Tag: Female genital mutilation

As many people have pointed out here, and far more have pointed out elsewhere, the report that ISIS had ordered all girls/women aged 11 to 46 to undergo female genital mutilation may be a hoax. (Some have said it simply is a hoax, but that’s not clear yet.)

But at least it’s not purely a Western media hoax. Al Arabiya is taking it seriously. Yesterday it reported the same story I got from the BBC:

Staff Writer, Al Arabiya News
Thursday, 24 July 2014
The al-Qaeda-Inspired Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has ordered all girls and women between the ages of 11 and 46 in and around Iraq’s northern city of Mosul to undergo female genital mutilation, the United Nations said on Thursday.

“It is a fatwa (or religious edict) of ISIS, we learnt this this morning,” said Jacqueline Badcock, the number two U.N. official in Iraq.

…

“This is something very new for Iraq, particularly in this area, and is of grave concern and does need to be addressed,” she said, according to Reuters.

“This is not the will of Iraqi people, or the women of Iraq in these vulnerable areas covered by the terrorists,” she added.

No one was immediately available for comment from Islamic State which has led an offensive through northern and western Iraq.

So, not confirmed, but not disconfirmed, either.

Today it reports that an Iraqi NGO thinks it will happen.

An Iraqi human rights organization said Friday that the al-Qaeda-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) will likely implement a religious edict (Fatwa) that all females aged 11-46 in and around the northern city of Mosul undergo genital mutilation (FGM).

“We’re sure ISIS will follow through with what they’ve announced,” William Warda, head of media relations at Hammurabi Human Rights Organization, told Al Arabiya News

Women working for ISIS may be used to check whether or not females are genitally mutilated, said Warda, a leading member of the Assyrian Democratic Movement.

At the end, it tells us there has been no official word either way:

Meanwhile, ISIS has not officially confirmed or denied the report.

Are we all fully confident that ISIS won’t do that? Do we think their human sympathies and kindness will prevent them?

Dalia Farouk at The Cairo Post reports a bad trend in Egypt:

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is increasing in rural areas in Egypt according to Women and Development Association (WDA) Alexandria governorate head Aida Nour al-Din, Youm7 reported Friday.

Din said that FGM is also common in urban areas due to some religious beliefs that it is a “religious obligation and must be done.”

She also said a 2008 study indicated 86 percent of divorce cases were due to FGM and its negative impact on marital intercourse.

Weird, isn’t it. You’d think people would be able to figure it out eventually. “Let’s see, how to make sure women won’t slut around – I know, mangle their genitals so that sex won’t be any kind of fun whatsoever at all. Perfect. Oh, wait a second…”

Gynecologist Eman Mahmoud told The Cairo Post in a phone interview Friday that FGM has a negative psychological impact that “lasts for years after performing the practice and losing part of the body.”

She added that FGM results in a loss of sex drive for women because they often feel pain during intercourse and because sensory nerves in the genitalia are often removed or damaged during FGM.

Well yes – on the one hand it hurts, and on the other hand there’s no compensatory pleasure. Bit of a down side.

But despite the practice’s prevalence in Egypt, 11 governorates announced Friday they had teamed up with an anti-FGM initiative organized by the Union Against Harmful Practices to Women and Children to combat the practice, Youm7 reported.

Also, back in June the Adam Foundation for Humanitarian Development (AFHD) launched its “Girl of the Nile” campaign to discourage FGM by publicizing Al-Azhar fatwas issued against the practice.

Good luck to them.

 

The Guardian tells us there are FGM “parties” in the UK. No punch, no cheese straws, no gossip, just carving up of little girls’ genitals.

The cutting of girls at female genital mutilation “parties” is still going on in Britain and not just taking place abroad, healthcare experts have told MPs.

The Commons home affairs select committee has heard that “cutters” – often older women – are flown into Britain for the events, at which as many as a dozen girls may be operated on.

“Operated on”? Don’t be silly, Graun – the cutters are not surgeons, and what they do is not an operation. They carve up little girls’ genitals.

FGM in Egypt.

