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Monday, March 29, 2010

Female circumcision is normal practice in Finland

March 18, 2010
By Helsinky Times

According to Finnish law, female circumcision is a crime even if carried out abroad, the national daily Helsingin Sanomat reports.

“CIRCUMCISED immigrant women commonly go to Finnish hospitals to give birth. If the procedure was performed on the women before they moved to Finland, then there is no crime involved.
There are no statistics on the number of circumcised women, but there are about 15,000 people in Finland whose cultural traditions include circumcision as a common practice. Of these, about 11,000 are of Somali background.

Now the Somali generation born in Finland in the 1990s is approaching childbearing age. If there are circumcised women among them, then it is a case of aggravated assault against a minor. The crime must be investigated regardless of the opinion of the victim, and the statute of limitation for the crime is 20 years.
According to Finnish legal interpretation, circumcision is a crime even in the case of the girl in question being sent abroad for the procedure. There are no precedents for this matter, and medical personnel have been inadequately instructed about their notification duty.

‘The crime must be notified but it is hard to get proof,’ says Janneke Johansson, a specialist at the Finnish League for Human Rights. ‘In the 1990s parents weren’t necessarily knowledgeable about the legislation due to the social and health care workers only becoming aware of the issue after a number of mistakes had been made.’”

Supermodel Survivor - Waris Dirie

March 17, 2010
By CNN

The story of world famous super model Waris Dirie who is raging a war against female genital cutting. 

Government to build schools for FGM fight

March 27, 2010
By David Kazungu - Daily Monitor

Mbale
Three reception centres and boarding schools await girls who will reject Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), the chairperson of Uganda Women Parliamentary Association has said.
Ms Jane Babiiha Alisemera said the schools will be built in Amdat, Bukwo and Kapchorwa districts to protect girls from the culture of female circumcision .
Resistance
She said the government is aware that the plan to abolish female circumcision has been met with a lot of resistance but said with the continuous sensitisation of girls, there are indicators that many of them are responding to the call of abandoning the culture.
“We need these reception centers to welcome and accommodate those girls who would escape the wrath of female genital mutilation,” Ms Alisemera said adding that the boarding schools will be used to ensure that the girls do not fall prey to FGM.
She explained that the government is planning in the next financial year to set up family and child courts with a Grade I Magistrate at sub-county levels to help prosecute perpetrators of the act.
She appealed to all stake holders to join hands to wipe out the practice that has left several women dead and others disabled.
The East African Community Member of Parliament Ms Lydia Wanyoto Mutende said the EAC Parliament is considering instituting a similar law to avoid cross border practice of female circumcision. “So far it is only Uganda that has a law against FGM, we want to deal with this matter once and for all in the countries that practice it especially Uganda and Kenya”, Ms Wanyoto said.
Sensitisation
The Uganda parliamentary Association was in Mbale to sensitise stakeholders about the new law that prohibits female circumcision. The sensitisation meeting drew participants from 10 districts from eastern Uganda.

Monday, March 22, 2010

Will the EU help end FGM?

March 21, 2010
By Teri Shultz - Global Post

BRUSSELS, Belgium — As a young girl in Guinea, Aissatou Diallo couldn’t save herself. She was 14 and six people were holding her down while a seventh cut her.

Somalian Ifrah Ahmed couldn’t even comprehend what was happening to her. She was only 8 years old and there were people holding her arms and legs. She had no anesthesia of any kind before or after, just raw agony and then the 40 days of isolation imposed on newly circumcised girls. Five years later, inexplicably, they did it to her again.

Diallo and Ahmed are just two of the estimated 140 million women girls and women worldwide who have been subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM). But unlike the vast majority of girls unable to fight back either during the procedure or after, these women are defying it now — and demanding the rest of the world do the same.

They are some of the leading voices in the latest push in a long campaign spearheaded by Amnesty International against FGM.  The new drive is specifically geared toward pressing the European Union to coordinate the laws, statistics and even foreign policy of its 27 member states into a united front to halt the practice.

Diallo is now in Belgium, one of the handful of countries that does grant asylum based on FGM claims. She claimed asylum on the basis that she could not protect her two young daughters from family and community members in Guinea determined to subject them to FGM. Ahmed, now 21, arrived as a war refugee in Ireland three years ago, unable to read or write as a result of never being sent to school in Somalia. Now fluent – and fearless – in English, she’s determined to change the culture of her own country, where almost 98 percent of adult women are believed to have been circumcised, the highest rate in the world.

But activists are working to make clear that while African countries are infamous for the practice, people in the West should not think it only affects women “somewhere else.” Figures compiled by the European Parliament indicate there are approximately half a million women living in the EU who have already undergone FGM. An estimated 180,000 more girls each year in Europe reach the age when the procedure is usually done, which ranges from birth up to age 15.

In the U.S., legislation has been in place since 1996 offering asylum to any woman fleeing the threat of FGM or who has already experienced it. But in Europe, though the majority of the 27 EU member states outlaw FGM under either specific or general criminal laws, only a handful officially recognize FGM as a form of persecution warranting protection and they do not apply the law in the same way. (This is also true among different courts in the U.S. where, for example, a Malian asylum seeker who had been subjected to FGM as a child was rejected by the state of Maryland because there was no reason for her to fear it happening again.) End FGM wants uniform laws adopted throughout the EU and the most generous possible interpretation of them.

