Ten UN Agencies Target Female Mutilation

Female genital mutilation is deeply rooted in many societies
UN, New York: Feb. 27th. (BBC News) A range of United Nations agencies are calling for the practice of female genital mutilation to be ended within the space of a generation. An estimated three million girls a year are thought to be at risk from this practice, many of them in Africa. The practice of cutting off the clitoris of a young girl - and often more - is deeply rooted in some cultures. Ten UN agencies want a major reduction in the tradition by 2015. The practice is seen in some countries as a way to ensure virginity and to make a woman marriageable. Yet it also leads to bleeding, shock, infections and a higher rate of death for the women's new-born babies, say the UN groups.

Up to 140 million women are thought to have undergone this procedure in 28 countries in Africa, and a few in Asia and the Middle East. It is also happening to girls and women who have left their original countries and settled in the West. The UN agencies say traditions are often stronger than law and legal action by itself is not enough to tackle this. Change must come from within communities, they say, citing the example of West Africa, where villages have joined together to make pledges to abandon this practice.
by Laura Trevelyan
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French Activists Fight Female Genital Mutilation

National Public Radio, Jan. 26th. - Female genital mutilation is an ancient rite practiced mostly in some sub-Saharan and North African countries. Many Muslims in that part of the world wrongly believe it's dictated by Islam. In recent decades, the practice has spread to immigrant communities in Europe. Women activists in France have led the campaign in prosecuting those responsible for excisions performed on young girls, and the United Nations now considers the practice a human rights abuse.

GAMS, the French Women's Association for the Abolition of Sexual Mutilations, estimates that there are more than 50,000 mutilated women in France. One of them is Aissata, a young woman from Mali who has a 2-year-old daughter. "I come from a village in Mali where excisions are always practiced," she says. "My sister had a daughter and when the baby was not even 2 years old, she was mutilated. When I was four months' pregnant and my doctor told me it was a little girl, I was scared for her and ran away to France. I didn't want my daughter to undergo what they did to me when I was young." But Aissata is in France illegally. She went to GAMS to file a request for political asylum. On average, six women a day, five days a week, come seeking asylum in France to protect their daughters from being subjected to mutilation in their home countries, says GAMS worker Khadi Diallo, 53. She claims GAMS has a 99 percent asylum success rate.

Diallo was mutilated when she was 14, and the brutality of the practice is etched in her memory. "I was mutilated against my parents' will," she says. "It was during the summer visiting my father's family in a village near the capital Bamako. In Mali, it's the father's relatives who decide everything in the family." Diallo describes how several women held her down as one of them inflicted excruciating pain. Supporters of female genital mutilation say it dampens a girl's sexuality and protects her honor. Diallo says she can't even begin to list the psychological traumas she has since suffered. "They cut off my sex. It was as if they cut off my finger. They took away a piece of me," she says. "They imposed customs of a society where it's not permissible for a 14 -year-old girl to remain intact." In most cases, the excision involves the removal of the clitoris and minor labia. The most extreme form is infibulation, where the vaginal opening is stitched closed. Often, knives or razor blades are used in unsanitary conditions. The result is scar tissue that not only makes sex difficult and not pleasurable, but can also create complications for childbirth and long-term infections. "There is such a strong taboo against sex that girls often learn they were mutilated at an early age only when visiting a doctor or after their first sexual experience, when their boyfriend says, you're not normal, you're not like the others," says Diallo.

Female genital mutilation is alien to the great majority of Muslims in Europe, but GAMS claims there's a growing number of fundamentalist imams, funded by Islamist movements from abroad, who preach that removal of the clitoris is endorsed by the Koran. Women activists here have enlisted rap singer Bafing Kul to help convince poor and uneducated immigrants to stop mutilation, saying the practice is backward and harmful. One song's lyrics include: "May my ancestors forgive me. Not all traditions should be preserved. Islam does not endorse this one." The producer and distributor of Kul's CD is lawyer and human rights activist Linda Weil-Curiel. "The aim of the mutilation is to deprive the woman of her own sexuality. She is only left to be a baby-maker," Weil-Curiel says. Weil-Curiel is the person most responsible for making France the leader in tracking and prosecuting both perpetrators of female genital mutilation and the consenting parents. Representing the interests of child victims over the last 15 years, Weil-Curiel has been involved in most of the 40-some trials that have led to convictions.

She says clitorectomies have all but been eradicated in France, but the tragedy continues. Families started taking their daughters to their homelands for summer vacations. So she and other activists go to schools. It's not easy, she says, to warn children about the risks. "And we are there saying, 'Beware, be very careful, 'cause your parents are planning to send you over and this is what will happen,'" Weil-Curiel says. "And each time … You have two to three girls, we can observe tears running down their face, so we know in the family, if it is not them, it has happened." But last year the law was toughened. It's now illegal for any girl who lives in France to be sexually mutilated whether it happens in France or not, whether the girl is a citizen or not. Doctors are obligated to report cases they discover, and parents can be prosecuted for neglect, even if they say it was done somewhere else, without their knowledge.
by Sylvia Poggioli
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A Cutting Tradition - Female Circumcision

Female circumcisers and their attendants waiting in an elementary-school classroom, where they do their work.