Egypt has one of the highest rates of FGM in the world: a staggering 91 per cent of women between the ages of 15 and 49 have been cut, according to a 2013 report released by UNICEF (PDF). Genital mutilation is practiced in various forms across the African continent, from Nigeria to Somalia. In Egypt, it is most common—indeed, almost universal—in rural areas like Diyarb Buqtaris village where Soheir grew up. But it crosses all class boundaries.  The West often labels the excisions an Islamic practice, but cutting occurs in Egypt in both Muslim and Christian communities, and it goes on despite the fact that the Egyptian Coptic Church and Al Azhar, the country’s leading Islamic authority, have condemned it.

Al Azhar may be “the country’s leading Islamic authority,” if that means anything, but it’s not so leading that it brought FGM to a halt. The Muslim Brotherhood did not condemn it, and when asked said it was not a priority.

In the past, barbers or local midwives often did the cutting in the back rooms of the girls’ homes. In recent years doctors have performed an estimated 80 per cent of the procedures. Even so, they may know little about the damage caused to the girl, says Vivian Fouad from the NPC. Her organization has worked to integrate a course highlighting the dangers of FGM into Egypt’s gynecological and public health curriculum. “The ‘medicalization’ of FGM is very high,” Fouad explained, and “this is very dangerous, as it gives legitimacy to the practice.” The procedure, which takes just a few minutes, costs anything between $4.50 in the countryside to $140 in private clinics in the capital: useful earnings the medics make on the side.

If doctors do it, that makes it look as if it’s a normal and in some way medically beneficial thing to do. That’s bad. Imagine if doctors cut off every girl’s left little finger. The girls would mostly survive, but they would have a worse, clumsier, narrower grip than people who kept both their little fingers. Adults should not do things like that to children.

An American-Egyptian artist who prefers not to be named says she was circumcised in a smart clinic in the coastal city of Alexandria during the early 1990s. “I thought it was normal thing and everyone did it. It was something to be proud of,” the 31-year-old told The Daily Beast. Her mother, from the United States, had been coerced by friends into organizing the operation. The young woman says she is still suffering from psychological damage as a result of the mutilation. She was sedated during the procedure, but that is is not always the case. She said she could barely walk or urinate for four days afterwards.

See? If everyone does it and it seems normal – then everyone does it and it seems normal. The fact that it’s agonizingly painful at the time and destructive later is obscured. Footbinding worked the same way. It hurt like fuck and it left girls and women crippled, but it was normal and everyone did it…until it wasn’t any more.

“In the era of the Muslim Brotherhood, the people perceived that they encouraged these practices,” Fouad said. Even though it is not addressed or endorsed in the Qur’an, genital mutilation fit into the kind of traditionalist view of Egyptian life that the Brotherhood exploited for its own ends.

In 2011, local media reported that the then-ruling Muslim Brotherhood was offering subsidized female circumcision at mobile clinics. The Daily Beast obtained a leaflet, dated April 2012, emblazoned with the logo of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) and detailing discount medical services being made available. At the bottom the simple paper brochure advertised female and male circumcision for just 30 Egyptian pounds ($4.50) a procedure.

Well it’s the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s not their genitals that are going to be carved up.

There’s a clinic in West London that undoes a small part of the damage done by Female Genital Mutilation, specifically infibulation. It makes the hole bigger.

Dr Naomi Low-Beer, Consultant Gynaecologist at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, and lead doctor for the FGM service at the West London clinic, performs the invaluable reversal surgery. She explained: “With the most severe type of FGM, the clitoris and labia have been totally removed, the vaginal opening closed, with a tiny passage left for urine and menstrual blood. This makes sex painful or impossible.

“Women with this type of FGM do benefit from surgery. It is often referred to as ‘reversal’, but rather than reversing the FGM the surgery opens the vagina so that women can have sex without pain. Otherwise, it can take months and months of painful attempts at penetration.  A number of women come in to have the surgery pre-marriage or before their first relationship, and others come because they are suffering from repeated urine and vaginal infections or very painful periods. The surgery can help women with these problems too. It can be safely performed under local anaesthetic in the outpatient clinic. In offering this service, you feel like you’re making a difference.”