But living in a country where there are laws against FGM by no means grants these girls automatic protection from the practice — it’s technically illegal in many of the African nations too. Sometimes the cutting is actually performed in Europe, but more frequently young girls are taken on “vacation” back to Africa, where it’s done in the traditional setting. The End FGM campaign wants data collected from across Europe to gauge the extent of the problem.

The European Parliament (EP) in March 2009 passed a strongly worded resolution condemning FGM as a “violation of fundamental human rights, as well as a savage breach of the integrity and personality of women and girls and therefore … a serious crime in the eyes of society.” The resolution called on the EU executive and member states to prepare plans “aimed at banishing FGM from the EU” and providing all means possible to protect and help vulnerable women. In short, it looks a lot like Amnesty’s wish list.

EP Vice President Isabelle Durant, attending the campaign's Belgian kick-off earlier this month, pledged her support for putting some teeth in the good intentions. “We’ve got the resolution, now we need the action,” Durant said. She promised to push for implementation of the parliamentary directive in addition to the possibility of linking trade and aid to countries’ willingness to give up the practice.

But there are also valid concerns about whether such pressure could be counter-productive, not just with foreign governments that may resent attempts to influence their traditions, but also with the people the policies are seeking to support. Women may be reluctant to seek medical care for themselves or their children if they worry they or other family members could be prosecuted.

Those concerns are far outweighed, says the campaign’s director Christine Loudes, by the need to protect innocent girls. “It’s a matter of her human rights, it’s a matter of her right not to be tortured, and her rights to access to health and her rights to physical integrity.”

Activists also want to promote sympathetic medical care so that when circumcised women see a doctor they do not have to answer embarrassing or ignorant questions about what kind of “accident” caused the deformity.

Ifrah Ahmed said she was at first very reluctant to go to the hospital for the very serious problems she suffers with each month’s menstrual period as a result of her double mutilation, including pain so bad she says “sometimes I fall down and I feel like I’m going to die.” And after having to explain time and time again to stupefied or even just curious attendants, she finally got an explanatory note from one sympathetic doctor that she could just hand over every time she needs care. It saves her from having to recount the excruciating details endlessly.

She said the doctors always ask her “why do they do this to you?” and she herself cannot explain. “I actually asked some old women why they are doing circumcision to a child, who is innocent, why are they hurting us?” she said. “But there is no answer.”

There wouldn’t be any answer that could satisfy Ahmed anyway. She is determined to see this practice stopped. While she agrees laws need to be strengthened, Ahmed insists the true solution is prevention, not prosecution, and that’s why she’s working in African immigrant communities day in and day out, despite the resistance she meets there.

“They are following what mothers, grandmothers, grand-grandmothers used to do,” Ahmed sighed. “But we in Europe, we are fighting for change. They won’t change everything within a day or two days or a year or two years but with campaigning and work, it will come.”

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Genital cutting not tied to childbirth complication

March 12,  2010
By Obstetrics & Gynecology, March 2010

The practice of female genital cutting may not raise the risk of a severe childbirth complication common in the developing world, a new study suggests.

The study, of nearly 500 Ethiopian women, found no clear relationship between female genital cutting and the development of obstetric fistula—where a prolonged, difficult labor causes a hole to form between the uterus and bladder or, less often, the rectum.

It is estimated that more than 130 million women worldwide have undergone female genital cutting, also known as female “circumcision.”

The centuries-old practice, which involves removing part or all of a girl’s clitoris and labia, and sometimes narrowing the vaginal opening, remains a common practice in some countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Studies in Africa have found that women who underwent genital cutting as girls have higher risks of certain childbirth complications, including stillbirth and severe vaginal tears. Similarly, some European studies of African immigrants have linked genital cutting to higher risks of vaginal tearing and emergency c-section.

But it has been unclear whether genital cutting raises the risk of obstetric fistula.

Obstetric fistula is now almost unheard of in wealthier countries, but it remains a serious problem in parts of the world with little access to emergency obstetric care. In these countries, women with obstructed labor can remain in labor for days, usually ending in a stillbirth.

Those who suffer fistulas are left with chronic incontinence; some are then abandoned by their families and ostracized by their communities.

The thinking has been that, if female genital cutting contributes to obstetric fistulas, then eradicating the practice will help prevent some cases of the childbirth complication.

But the current findings suggest that this would not be the case, according to the researchers, led by Andrew Browning of the Barhirdar Hamlin Fistula Centre in Ethiopia.

“Although the eradication of female genital cutting is desirable from the standpoints of both women’s health and human rights,” the researchers write in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, “the elimination of these traditional genital operations will not eliminate the obstetric fistula as a complication of childbirth.”

The findings are based on 492 women who underwent surgery to correct obstetric fistula at the Barhirdar center; 255 women had undergone genital cutting, while 237 had not.

Overall, Browning and his colleagues report, there were no differences between the two groups of women as far as the location or severity of the fistulas. They also had similar success with surgical repair; the fistula was closed in nearly all women in both groups.

Women with genital cutting did have slightly longer labors—3.1 days, on average, versus 2.8 days among the other women.

However, the researchers note, a look at the patients’ geographical locations suggested that the longer labor was attributable to their living in more-remote areas, farther from medical help.

