Interesting piece on female genital mutilation

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Mutilation by tradition
http://theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/27/1082831549968.html?from=storyrhs

April 28, 2004

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Clitoridectomy has been banned in Kenya, but the law is rarely enforced. Simalo, 15, who was circumcised, was married to an older man who raped her.

Kim Longinotto's film on clitoridectomy spares none of the grisly details, writes Stephanie Bunbury.

In the middle of Kim Longinotto's staggering documentary about female circumcision, The Day I Will Never Forget, I simply had to leave the video running, go to the kitchen and stare at the kettle for a while.

Watching a little girl held down while an old woman mutilates her with a razor is more than the human heart can bear.

Clitoridectomy has been banned in Kenya, but the law is rarely enforced. Among Kenya's Somali, 98 per cent of girls between the ages of four and 12 are cut and stitched, but the practice is also prevalent among other ethnic groups, such as the Masai.

Altogether, 132 million women throughout the world are estimated to have had their genitals mutilated. Quite a few die in the process.

Longinotto, 52, has become something of a specialist in documentaries on the women of ignored and hidden cultures: The Day I Will Never Forget came out of making a film on women in Egypt.

She has won a string of awards and deservedly so. Her work is remarkable for the immediate identification we feel with subjects who are very different from us.

The Day I Will Never Forget is deliberately different from any of the other films on this subject. There are no euphemisms or fuzzy dance sequences to make it a little more palatable, no experts or Western interpreters.

Instead, we hear women talk. Some are against clitoridectomy, while many others support it, even carry it out. All speak frankly: we hear every grisly detail. Yet, somehow, this makes everyone seem more human; these women are simply attempting to live life as they find it.

Some of the diehards may appal us with their talk of the "dirty thing hanging down", but we are never given room to feel superior.

The film's linchpin is a nurse, Fardhosa Ali Mohamed, whom Longinotto met by chance after she had begun shooting. Fardhosa has spent most of her working life trying to mitigate the terrible effects of clitoridectomy on girls having sex for the first time and women attempting to give birth through a web of scar tissue.

We see her with a young bride, Amina, trying to "re-open" her so that sex will be possible, but the girl thrashes with fear whenever she gets near her traumatised vulva. She suggests that the operation be completed under general anaesthetic, but her new husband won't allow it. He would become a laughing stock, he tells the nurse. "I'd rather do it myself."

Fardhosa, incredibly, stays calm and smiles at him. If he changes his mind, she says, the door is always open.

"I think I learned a lot from her," says Longinotto. "She is a kind of Nelson Mandela character, a very committed and angry woman, but able to be very gentle and keep her sense of humour and compromise to do the best thing possible in every situation so that she has gradually won the trust of the community."

Fardhosa organised the filmmaker's access to the circumcision we see, begging her not to intervene no matter how dreadful it was. By being there, she explained, they ensured that the cut chosen was the least extreme that would be acceptable and that an anaesthetic would be used. If they tried to stop it, the girls would certainly undergo something far worse later on.

"Emotionally, it felt like a terrible betrayal," Longinotto says. "I felt like a monster. But if I had stopped it, I would have had to take them away and they were not ready to do that. Girls who refuse to have it done are effectively deciding to be outcasts and face quite a lonely life, outside their families and outside their communities."

Sure enough, Longinotto says, when they visited the girls the next day they were already saying how glad they were that they were now, as they saw it, complete women.

Men who support circumcision say it is essential to take the vestiges of manhood out of women. And the girls had certainly been rendered more docile, more ready to conform. After so much agony, there was no fight left in them.

But some girls, incredibly, do fight back. The Day I Will Never Forget is not simply about victims; by the end, we feel less pity than astonishment. Dozens of girls have run away to the few existing shelters and, in a remarkable class action, 16 of them took their parents to court to get injunctions against them.

The individual courage this demands is brought home when Longinotto goes with a 15-year-old girl called Simalo back to her village. Simalo was circumcised then married to an older man who raped her. She ran away to a shelter and has come back to the village for the first time. Her friends embrace her, but she will not speak to her mother.

For many girls, Longinotto says, it is the sense of betrayal by the women who have loved and protected them that is most devastating. Men may expect their brides to be circumcised - their guarantee that they will be marrying a virgin - but circumcision is women's business.

Professional female circumcisers do the cutting, while mothers and aunts hold the girls down and laugh at them if they scream. Stoicism is important. They have to learn that a woman's life is full of pain.

Some, however, are jolted by that knowledge in ways their mothers could not have expected.

The Day I Will Never Forget takes its name from a poem written in English by Fouzia, aged eight. Fouzia listened to a discussion about circumcision being recorded for the film, a discussion that included her own mother.

Afterwards, she approached Longinotto and urged her to come home with them. Once there, with the camera rolling, she recited her poem. It is heartbreaking. Then, still on camera, she tells her mother she will forgive her what she has done only if she promises to spare her sister.

Longinotto says hope lies in these astonishing shows of determination. Simalo was so traumatised that, in the months she spent at a girls' school, she hardly spoke. She knew she was blighted, that she would never be a normal wife.

School, however, was her hope. In a sense, this was her real revolt against tradition. Other girls were quite blunt about it. "I don't want to have 15 children," said outspoken Gladys. "I want a bright future, not just a marriage."

How moving that was, Longinotto says. It suggests another future for everyone. "The men are right about circumcision. Once the girls start questioning this one thing, they start questioning everything."

I hate the thought of opening this one up for debate again - and I wanted to post this on an old thread, but could not find it.