Not a reversal. Far from it.

FGM has been a criminal offence since 1985 and the 2003 Female Genital Mutilation Act made it illegal for British citizens and permanent residents to practice FGM within and outside the UK. To date, there have been no prosecutions. By comparison, France has convicted around 100 parents and practitioners.

Misplaced cultural sensitivities, a failure to see FGM as a child protection issue and a lack of accountability have so far impeded successful prosecutions taking place, Mrs Dorkenoo said. “The issue needs to be brought into the mainstream as a child abuse issue through a combination of education, protection and prosecutions.”

Momentum is growing in the campaign to raise awareness and eliminate FGM with the government making it a national priority.  Last month, the London Metropolitan Police have, for the first time, arrested two people suspected of performing FGM on a five-week old girl. The case is under investigation and a  successful prosecution would be a landmark victory and an important step to achieving the goal of eliminating FGM.

And that will free up Dr Naomi Low-Beer to fix things that were not caused by human fetishes and stupidity.

A slice of life in rural Tanzania…

Lozwi Longinai was preparing for her wedding day last month in northern Lingate village, but at the last minute her groom changed his mind after realising that his 18-year-old fiancée had not been circumcised.

“This is very bad.  We are being rejected by our own society because we have refused to be circumcised,” Longinai complained.

While female genital mutilation (FGM) is on the decline in Tanzania, the practice remains widespread in some rural areas, and in Maasai communities like Lingate in the northern Arusha region, dozens of women are being turned away in marriage because they have refused to be cut, according to an NGO working in the region.

That’s grim. I’m guessing that in rural areas in developing countries there aren’t a lot of possibilities for women who don’t marry.

Women rights groups say the best way to stop FGM is by engaging those who have abandoned the practice to educate society about its risks – including the family of girls like Sara Lukumai, a Maasai woman who narrowly escaped the procedure.

She was 16 when her mother told her it was time to face the knife as part of the Maasai tradition that prepares girls to be women.

“As I was coming from school one day, I saw a group of women gathered at our home singing and ululating. I realised it was my turn, but I strongly refused,” the woman, now 19, told Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview.

Her father, Lengai Ole Lukumai – a Maasai herder in the village of Oldonyosambu, about 35km from Arusha – supported his daughter’s refusal because his six other daughters did not benefit from undergoing the procedure.

“I have had enough of it. I know it is a break in tradition, but I wanted to show how bad some of our customs are,” he said. “I am still a follower of my traditions, but I just don’t want any more cuts for my children because I have realised it brings more harm than good.”

His wife was not pleased because their daughter’s rejection of the ritual was a disgrace to the family and would be seen as an act of cowardice, but she could not argue with her husband.

The girl, meanwhile, was ridiculed by friends who had been circumcised, but she saw it as a necessary act of defiance to tell villagers that it was high time to abandon outdated traditions.

In her impoverished community, many parents are unable to afford school fees and so marry their girls off at a young age. Uneducated and too young to fight back, many girls undergo FGM as the traditional precursor to marriage.

Grateful that her father supported her, Sara Lukumai sees education as the way to fight poverty and FGM.

“I want to study. It is through education that I can help my family get out of poverty,” said the girl, who is now in her second year at a secondary school in Arusha. “I want to be a teacher so that I can help fellow citizens to reject bad traditions.”

Good luck to her.

H/t leftoverunder.

 

 

At Comment is Free, Leyla Hussain on FGM.

I was cut when I was seven years old. Four women held me down. I felt every single cut. I was screaming so much I just blacked out. I didn’t know what female genital mutilation (FGM) was until the day it happened to me. FGM is one of the worst physical and psychological scars a girl can be left with and I therefore completely endorse and welcome the new report on tackling FGM.

Shudder. It’s an atrocity, yet there are places where it’s both commonplace and mandatory.

A key point of the report, Tackling Female Genital Mutilation in the UK, launched on Monday in the House of Commons, is about holding frontline professionals accountable and empowering them to act to prevent this. Reporting abuse should not be an opt-in or opt-out matter. Also very important is implementing an awareness campaign; I believe FGM should be given the same publicity as HIV and knife crime. Historically there has been such a lack of urgency in confronting and tackling it – we seem to be closing our ears and pretending it’s not happening.