Indeed, Browning’s team writes, rather than being a cause of obstetric fistula, genital cutting may be a marker of other factors that raise a woman’s risk of complications. Those factors include greater poverty, poor infrastructure, earlier marriage (young girls are at greater risk of obstructed labor) and little personal freedom for women.

The elimination of obstetric fistula, the researchers conclude, “will require the presence of a trained attendant during every labor and timely, universal access to competent emergency obstetric services worldwide.”

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Female Genital Mutilation in Georgia, USA

March 15, 2010
By Julia Lalla-Maharajh

In La Grange, Georgia, a 35-year old mother has been arrested and is being held on charges of female genital mutilation. It was simply a matter of time. A senior director of the campaign group Avaaz once asked me to make the case for them to take up the issue of FGM. I tried, but they didn't feel able to. I sent an email reply: "Sadly, this will become an issue when a baby girl or infant dies from the cut somewhere in London or New York. Then the outcry will start and we will all wonder why we didn't do more."

We can and we should be doing more. But people shy away. It's too taboo. Female genital mutilation is one of the least researched, least resourced, least talked about issues that the world faces today. It is a gross abuse of human rights, of child rights, of health rights. Over 140 million women bear the consequences. 3 million girls in Africa alone are cut a year. This is not just an African problem -- it happens in Indonesia, Malaysia, Yemen, UAE, Kurdistan and of course, as we now know, in the US, Australia, and across the EU. This is a global problem and it is our problem.

And yet, we stand by. There are some valiant efforts in the field, some organizations doing brilliant work, yet the scale of their interventions are tiny. What will it take to make the world sit up and take notice of how we are failing our girls, our women? How we are taking control from them, taking away their right to their bodies, to their life? We don't even know the statistics of how many girls or women have died as a result of FGM.

Marietou Diarra's two daughters died after being cut. She is here, interviewed with Tostan director, Molly Melching at the Women in the World summit. If you watch, you will learn some of the complexities behind FGM: There's more. Tadeletch Shanko, who lives in Ethiopia and now campaigns against FGM with UNICEF had herself performed FGM on girls for 15 years and underwent the procedure herself as a girl, with devastating consequences.

"I lost seven of my nine children in childbirth" she said "Because of the scarring, I was not elastic enough. All seven of them suffocated inside my womb."

Neo-natal deaths associated with FGM are not attributed to the practice. Women who die in childbirth are not counted. In spite of having a direct impact on four of the Millennium Development Goals, it's not shouted from the rooftops. FGM is invisible. I don't know why. I don't know why our agencies are failing us so wholly. Yes, it is a taboo issue. But so was HIV -- a global pandemic that is funded to the tune of $13 billion a year (and still that is nowhere near enough). Guess what -- FGM is cheap. Ending it is a matter of social behavioural change and talking with communities, empowering women. It doesn't need expensive drugs, complicated interventions and exhortations for safe sex and condoms. It needs recognition, it needs the women on the ground to be supported. It needs resources. And yet, no one knows how much. There is not a global, costed, timetabled plan to end FGM.

Is it going to take that one child in the West to die for us to take notice? And how do we sit by and ignore the cries of more than 3,000,000 others?

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Egypt’s rate of female mutilation drops to 66%

March  16, 2010
By Matt Bradley, The National

CAIRO. The practice of circumcising young girls is slowly declining in Egypt, according to human-rights campaigners.

A survey of Egyptian youth released last month by the Population Council, an international non-governmental organisation focused on public health, reported that among more than 15,000 young people interviewed across Egypt, only 66.2 per cent of girls 10 to 14 years old have experienced some form of genital mutilation, while 92.6 per cent of women between 25 and 29 have undergone the procedure.

The practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) remains common in Egypt, particularly for women in rural areas and those with low incomes. Another report by the ministry of state for family and population that will be published this year says 96 per cent of Egyptian women 15 to 49 who have been married were victims of FGM.

Nevertheless, the report concluded that the reduction in the incidence of FGM – however gradual – points to the success of a government-led campaign to combat the practice.

Campaigners said the incremental but significant reduction in FGM shows the effectiveness of confronting cultural taboos with highly public media campaigns. They say the FGM campaign, along with a 2008 decision by legislators to criminalise the practice, offers a lesson for policymakers on how to tackle other deeply entrenched but little-discussed cultural norms in a conservative society such as Egypt’s.

Vivian Fouad, a training co-ordinator for the FGM-Free Village Model Programme at the ministry of state for family and population, which has led the government’s fight against FGM since 2003 said: “For me, the most important factor was the revolution in media.

“In the beginning, when people were against FGM, they put this in newspapers and in books. And of course, the people who practise FGM are illiterate people. So media [TV and radio], I think it’s a very important tool for illiterate people and people who don’t follow newspapers and books.”
FGM is a chiefly cultural – as opposed to religious – practice common for girls in north-east and central Africa, as well as some parts of Asia. While FGM, also known as female circumcision, can include a variety of different procedures, the World Health Organisation defines it as any mutilation of the external female genitalia without a valid medical reason.


Women’s rights campaigners have opposed FGM for generations (he first anti-FGM campaign in Egypt started in 1928) because the procedure is dangerous and the girls who undergo it tend to be far too young to be able to consent. The procedure is supposed to reduce a woman’s sexual sensitivity and appetite, but it can lead to medical complications, particularly when performed in unsanitary conditions.

