of vulnerable girls and women.
We envision a world where women and girls live in dignity, are healthy and have choices and equal opportunities to fulfil their potential.
About The Gift
The Gift is a fictive monologue written by Zahrah Awaleh that deals with the realities and horrors of FGM. It gets inside the head of a young Somali woman who is on her way to her FGM reversal operation in a London hospital. In the monologue, she opens her heart to the listener, and in the process restores and reclaims her dignity and self-worth.
The Gift – A Monologue
I have an appointment today to see a doctor at Guy’s Hospital for an operation. Not no ordinary hospital operation. I was circumcised at the age of 8; well actually it wasn’t a circumcision, because if it had been there’d be no reason for me to see this doctor today. ‘Circumcision’ is the politically correct name for what happened to me. It even sounds acceptable, pleasing with its soft sibilants; clinically sound: ‘circumcision’ with precision. Bloodless, painless, unconscious even. An everyday affair. Numb. What about Female Genital Cutting, or FGC? More upfront, but still sterile and neat. It keeps those who practise it happy enough perhaps, as it’s quite neutral, non-judgmental I suppose. On the other hand, Female Genital Mutilation, or FGM, is more blatant, offensive and refreshing in some ways. Mutilation can be done with or without consent, but ultimately, in my opinion, mutilation sounds like it’s done by force and with malice. Some mothers say they do it as an ‘act of love’. Perhaps, that’s what their mothers told them. Few ‘acts of love’ impose so much bloodletting, excruciating pain, and confusion upon a girl child who has no clue as to why her mother is killing her. The only explanation being, ‘It’s what we do, everyone does it, it’s our culture’. The girl becomes a woman and still doesn’t understand why this happens and will one day have to choose whether or not to do it to her daughters. If not as an ‘act of love’, then as an act of compliance to convention and religion, even though religion, at least Islam, makes little mention of it. So what? In this matter, religion serves an age-old tradition.
I don’t know of any culture or community who practise Female Circumcision Proper, because what purpose could there be in cutting off the prepuce of the clitoris? I’ve heard that some Muslim Malaysians practise this because it improves the woman’s sexual sensitivity, rather than abates it, as it is commonly understood to do. The most common form of FGM is the partial or total cutting of the clitoris, and that is no ‘circumcision’, that is plain excision: that is mutilation. The one part of the human body in either male or female ever created solely for pleasure is the most guilty. That’s why it’s the most popular part to cut down and be rooted out. Why do these people think that they can take away what God Himself gave to each woman as a gift? A gift for all the crap that she has to put up with in life: from child molesters (usually found within the family), menstruation, men, to childbirth and losing her figure, to menopause, HRT, and losing her looks. What is the clitoris guilty of anyway? It’s just a tiny bit of flesh made to give women sexual pleasure. Islam advocates that sex is good within marriage, even in the holy month of fasting! (i.e. in Ramadan, and for your information check out the second chapter of the Koran). Furthermore, the Prophet Muhammad said in a famous saying that men should practice foreplay with their wives and not just mount them like beasts. Where did we go wrong?
Well, what I’m about to do today may be seen as sacrilegious by some members of my family or by those of my Somali community. On the whole they practise FGM Type 3, as the WHO would say (so polite!?). This is when the vulva is closed by normally cutting off the clitoris, and gutting the inner or outer lips and stitching them together with sutures, thread, or even thorns. The pitiful girl child is normally subjected to this torture with several kinswomen holding her down, since she has not been given any anaesthetic to relieve the horrific pain. If she’s ‘lucky’ enough to have a local or general anaesthetic, then she’s numb to what’s going on down there, so doesn’t feel the enormity of what she’s losing. According to Somali tradition a woman should wait till she’s about to be married or until the wedding night itself until she’s ‘opened’. In the old days, the husband would have to prove his virility, his ‘manhood’, by opening it during his first penetration, which could last for several weeks before he got in. Imagine that?! In recent years, a trend has come about where a Traditional Birth Attendant, a TBA, or nurse comes along a few days before, or perhaps even on the wedding day itself, to open the vulva and instruct the patient on how to care for the wound. The place is no sooner opened than the first sex has to occur. So what are women meant to feel about sex in Somali culture? That it hurts like Hell! That’s what. If it doesn’t hurt physically because of what I’ve just told you and because the ‘fake 2-in-1 vagina and piss hole’ left is about the size of the average woman’s fingertip, then what’s happening on the emotional and psychological levels as he simply approaches her? Perhaps her body trembles remembering how it was violated long ago in its most vulnerable place by the one who carried it and screamed bearing it. Or she closes her eyes and tries to hold back her tears and sobbing, whilst her husband is blissfully unaware. Or it may mean pushing her partner off of her, yelling that she doesn’t want sex that night. It may be the first time and he’s got a blade ready; he’d rather cheat and take a short cut to getting in, risking his manhood coming under attack if anyone found out. All this so that she’s in less pain, but then he might strike a main artery, especially critical around the clitoris which has so much blood connected to it, so there’s a risk of haemorrhaging and even dying. So on seeing the blade she runs for her life into the toilet and locks herself in for the night.
After living with my scarred wound for so long and coming to terms with it by reading, debating, crying, sobbing and raging with God (Why me?! Why didn’t you stop them?), it took a period of depression for me to finally realise that the only way for me to resist this shit, no other word can do, and pull myself out was by taking serious action. No more talking. I began to see that the whole experience of FGM was a circle: the girl is viciously ‘closed’ to preserve her virginity and close out the demons or perverts that would certainly infiltrate her chastity (For real! At least in my culture anyway), and only be ‘opened’ for the groom upon her marriage to him. Well, I’ve decided to break the circle, now before I’m married, for me. It’s not for him, not for my parents, not for my so-called ‘culture’ (What kind of culture does this to a human being anyway?!). It’s for ME. It’s a gift to myself: I am my own gift to myself. Somalis call a young unmarried woman gashaanti, meaning ‘young virgin’ in everyday terms. However, linguistically it means ‘she who is a gift for the household of her husband’ or ‘she, the gift who enters the marital home of her husband’. It could also mean, ‘the gift from which the husband derives sexual pleasure when he enters her’. Today is a gift to myself: I am my own gift to myself.
It’s taken me months, no years, to accept the fact that my body is my own property, and that I have every right to do this operation. I’m a Muslim woman and I don’t want to transgress any laws of Islam, especially those relating to modesty. Yet I must do this one thing for myself, or I will lose my self-respect and even the will to live, and there’s nothing in the laws of Islam that says what I’m about to do is a sin:
Today is a gift to myself: I am my own gift to myself.