The most important aspect of the report is to treat FGM as a safeguarding issue, as it is child abuse and needs to be stopped. One misconception is that it is similar to male circumcision. It’s much more painful, it can lead to serious and sometimes life-threatening complications and there is no medical reason to do it.

Plus it’s done on girls, not infants. The pain is not forgotten.

I have been heading up a campaign to ask the government to take charge and demanding we stop FGM in the UK for good. It has been filmed as part of a documentary for Channel 4. During filming I looked at British attitudes to FGM and raising awareness among people in this country, as well as visiting practising communities and challenging them to look at why this is happening. My colleagues in Europe often say to me that Britain is a soft touch because their girls are being brought over to the UK to be cut. I think that’s a clear sign that not enough is being done to tackle it. To me, cultural sensitivity is one of the biggest barriers to stopping FGM in Britain. One of the most powerful and disturbing parts of the filming for me was when, to demonstrate that we are walking on cultural eggshells in Britain, I took to the streets asking people to sign a petition in favour of FGM. I was shocked that in less than 30 minutes I got 19 signatures. The fact that people thought it was OK because it’s someone’s culture, was really scary.

She asks that you sign her petition. It’s only for people in the UK though, so I couldn’t sign it. But lots of you do live there. You can’t fool me, I know you do. I watch you.

Campaigning against FGM can be dangerous work, at least in the UK.

The Guardian has spoken to women who have received death threats, been publicly assaulted and who have had to move house after speaking out about FGM, which involves cutting away some or all of a girl’s external genitalia and can include sewing up the vagina. It is mostly carried out on girls some time between infancy and the age of 15.

Nimko Ali, a 29-year-old British-Somalian, was taken to Somalia for the procedure when she was seven. “I never told anyone I had FGM, not even my best friend, because I saw what happened to women in the UK who did speak out and saw it as a warning sign,” said Ali, who has set up a group called Daughters of Eve to campaign against the procedure.

“I only decided to go public very recently after seeing other girls put themselves in danger by speaking out. The weeks afterwards were the most horrifying of my life. I lost friends – one even offered to kill me for £500.”

One wonders why. What is so important about destroying girls’ genitalia that opposing the practice is seen as a capital crime? Because girls and women with intact genitalia=total whoredom everywhere and that’s the worst possible thing?

I don’t  know. It’s all the same shit, isn’t it. Ropes and chains on Semour Avenue, or girls’ genitalia sliced off like so much grapfruit rind.

FGM is not condoned by any religion. It is illegal in the UK to carry out the procedure, take a British citizen abroad to have the operation, or assist in carrying out FGM abroad, whether or not it is against the law in that country.

What does the Guardian think “FGM is not condoned by any religion” means? There are some clerics who say don’t do it, but there are others who say do it. There are some Islamic clerics who say it is mandatory. They’re not the majority, I think, but they certainly exist.

Efua Dorkenoo, a director at Equality Now, regularly receives death threats aimed at stopping her campaigns against FGM. “I’m told my offence in speaking out is greater than that of Salman Rushdie and that I should die,” she said.

That certainly seems to hint that some adherents of one religion not only “condone” FGM but try to enforce it with threats. So what does the Guardian think “FGM is not condoned by any religion” means?

Dorkenoo says the backlash against women who speak out is getting more extreme. “It’s getting worse for young girls because social media means they can be threatened and harassed by people outside of their community, including by family members back in Africa who are told what they’re doing.”

Groan. Social media turn out to be such a useful tool for people who like to threaten and harass.

Muna Hassan, an 18-year-old member of the charity Integrate Bristol, a charity that helps young people from other countries and cultures, has suffered for her outspoken support of the group’s campaign against FGM. “Men harass and intimidate us girls all the time,” she said.

“We made a film about FGM called Silent Scream and they spread rumours that we were being paid to make a pornographic film. They rang our fathers anonymously and said we were humiliating our families in public.

“It horrified our parents and quite a few girls weren’t allowed to do the project any more because of it.