Recent incidents brought the fight against FGM to the public’s attention, Ms Fouad said. In 2007, two girls died after FGM procedures in Egyptian hospitals. Their deaths were highly publicised thanks to Egypt’s recently emboldened independent media, which has enjoyed fewer government restrictions within the past decade.

Independent newspapers carried the girls’ stories on their front pages, prompting television talk shows to discuss FGM in earnest. News of the deaths built on television adverts launched by Ms Fouad’s campaign years earlier that described FGM for what it was: a harmful cultural practice with no basis in medical science or religious ideology.

For the first time, Ms Fouad said, discussions of FGM were no longer about wealthy or educated women’s rights activists lecturing uneducated women in villages.

Ghada Barsoum, a programme manager for the Population Council’s poverty, gender and youth programme, said: “Talk shows are very popular in Egypt. They had prominent religious figures coming to talk about FGM. They had lawmakers. It was a well-organised campaign, and it this was not the first time that FGM made it into the media.

“It’s a taboo issue, you don’t want to talk about it even in your own house,” Ms Barsoum said.

“The breakthrough was bringing this taboo issue to the media, so that people can start to make a conscious decision about whether they are going to do it or not.”

Previous attempts to make FGM a topic of public discussion had failed, Ms Barsoum said, mainly because fears of offending local sensitivities led campaigners to skirt the issue. Television adverts that were aired before the FGM-Free Village Programme made obscure allusions to FGM without any direct references to the practice itself or female sexuality. The message was lost.

“There were a few mistakes that were avoided this time,” Ms Barsoum said. “Before then, they used to talk about it without talking about it.”

The direct media attention, blunt, informative and to the point, was buttressed by several new laws. A law passed in 2008 finally made FGM illegal in all its forms, whether it is performed by a doctor or traditional practitioner, but its full enforcement will require a sweeping change in the attitudes that have allowed the practice of FGM in Egypt for centuries.

A survey by Ms Fouad’s programme found that Egyptian girls are 10 per cent less likely to be circumcised than girls of their parents’ generation. While that certainly counts as progress, it also means that reducing or eliminating genital mutlation will take decades more work, she said.

“Female genital mutilation is a very, very old tradition. We have to be patient to see the results through the generations, not immediately,” Ms Fouad said. “This is my message to all activists against FGM: don’t give up. Don’t say I made many efforts and people don’t want us or people aren’t convinced.”

Monday, March 15, 2010

Female circumcision still rife in Egypt

March 12, 2010
By The Siasat Daily

Cairo, March 14: “It is a day I don’t want to remember. Whenever it comes to my mind, it sends shivers down my spine,” said Aya Abdel Aati, aged 17, recalling the painful experience of her circumcision at the age of 12. She says she bled for several days.

Despite efforts by the authorities, NGOs, and international agencies to eliminate Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C), the practice is still widespread in Egypt and deeply rooted in the minds of the people, according to a study funded by World Health Organization (WHO) entitled Investigating Women’s Sexuality in Relation to Female Genital Mutilation in Egypt.

“The main reason we found for the continuation of the practice is a drive to control a woman’s sexuality before marriage as a means of ensuring her virginity and therefore her marriageability by delivering an intact bride to her prospective husband,” the study said.

The study said many of those surveyed saw FGM/C as a “family affair” and a personal decision, in which the government should not interfere. “Therefore they are highly skeptical that regulations and laws recently introduced to stamp out the practice will actually succeed,” it said.

In 2008, Egypt passed a law criminalizing FGM/C with punishments ranging from three months to two years in prison, and a fine of 1,000-5,000 Egyptian pounds (US$183-912).

Experts believe that although female circumcision is widespread, considerable progress has been achieved. “The Demographic Health Survey of 2008 [published in 2009] showed that 72 percent of girls aged 15-30 were circumcised, compared to 96 percent of the same age group in the Demographic Health Survey of 1995,” said Azza Shalaby, gender adviser at Plan Egypt, a children’s development NGO.

However, the Demographic Health Survey of 2008 also indicated that 91 percent of women aged 15-49 were circumcised.

Elaine Bainard, head of UNICEF Egypt’s Child Protection Section, believes the prevalence of FGM/C is high but decreasing. “We believe that as more and more families publicly declare their position not to cut, and as their daughters are successfully married, the momentum will grow further.”

Religious leaders, both Muslims and Christians, are playing an important role fighting in FGM/C, preaching that the practice is not related to Islam or Christianity.

However, there are conflicting views among them, according to the WHO-funded study. “This was particularly true for Muslim leaders, who are bombarded with contradictory messages from official religious scholars and so-called 'tele-sheikhs', religious figures on TV and other media,” the study said.
Physical, psychological damage

Meanwhile, circumcised girls and women are suffering physically and psychologically.

“The process of FGM/C can be very traumatic for girls, as they are compelled or forced to comply with the procedure.

They must endure the physical pain but also the emotional aftermath of being subjected to the cutting by those she loves,” Bainard said.

In extreme cases, where the cut has been extensive, girls could face increased risks during childbirth, and incontinence, she added.

“Some women have urinary tract problems and others severe bleeding during delivery,” said Plan Egypt’s Shalaby. “But circumcised women worry less about health complications than the psychological effect and shock. They say they became more secluded and fearful.”

“Giving them [people] solid information about the benefits of abandoning FGM/C within the context of social pressure to abandon it, is achieving success, but it takes time,” Bainard said.