NY Times Jan. 20th. - When a girl is taken — usually by her mother — to a free circumcision event held each spring in Bandung, Indonesia, she is handed over to a small group of women who, swiftly and yet with apparent affection, cut off a small piece of her genitals. Sponsored by the Assalaam Foundation, an Islamic educational and social-services organization, circumcisions take place in a prayer center or an emptied-out elementary-school classroom where desks are pushed together and covered with sheets and a pillow to serve as makeshift beds. The procedure takes several minutes. There is little blood involved. Afterward, the girl’s genital area is swabbed with the antiseptic Betadine. She is then helped back into her underwear and returned to a waiting area, where she’s given a small, celebratory gift — some fruit or a donated piece of clothing — and offered a cup of milk for refreshment. She has now joined a quiet majority in Indonesia, where, according to a 2003 study by the Population Council, an international research group, 96 percent of families surveyed reported that their daughters had undergone some form of circumcision by the time they reached 14.

These photos were taken in April 2006, at the foundation’s annual mass circumcision, which is free and open to the public and held during the lunar month marking the birth of the prophet Muhammad. The Assalaam Foundation runs several schools and a mosque in Bandung, Indonesia’s third-largest city and the capital of West Java. The photographer Stephanie Sinclair was taken to the circumcision event by a reproductive-health observer from Jakarta and allowed to spend several hours there. Over the course of that Sunday morning, more than 200 girls were circumcised, many of them appearing to be under the age of 5. Meanwhile, in a nearby building, more than 100 boys underwent a traditional circumcision as well. According to Lukman Hakim, the foundation’s chairman of social services, there are three “benefits” to circumcising girls. “One, it will stabilize her libido,” he said through an interpreter. “Two, it will make a woman look more beautiful in the eyes of her husband. And three, it will balance her psychology.” Female genital cutting — commonly identified among international human rights groups as female genital mutilation — has been outlawed in 15 African countries. Many industrialized countries also have similar laws. Both France and the U.S. have prosecuted immigrant residents for performing female circumcisions.

In Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population, a debate over whether to ban female circumcision is in its early stages. The Ministry of Health has issued a decree forbidding medical personnel to practice it, but the decree which has yet to be backed by legislation does not affect traditional circumcisers and birth attendants, who are thought to do most female circumcisions. Many agree that a full ban is unlikely without strong support from the country’s religious leaders. According to the Population Council study, many Indonesians view circumcision for boys and girls as a religious duty. Female circumcision in Indonesia is reported to be less extreme than the kind practiced in other parts of the globe — Africa, particularly. Worldwide, female genital cutting affects up to 140 million women and girls in varying degrees of severity, according to estimates from the World Health Organisation. The most common form of female genital cutting, representing about 80 percent of cases around the world, includes the excision of the clitoris and the labia minora. A more extreme version of the practice, known as Pharaonic circumcision or infibulation, accounts for 15 percent of cases globally and involves the removal of all external genitalia and a stitching up of the vaginal opening.

Studies have shown that in some parts of Indonesia, female circumcision is more ritualistic — a rite of passage meant to purify the genitals and bestow gender identity on a female child — with a practitioner rubbing turmeric on the genitals or pricking the clitoris once with a needle to draw a symbolic drop of blood. In other instances, the procedure is more invasive, involving what WHO classifies as “Type I” female genital mutilation, defined as excision of the clitoral hood, called the prepuce, with or without incision of the clitoris itself. The Population Council’s 2003 study said that 82 percent of Indonesian mothers who witnessed their daughters’ circumcision reported that it involved “cutting.” The women most often identified the clitoris as the affected body part. The amount of flesh removed, if any, was alternately described by circumcisers as being the size of a quarter-grain of rice, a guava seed, a bean, the tip of a leaf, the head of a needle. At the Assalaam Foundation, traditional circumcisers say they learn the practice from other women during several years of apprenticing. Siti Rukasitta, who has been a circumciser at the foundation for 20 years, said through an interpreter that they use a small pair of sterilized scissors to cut a piece of the clitoral prepuce about the size of a nail clipping. Population Council observers who visited the event before the 2003 study, however, reported that they also witnessed some cases of circumcisers cutting the clitoris itself.

Any distinction between injuring the clitoris or the clitoral hood is irrelevant, says Laura Guarenti, an obstetrician and WHO’s medical officer for child and maternal health in Jakarta. “The fact is there is absolutely no medical value in circumcising girls,” she says. “It is 100 percent the wrong thing to be doing.” The circumcision of boys, she adds, has demonstrated health benefits, namely reduced risk of infection and some protection against H.I.V.

Nonetheless, as Western awareness of female genital cutting has grown, anthropologists, policy makers and health officials have warned against blindly judging those who practice it, saying that progress is best made by working with local leaders and opinion-makers to gradually shift the public discussion of female circumcision from what it’s believed to bestow upon a girl toward what it takes away. “These mothers believe they are doing something good for their children,” Guarenti, a native of Italy, told me. “For our culture that is not easily understandable. To judge them harshly is to isolate them. You cannot make change that way.”
By SARA CORBETT
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Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Mozlink’ for any or all of the articles/images placed here. The placing of an article does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
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