“These are people who promote themselves as community leaders and elders. The scary thing is that these are  the people that councillors and politicians go to when they want to discuss community issues.”

And the BBC – and sometimes the Guardian. This is exactly why they need to stop doing that.

Edna Adan is one of the heroic women I learned about courtesy of the Half the Sky series. She built and runs a hospital in Somalia. A Safe World for Women gives us her statement on Female Genital Mutilation.

As a midwife, I have been delivering babies for 50 years, many of whom were being born to women who had undergone FGM. Witnessing the FGM-associated complications that many were suffering caused me to speak out against it in public in 1976 which at that time shocked my family and my people.

37 years later, and after so many resolutions have been passed to eradicate the practice, we sadly found that 97% of our women still suffered FGM as shown in the survey carried out on 4000 women at the Edna Adan Hospital between 2002 to 2006.

We are still looking for resources to study the prevalence of FGM and hope that the next survey/audit will reveal a reduction of FGM in our women, particularly after all the campaigns that we have held over the years.

It also posts background information via the hospital website.

In March 1977, during the formation of the Somali Women’s Democratic Organization (SWDO),  Edna Adan Ismail was the first Somali person to publicly denounce FGM and pioneered the campaign for its eradication in Somalia and in Somaliland.

From that time she has campaigned against FGM at many important occasions, including during the WHO Seminar in Khartoum in 1979 on the Mental and Physical Complications of FGM; in 1980 during the Mid-Decade Conference for women in Copenhagen; in Lusaka in the same year; In Dakar in 1984 when she co-founded and was elected the Vice-President of the Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children; In 1986 in EMRO Egypt; 1987 in Addis Ababa and the lobbying of the Organization of African Unity. During the Beijing Women’s Conference in 1995 and between 1988 and 1997 when she tirelessly along with international colleagues, lobbied WHO/UNICEF and every Human Rights Organization.

One of the heroic women.

There’s the Hastings Center report itself, which was the source of Lisa Wade’s article. Zinnia Jones has a great, detailed post on it. I’ll just mention some things that jump out at me.

Starting with the title.

Seven Things to Know about

Female Genital Surgeries

in Africa

They’re not surgeries. If you’re walking down the street and someone tears your arm off for the fun of it, that’s not surgery.

Calling FGM “surgeries” makes it sound health-related, beneficial, useful, good for the girl it happens to. It loads the deck. It’s a creepy, sly, underhanded way of trying to manipulate us into thinking oh well it’s not so bad then.

Then the first part of the first sentence.

Western media coverage of female genital modifications in Africa has been hyperbolic and onesided, presenting them uniformly as mutilation

Because they are. “Modifications” is again a way to pretty them up.

Then the next sentence.

Even if we ultimately decide that female genital modifications should be abandoned, the debate

around them should be grounded in a better account of the facts.

We? Who’s we? “We” already have decided that. Maybe the Hastings Center hasn’t, but I’m in a different “we.”

And what does “ultimately” mean? As if nobody had thought about this yet, and there were all sorts of reasons not to abandon FGM? As if it were a wide-open question? Many many many people, right there in Africa, have already decided that FGM should be abandoned.

The title and two sentences. Now to page 6.

Policy Implications 1. Better fact checking and better representation of the voices of scholars and the perspectives and experiences of African women who value female genital surgery are likely to change the character of the discussion. For nearly three decades, there has been an uncritical relationship between the media and antimutilation advocacy groups. In the face of horrifying and sensational claims about African parents “mutilating” their daughters and damaging their sexual pleasure and reproductive capacities, there has been surprisingly little journalistic exploration of alternative views or consultation with experts who can assess current evidence.

We recommend that journalists, activists, and policy-makers cease using violent and preemptive rhetoric. We recommend a more balanced discussion of the topic in the press and in public policy forums. Female genital surgeries worldwide should be addressed in a larger context of discussions of health promotion, parental and children’s rights, religious
and cultural freedom, gender parity, debates on permissible cosmetic alterations of the body, and female empowerment
issues.