Marietou Diarra Talks About Losing Daughter to Female Genital Cutting

March 13, 2010
By Women in the World

Marietou Diarra, a Senegalese woman, closed the panel with a powerful story of what her society calls "the tradition." She spoke in her native language of Wolof, translated by Melching. After a string of tragedies, Diarra's family and in-laws banded together to reject the procedure. Her entire village followed suit. She eventually helped to convince over 40 neighboring villages—through education and community deliberation—to abandon genital cutting.

Friday, March 12, 2010

Don't Cut These Girls

March 11, 2010
By Eliza Griswold - The Daily Beast

Molly Melching, a speaker at The Daily Beast's Women in the World summit, changed the fate of millions of Africans by helping end female genital circumcision in Senegal. She tells Eliza Griswold how she did it.
 
Molly Melching first learned about female genital cutting more than 30 years ago from a doctor she met on a train in Senegal. She was traveling around the country as a graduate student in African studies and he was going to attend his daughter's circumcision. The doctor told Melching, now 61, that he didn't like the procedure but there was nothing he could do about it. Every Senegalese woman was circumcised. The best he could do, as a doctor, was to attend the ceremony to make sure that his daughter didn't hemorrhage.

That was just the beginning of Melching's career, which would effectively change the fate of as many as 3 million African women and girls a year. Melching is the founder of a nonprofit women's organization called Tostan, which means "breakthrough" in the West African language of Wolof. Through teaching health and human rights, and by encouraging Africans to disseminate information themselves, Tostan has managed to bring about the biggest "breakthrough" imaginable.

Today, for the first time in history, 4,229 communities out of 5,000 in Senegal have abandoned female genital cutting. (That's in addition to 298 in the neighboring country of Guinea and 20 in Burkina Faso.) And this year, Senegal declared a nationwide end to the practice. By 2015, the government announced just last month, female genital cutting, which affects 2 million women in Senegal alone, will come to an end.
"The movement is spreading across Africa," says Melching.

Senegal is the first country in the world to adopt such a program, and it is a direct result of Melching's work on women's empowerment, which she began in the 1970s alongside local women. At first she didn't want to get involved in such a sensitive cultural issue.

"As a white American woman, I didn't think it was my place," she says. But the other members of Tostan disagreed. "This isn't about you; it's about us. We are Tostan," they told her.

So Tostan began training women about human rights, and about health. Until Melching's organization started its three-year training program, no one knew the basics of germ theory—or its link to HIV. Or how tetanus worked, or why girls often sickened after the procedure of genital-cutting, or why many died two weeks later.
After learning these empowering lessons, in July 1997 the first community chose to publicly declare an end to the practice. It wasn't easy for them. Soon after, a local Muslim leader named Demba Diawara came to tell Melching that Tostan's program was leading to trouble.

"This isn't the way to end female genital cutting," he said. "Change has to come from within." So Melching asked the Islamic leader how he would approach the problem. "I would put on my shoes and walk to all the surrounding communities," he said. Since women from one village marry the men of another, it's crucial that both communities accept the end of the practice, so that women don't find themselves isolated, ostracized, and unable to find suitable husbands, he explained. Ending female genital cutting was never going to happen until all the villages decided to abandon the practice together.

"You have to bring everybody in the community," Melching says. "Everybody has to buy into it." The secret of Tostan's success is that it does just that: brings people together, gives them information that they then spread themselves, and builds on the basic truth that African communities are interconnected.

Curiously enough, the most vociferous opposition Tostan has faced comes from the girls themselves. At first when they learned that the practice of cutting was ending, they were angry about it and afraid that they would not be respected or seen as desirable wives. "Why can't we have the same celebration our sisters have?" they asked. What did Melching learn from their objections? Teenagers have to go through the program as much as elders and religious leaders do.

Once under way, the message of women's health and human rights begin to spread from community to community on its own until an entire nation leaves the practice behind. As Melching puts it, "You get to a tipping point where the social norms change."

Eliza Griswold is a New America fellow and a recipient of the 2010 Rome Prize. Her book, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Islam and Christianity, will by published by FSG this spring.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Women's Day an Insult: Somali supermodel

March 9, 2010
By Somalia24

Millions of women around the world are feted on International Women’s Day but for Waris Dirie, the Somali nomad turned supermodel, the idea is absurd.”Every day, women move mountains. 
 
It is an insult to have an international women’s day,” Dirie told Reuters before the premiere of a film based on her life story, coming out in France on Wednesday.

The film, Desert Flower, tells the story of how Dirie used her fame as a model to get the world to care about and fight against female circumcision.

Dirie underwent genital mutilation at the age of three together with her two sisters, who did not survive.
Dirie, a special ambassador to the United Nation for the elimination of female genital mutilation, said governments in Africa cared little about the issue.

“Governments do not care about that type of thing,” she said. “They do absolutely nothing to help.”
That is why, she said, help needed to come from non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

On its website, the Waris Dirie Foundation, estimates that at least 150 million women and girls are affected by the cruel practice which continues to be performed in Africa and elsewhere around the world.

Thousands of mothers continue to give up their little girls for mutilation even if they live in Europe or America as it represents a way for them to cling to their traditional beliefs.

The film says 6000 women every day lose their genitals and are sown up. The practice is based on a belief that woman who are not circumcised are impure.

Women remain sown up until their marriage. They suffer lasting infections and psychological disorders.
The film is based on Dirie’s books.