No. No I’m not going to seek out ”better representation” of the perspectives and experiences of African women who value female genital surgery mutilation. I’m not going to do that any more than I would in the case of foot-binding. No I’m not going to combine “parental and children’s rights” in that way when it’s a question of cutting up children’s genitals. Parents don’t have a “right” to do that in the absence of medical necessity. No, no, no.

Richard Shweder is one of the people who signed that report. We’ve seen him before. It was five years ago…

I trust you read that piece by John Tierney on the need to be more respectful of female genital mutilation – or rather, of what he carefully decides to call ‘female circumcision’ because it’s critics who call it female genital mutilation. Well we call it that because chopping off the clitoris and most of the labia and sewing up the whole hatchet-job does seem like mutilation – we critics are funny that way.

Tierney’s piece on Leon Kass’s speech last week was terrific, but this one is…not so good. I do not like it. It makes me cross.

But the one by Richard Shweder puts Tierney’s in the shade. It’s jaw-dropping.

He’s very angry with feminists who don’t like FGM.

The article is one of a series of sensational, lurid and horrifying pieces that the Times has printed over the past decade or so covering the topic, all giving one-sided and uncritical expression to a representation of the practice that has been constructed and widely circulated by feminist and First World human rights activist groups.

Horrors. Feminists and human rights activist groups have ‘constructed’ a representation of FGM that portrays it as a drastic mutilation imposed on female children as a way to control women by chopping off most of their genitalia. How imperialist, how colonialist, how elitist, how cosmopolitan, how wicked. Of course mutilation of girl children is a fine thing as long as it’s done six thousand miles away.

There’s a lot more, and a lot of comments. Oh yes we’ve been here before.

See also Will Bordell’s article from a couple of months ago.

Now that the first steam has dissipated a little, a closer look at one part of Lisa Wade’s “Balanced Look” at cutting off parts of the genitalia of very young girls.

The third item in her list of useful things for people to know so that they can take a more “balanced” approach to Female Genital Mutilation.

Research has shown that women with cutting are sexually responsive.

Women who have undergone genital surgeries report “rich sexual lives, including desire, arousal, orgasm, and satisfaction…”  This is true among women who have experienced clitoral reductions and undergone infibulation, as well as women who’ve undergone lesser forms of cutting.

Look at the way she puts that. There are no qualifications – no “many” or “some” or “there are a few who” – just an unadorned “women.” Fortunately, most people who read that far will already be furious enough to spot the manipulative wording, but that doesn’t make her wording any less infuriating. It’s all the more so because she says “genital surgeries” – as if FGM were medical. It’s not medical. There is no medical reason to cut away parts of the healthy genitalia.

What she implies in that disgusting passage is a brazen falsehood. Many women who have undergone FGM report shitty sexual lives, and even shittier childbearing.

How horrible to try to obfuscate that.

 

 

Nick Cohen notes that it’s progress when violence against women and girls is treated as such.

Odd though it may seem to older readers, the Crown Prosecution Service now regards itself as a liberal organ of the state. This week it is making a great play of its success in deterring violence against women. Its lawyers brought 91,000 domestic violence prosecutions last year and secured 67,000 convictions. As I have mentioned in this space before, many criminologists believe that the willingness, not just of prosecutors and the police but of wider society, to take violence against women and children seriously explains the welcome fall in homicide rate.

Well it would, wouldn’t it. If fewer women are killed then the homicide rate will fall, unless killers decide to kill more men to make up the numbers, which seems unlikely. Plus taking violence against women and children seriously has the added advantage of taking violence against women and children seriously. It’s quite a good idea to take violence against all kinds of people seriously, just in case no kinds of people actually deserve to be the object of violence.

But anyway, despite this one bright spot, all is not well.

But officialdom’s concern for abused women is strictly colour coded.  The CPS will defend women’s rights, but only the rights of white women. Girls with black or brown skins can go hang — or, rather go have their genitalia cut to pieces.

FGM, in other words. It’s not being seen as another form of violence against girls.

Britain made female genital mutilation a criminal offence in the 1980s. Later we said it was illegal for parents to take their children abroad for the ‘procedure’. Yet although thousands of British girls are the victims of wounding with intent, the CPS has not instigated one prosecution, let alone secured a conviction.