Dirie was born in the Somali desert and fled her family after she was given in marriage to an old man.
She became a supermodel after a photographer noticed her while she was cleaning in a fast-food restaurant in London.

The Foundation in Support of the Dignity and Rights of Women, part of the French retail and luxury group PPR, supported the screening of the film and organized fund-raising to support NGOs that fight female genital mutilation.

Members of the Foundation include actress Salma Hayek, wife of PPR Chief Executive Francois-Henri Pinault, and designers Stella McCartney and Frida Giannini.

Funds from the film screening went to French NGO Equilibres et Populations which works against female circumcision in Mali.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Reports focus on female genital mutilation in Iraqi Kurdistan

March 9, 2010
By Talha Burki - The Lancet


Campaigns against female genital mutilation have mainly targeted African nations, where most mutilations occur. Now two reports hope to highlight the issue further afield. Talha Burki reports.
 
Female genital mutilation (FGM) is widespread in Africa but also occurs in Oman, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia; parts of Indonesia and Malaysia; and in specific immigrant communities in North America and Europe. Two new reports—one published by German relief organisation WADI on Feb 6, the other to be issued by Human Rights Watch (HRW) later this year—centre on an arena hitherto neglected by researchers and activists: Iraqi Kurdistan.
 
Kurdish northern Iraq is an autonomous region consisting of the three governorates of Dohuk, Arbil, and Suleymaniya, with a population of about 5·5 million, and several provinces in neighbouring governorates, one of which, Kirkuk, awaits the result of a referendum to determine whether it will become part of Kurdistan.
“Most girls in northern Iraq are likely to have undergone FGM”, concludes the WADI report, which surveyed more than 1400 women across the region. The average rate of FGM was 72·7%, but in some areas was virtually 100%.
 
HRW stated that type 1 mutilation—clitorodectomy—predominated, even though some older women reported undergoing the amputation of their clitoris and inner labia (type 2 mutilation). After the event, infections are common. Sepsis can take hold. Moreover, “recent studies show that all types of FGM carry greater risks for pregnant women during childbirth”, says HRW. “There are also risks for the fetus which may result in stillbirth.”
 
More than 130 million women worldwide have undergone FGM, including 92 million girls older than 10 years in Africa. Every year an estimated 3 million girls are at risk of the procedure.
 
The procedure itself is highly traumatic. Girls might be held down by family members and neighbours while being cut. They experience great pain, and heavy bleeding. Deaths have been reported, although data are hard to come by. Undocumented but highly plausible is a sizeable incidence of post-traumatic stress syndrome and other mental disorders among those who have been mutilated.
 
Thomas von der Osten-Sacken of WADI notes that FGM is widespread in both rural and urban parts of Iraqi Kurdistan. “We found that it is very closely linked to the level of education both of the girls and the parents”, he added. “The more educated people are, the easier it is to convince them to stop this practice”.
“Enacting a law against FGM is an important practical, strategic, and symbolic step”, HRW's Liesl Gerntholtz tells The Lancet. “Legislation alone is not enough”, she stressed, “but it indicates a political will to address this issue”. Unlike other governments in the Middle East and Africa, the Kurdish Regional Government has instituted laws banning “honour killings”. In late 2008, it established the Directorates to Combat Violence Against Women. “We are working with advocacy groups to persuade people that FGM is part of a spectrum of violence against women”, says Gernholtz.
 
Osten-Sacken points out that there is support for a bill banning FGM among Kurdish Parliamentarians. He has received assurances that such a motion will be brought to Parliament this year. “This is quite a big issue now”, he explained. The past 5 years in Iraqi Kurdistan have seen the subject move from a taboo to hotly debated topic. “There is a lot of public pressure through newspapers and media channels”, says Osten-Sacken. “Among the young, there is very strong support for abolishing FGM.”
 
A key constituency is clerics. FGM is not even mentioned in the Koran. Proponents cite a couple of passages from the Hadith (sayings of the Prophet) as providing implicit support. This is a moot point. The authenticity of one Hadith—which recommends but does not require FGM—has been questioned, whereas the other does not really endorse the practice at all. Certainly, this is a debate that the anti-FGM movement hopes to win.
Besides, Osten-Sacken points out that culture and religion are inextricably entwined, and the zeitgeist in Kurdistan is shifting. He stresses the importance of mass public-awareness campaigns. There is widespread access to television in Kurdistan, even in poor areas. “I'd say that if one is taking this subject very seriously, we can eliminate FGM in Iraqi Kurdistan in 5 to 7 years”, Osten-Sacken tells The Lancet.

EGYPT: FGM/C still widespread, says WHO-funded study

March 8, 2010
By IRIN

CAIRO, 8 March 2010 (IRIN) - “It is a day I don’t want to remember. Whenever it comes to my mind, it sends shivers down my spine,” said Aya Abdel Aati, aged 17, recalling the painful experience of her circumcision at the age of 12. She says she bled for several days.

Despite efforts by the authorities, NGOs, and international agencies to eliminate Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C), the practice is still widespread in Egypt and deeply rooted in the minds of the people, according to a study funded by World Health Organization (WHO) entitled Investigating Women’s Sexuality in Relation to Female Genital Mutilation in Egypt.

“The main reason we found for the continuation of the practice is a drive to control a woman’s sexuality before marriage as a means of ensuring her virginity and therefore her marriageability by delivering an intact bride to her prospective husband,” the study said.