…

To his credit, I suppose, Scotland Yard’s specialist in child abuse cases Commander Simon Foy found the courage to speak in public. Unfortunately, his words were a disgrace. ‘I am not necessarily sure that the availability of a stronger sense of prosecution will change’ the incidence of FGM ‘for the better,’ he said.  Is there any other law that Commander Foy and his superiors think it pointless to enforce? Do senior officers say that prosecuting burglars or rapists or murderers makes no difference? Or is it only in the case of the mutilation of girls from other cultures that the cops abandon their belief in the deterrent power of punishment?

Imitating the French by having medical staff check girls, would infringe the girls’ rights, Foy continued, as he used the language of human rights to justify his failure to uphold the rights of women and girls. In this instance, and in this instance only, the police not only believe that putting alleged criminals on trial is pointless, they add that investigating an alleged crime is a criminal act.

So much for taking violence against women and girls seriously.

Via Deeyah, via Mona Eltahawy: Azza El Garf of the Freedom and Justice Party – the Muslim Brotherhood party – disapproves of the ban on FGM.

She condemns the notorious “virginity tests”  that military officers and doctors are accused of perpetrating on a group of female  protesters in March 2011.

But she disagrees with Egypt’s 2008 ban on female cutting,  which opponents call genital mutilation. The World Health Organization defines it  as the partial or complete removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury  to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.

“It is a personal decision and each woman can decide based on her needs. If she needs it, she can go to a doctor,” El Garf said,  adding that the Muslim Brotherhood refers to the practice as beautification plastic  surgery. She was adamant that it was a woman’s choice, and hers alone, to have the  outlawed procedure and should be done in consultation with a trained medical professional.

But it’s not about “women” making a “choice” to get their external genitalia sliced off. It’s about women “choosing” to have that done to their very young daughters. Prattling about “choice” as if it were a fucking manicure or a haircut is insulting.

 

I saw a powerful BBC report on FGM in Egypt the other day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bObvzSHRKT8

The most chilling part is at the very end (11:00) when Sue Lloyd Roberts asks a Salafist honcho if he’s on board with the campaign to end FGM and he said it’s not a priority. She pressed him by saying, “So you wouldn’t deter a mother who wants to get her underage daughter mutilated.”

He stared for a second and then said, with a tiny smirk, “I have nothing further to say on this matter.”

Sue Lloyd Roberts in voiceover: “The will of mothers like Olla will therefore be respected, and 11-year-old Raja will be mutilated.” Freeze-frame on young Raja.

One small bit of good news, for a change.

The movement to end genital cutting is spreading in Senegal at a quickening pace through the very ties of family and ethnicity that used to entrench it. And a practice once seen as an immutable part of a girl’s life in many ethnic groups and African nations is ebbing, though rarely at the pace or with the organized drive found in Senegal.

But good news of that kind is of course always too late for some…for many.

Bassi Boiro, the elderly woman who was Sare Harouna’s so-called cutter, said she always performed the rite before dawn under the spreading arms of a sacred tree, away from the settlement.

“Men couldn’t hear the girl’s screams,” she explained. “They are not part of this.”

Four women would hold down the arms and legs of each girl, usually ages 5 to 7. For years, Mrs. Boiro said, she used a knife handed down through generations of cutters in her family until it became “too dull to even cut okra.” She then switched to razor blades.

But Mrs. Boiro says she has now accepted Sare Harouna’s decision to end the practice and speaks about the harm caused by her life’s work. “I didn’t realize it was my doing,” she said.

Muusaa Jallo, the village imam, was convinced of the need to stop the practice and has spread the word in many other villages. As his toddler impishly poked her finger through a hole in his sock, he placed his hand gently on her head and said, “I have already decided this one will not be cut.”

His 8-year-old, Alimata, sat solemnly to the side, her eyes downcast.

“I will abandon it like my parents,” she said, almost inaudibly. “I won’t do it to my daughters. It’s not good to do that, and they did it to me.”

8 is very young to know that it’s too late for you.