The study said many of those surveyed saw FGM/C as a “family affair” and a personal decision, in which the government should not interfere. “Therefore they are highly skeptical that regulations and laws recently introduced to stamp out the practice will actually succeed,” it said.

In 2008, Egypt passed a law criminalizing FGM/C with punishments ranging from three months to two years in prison, and a fine of 1,000-5,000 Egyptian pounds (US$183-912).

Experts believe that although female circumcision is widespread, considerable progress has been achieved. “The Demographic Health Survey of 2008 [published in 2009] showed that 72 percent of girls aged 15-30 were circumcised, compared to 96 percent of the same age group in the Demographic Health Survey of 1995,” said Azza Shalaby, gender adviser at Plan Egypt, a children’s development NGO. 

However, the Demographic Health Survey of 2008 also indicated that 91 percent of women aged 15-49 were circumcised.

Elaine Bainard, head of UNICEF Egypt’s Child Protection Section, believes the prevalence of FGM/C is high but decreasing. “We believe that as more and more families publicly declare their position not to cut, and as their daughters are successfully married, the momentum will grow further.”

Religious leaders, both Muslims and Christians, are playing an important role fighting in FGM/C, preaching that the practice is not related to Islam or Christianity.

However, there are conflicting views among them, according to the WHO-funded study. “This was particularly true for Muslim leaders, who are bombarded with contradictory messages from official religious scholars and so-called 'tele-sheikhs', religious figures on TV and other media,” the study said.

Physical, psychological damage

Meanwhile, circumcised girls and women are suffering physically and psychologically.

“The process of FGM/C can be very traumatic for girls, as they are compelled or forced to comply with the procedure. They must endure the physical pain but also the emotional aftermath of being subjected to the cutting by those she loves,” Bainard said.
 
In extreme cases, where the cut has been extensive, girls could face increased risks during childbirth, and incontinence, she added.

“Some women have urinary tract problems and others severe bleeding during delivery,” said Plan Egypt’s Shalaby. “But circumcised women worry less about health complications than the psychological effect and shock. They say they became more secluded and fearful.”

“Giving them [people] solid information about the benefits of abandoning FGM/C within the context of social pressure to abandon it, is achieving success, but it takes time,” Bainard said.

Unicef gets tougher against female mutilation

March 8, 2010
By SwissInfo

The Swiss section of the United Nations Children’s Fund has handed in almost 20,000 names calling for stronger measures against female genital mutilation.

The petitioners who filled in an online electronic card are calling on parliament to anchor criminal law provisions in the Swiss penal code against all forms of the practice.

Unicef Switzerland’s campaign was launched on February 6, the International Day of Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation, an annual United Nations awareness event.

The printed cards were handed in to Anita Thanei, president of the legal commission of the Swiss House of Representatives on Monday – International Women’s Day.

Unicef Switzerland, which has led a campaign opposing the practice for years, says such mutilation is carried out every ten seconds on a girl somewhere, with three million affected every year.

It adds that female genital mutilation is a gross infringement of the right of a child to physical integrity and the right to grow up healthily and in safety.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Female Genital Mutilation: "Such Hadits are not confirmed to be authentic"

March 3, 2010
By by Thomas v. der Osten-Sacken

Dr. Irfan Al-Alawi, member of The Center Islamic Pluralism, wrote an excellent article about the relation between FGM and Islam.

He is also quoting the study about FGM in Kurdistan drawing this conclusion:

A situation in which half of Kurdish women are still subjected to this atrocity remains disgraceful for all Muslims. Islam today faces many challenges as believers seek to reinforce universal values of civility between faiths, accountability, and popular sovereignty within the global Islamic community. But these necessary efforts cannot be fulfilled without renewed guarantees for the equality of women and protection of their rights. For moderate Muslims, a major goal must be the abolition of FGM, with the naming and shaming of clerics and other authorities who justify it.

The Grandmother Project's New Approach to Ending Female Genital Mutilation

February 2010
By Nadwa Mossaad, research associate at Population Reference Bureau


(February 2010) Female genital mutilation (FGM), also known as female genital cutting or female circumcision, is the cutting, altering, or injuring of any or all parts of the female genitalia for nonmedical purposes.1 FGM's often catastrophic health effects and whom it affects are well known and well documented, but why FGM continues and how best to end this harmful practice are a matter of ongoing research and debate.

According to several studies, FGM continues because of cultural beliefs and tradition. The low prospect of marriage for uncut girls is often cited as the reason for the continuation of the practice. Interviews by Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) of women who have been cut reveal that "a husband will prefer his wife to be circumcised" and "circumcision prevents adultery." Men who were interviewed listed the same reasons in higher proportions.2
 
Despite some successes in ending FGM—most notably in Egypt—the rate of abandonment has been slow.3 One approach used to combat the harmful practice has been direct message-based advocacy, but this approach is often judgmental and accusatory and seems to have very little effect on curbing the practice in the long term. Messaging that concentrates on FGM's medical and health risks can lead to an increase in alternative cutting carried out by professional health workers.4

The old approach also targets only those affected—particularly young women—by assuming that the practice is based on individual rather than collective decisions. This approach often excludes other members of the community, especially older women who are sometimes labeled as obstacles to positive change and even the driving force behind the tradition.

One new approach to the abandonment of FGM is the Grandmother Project (GMP). The GMP is a nongovernmental organization that promotes the health and development of poor communities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The GMP explicitly involves grandmothers as active assets in their communities to promote maternal and child nutrition, early childhood development, and education, and to eradicate female genital mutilation and HIV/AIDS.5 (The Grandmother Project is being implemented by World Vision, with technical assistance from GMP. The project is funded by World Vision Canada, GMP, and the U.S. Agency for International Development.)

Started in 1997 in Laos, and later in central Senegal, Mali, Uzbekistan, Albania, and southern Senegal, GMP's main goal was to overcome the negative biases against grandmothers and instead involve these elderly women in community efforts to improve the health and well-being of women and children. In a pilot study documenting Senegalese grandmothers' involvement in promoting improved maternal health and child nutrition practices, the findings were encouraging.6 The first stage of the study used an innovative method to inform grandmothers on the subject of nutrition practices through storytelling and songs. Data on women of reproductive age were collected in Senegalese villages before and after the education of grandmothers. In the intervention villages, women who had been pregnant recently reported, on average, a 92 percent improvement in pregnancy and nutrition practices compared with a 38 percent improvement in the control group where grandmothers were not involved. In addition to the health benefits to new mothers and their infants, the study documented increased self-esteem among the grandmothers.

Based on this pilot study, GMP was created in the context of FGM. The GMP aims to bring about positive changes by including grandmothers and elderly women, a once-marginalized group. The project encourages learning and communal decisionmaking through open discussions about problems facing the community. GMP hopes this will lead community members to identify their problems and reach consensus on possible solutions that best suit their needs, leading to long-term effective changes in harmful practices.

According to Judi Aubel, GMP founder and executive director, "Decreasing FGM is a major goal. But the strategy that [GMP] is using does not deal with FGM in a linear and reductionist way as many programs do." She adds that the main objective is to work on the holistic upbringing of girls' intellectual, spiritual, physical, moral, and psychological well-being as an alternative right of passage to FGM and an effort to strengthen positive cultural traditions and discard harmful ones.

Older women and grandmothers play a very important role in most traditional communities, holding matriarchal power and consulted on family affairs and conflict resolution. FGM and other harmful practices against girls are entrenched in cultural values, and grandmothers and elders are known to be the "guardians" of such traditions.

In October 2009, 13 months into the project, a mid-term review in the Velingara area in southern Senegal found several changes.7 Most notable were a greater appreciation for grandmothers' roles in disseminating positive cultural values and a positive change in communities' attitudes toward ending FGM as well as other harmful cultural practices, such as early marriage for girls and violence against women.
As for long-term results, project staff hope that GMP's intervention will increase communities' acknowledgment of the intellectual, psychological, and moral upbringing of girls and their importance to the well-being of the communities. Grandmothers can help lead a community to a collective decision to stop FGM.

The Senegal project is implemented by World Vision with technical assistance from GMP. The project is funded by World Vision Canada, GMP, and USAID.

References
  1. The terminology for this harmful traditional practice varies greatly and many organizations use the combined female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C). Since the Grandmother Project prefers FGM, that is the term used in this article.
  2. IFC Macro, 2008 Egypt Demographic and Health Survey (Calverton, MD: IFC Macro, 2009).
  3. Charlotte Feldman-Jacobs and Donna Clifton, Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: Data and Trends Update 2010 (Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau, 2010), accessed at www.prb.org/pdf10/fgm-wallchart2010.pdf, on Jan. 26, 2010.
  4. World Health Organization, "Female Genital Mutilation and Other Harmful Practices," accessed at www.who.int/reproductivehealth/topics/fgm/fgm_trends/en/index.html, on Jan. 26, 2010.
  5. The Grandmother Project, www.grandmotherproject.org.
  6. Judi Aubel, Ibrahima Toure, and Mamadou Diagne, "Senegalese Grandmothers Promote Improved Maternal and Child Nutrition Practices: The Guardians of Tradition Are not Averse to Change," Social Science and Medicine 59, no. 5 (2004): 945-59.
  7. Judi Aubel, Dialogue to Promote Change From Within: A Grandmother-Inclusive and Intergenerational Approach to Promote Girls' Health and Well-Being and to Eliminate FGM, unpublished report (February 2010).

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Think Again: The Making-Of

March 3, 2010
By FORWARD

"Think Again" is a thought-provoking film that follows a 12-year-old's struggle between family honour and the facts about FGM. On discovering that her mom wants to take her back home to be 'cut' she explores the implications FGM has on her life and the misconceptions that explain why the practice persists in the 21st century.

"Think Again" depicts the cultural context in which FGM is practiced and the inter-generational conflict of holding down tradition in a new and foreign environment. The physical and psychological impact of FGM is ongoing, life-long and remains taboo to discuss even between mother and daughter. "Think Again" addresses a complex issue with sensitivity and creativity, breaking the silence and inspiring change.

The Young People Speak Out project is led by FORWARD to engage young people from FGM-practicing communities to educate and empower their peers and their community to abandon the practice of FGM. The storyline for the film is based on real-life experiences of women and young people in the UK who have undergone FGM.

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FORWARD is an African diaspora-led campaign and support charity, established in 1985. FORWARD works to advance and safeguard the sexual and reproductive health and rights of African women and girls, particularly those affected by female genital mutilation (FGM).