Anyway, this film might be worth looking out for - as it seems it deals with the subject in a most balanced and compassionate manner.

I just wanted to share it.

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I saw a documentary a few years ago which mirrors this almost exactly - I will never forget the screams of one young girl as her aunts and grandmother held her down and 'operated' exactly as described in this article. It was the most horrific thing i have ever seen.

Before that i hadn't heard of the practice.

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This entire subject makes me sick.

I hope everyone responsible for girls being so hurt burns in the deepest darkest pit in Hell.

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I'm a cultural relativist, but that does not apply to this "tradition". The practice of clitoredectomy is not bad just because WE don't like it. If all women in Kenya considered it a "good" thing. I would try not to impose my cultural values on that behavior. But not all women do. It's a male driven tradition, and little girls are too young to make an informed judgement. Frankly, I feel almost the same, but with much less intensity--can't tell you why--about the circumcision of male babies in our culture. I suspect it might reinforce the repression, described by Freud, of thoughts of mother incest--and the accompanying fear of being castrated (by father) for such a "primal sin."

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Yeah - I think "purist" cultural relativism sucks. But then I would. I live in a pretty dominant culture.

Thing is, I sort of want to understand this better - I said my piece about cultural relativities in the other thread which I cannot find. Now I would just like to find some respectful way in which to assist in change - seems there is movement for change in the affected countries - clearly it is best to foster these gently and respectfully and through the people working there already.

Seems to me if we begin to understand we can begin to assist - dunno how - with change - like mebbe helping fund shelters - working on the governments of the countries where it happens?

I wonder if the reluctance of the governments is a bit like governments here re domestic violence and such?

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I think it is easy, as you know of course, to condemn other culture's practices as barbaric - they hafta make sense where they are - and be done from love. Like foot binding.

Be great if care 2 would take this sort of funding on - I could be clicking for the clitoris!

Er - sorry - I need black humour badly when I let myself think about all the horror in the world...

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Yeah - I have been talking to lots of men re circumcision since it came up with such passion here over the last little while.

Od course, the female version being discussed here is analogous to having your penis cut off, and enclosed within a pocket of flesh, so the wee just dribbles out, infecting the area the while, NOT removal of the foreskin! Seems to be very much about control and fear of female sexuality.

I cannot find any passion about the matter in any men I know, cut or uncut - but I know of nobody who has had sons circumcised.

I hguess ritual cutting of men's equipment is common in many cultures, though? 'Tis dashed odd, how much we like to cut and mutilate ourselves and our hapless progeny!

Aboriginal male initiation involve/d/s mutilation of male penis, for instance.

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Yes the aborigines used to practice SUBincision. That really causes the dribbles. They are trying to emulate, I'm told, the structure of the kangaroo penis, because the latter are so verile. Another theory, Freudian most likely, is that of vagina envy. The split?
Well, from your revelation of how clitorectomies are, one should not refer to them as female circumcision. That would be a gross euphemism.

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New Ritual Replaces Female Genital Mutilation
Run Date: 04/08/03
By Fredrick Nzwili
WeNews correspondent
Female genital mutilation rites are beginning to be replaced by an alternative rite of passage in Kenya known as "Cutting Through Words." The new ritual includes a week of seclusion and lessons on adult life.

NAIROBI, Kenya (WOMENSENEWS)--Anti-female genital mutilation crusader Julie Maranya tells the story of her circumcision with much resentment. Recollecting bits, vividly, of the day village women elders walked her to the circumciser's homestead and across a river to the maize plantations where they mutilated her, she cannot help getting angry.

That was 43 years ago when she was 7, and the vulgar circumcision song, the chants and ululations have refused to leave Maranya's mind.

"Regardless of my profuse bleeding, the women sang and ululated that I had become a wife of young-men, not boys anymore," said Maranya, now the director of the Julkei International Women and Youth Affairs, a women rights organization in Kenya. "They are still mutilating and cutting young girls, while they sing the same old songs they sang to me."

Even though million of women around the world are as angry as Maranya, female genital mutilation rites are still being performed in many parts of the world. About half of the rural districts of Kenya practice the rite; about 38 percent of Kenyan women have been circumcised. More than 100 million women are believed to be subject to varying forms of female genital mutilation across Africa and parts of western and southern Asia. In rural Kenya, the circumcision rites are usually carried out by traditional experts using crude knives and no anesthetic. The ceremony is performed in the early morning, when the weather is thought to be cold enough to numb the young girl's body. They charge a fee that may be as much as $6 per cut.

But the prospects of ending the rite in Kenya are higher as some communities adopt an alternative rite of passage in which they "circumcise" their girls through words. Known as "Ntanira na Mugambo" in the local language of the Ameru, a community on the eastern slopes of Mount Kenya, "Cutting Through Words" is a joint effort of rural families and the Kenyan national women's group, Maendeleo ya Wanawake Organization.

New Rite Includes Week in Seclusion
The rite brings willing young girls together for a week in seclusion where they get traditional lessons about their future roles as women, parents and adults in the community. They are also taught about their personal health, reproduction, hygiene, communications skills, self-esteem and dealing with peer pressure. It is just like the traditional ritual, except that there is no cutting of their genitals.

Secluded, the girls remain indoors and can only be visited by previous initiates, female relatives or parents. A woman who is either an aunt or a friend is assigned the role of a supporter or "godmother." She ensures that the girl gets and understands family life education. The week's ceremony ends with a "graduation" at a chosen day of "coming of age," where religious, political and government leaders are invited to make speeches.

"The community joins the rituals. They dance, sing and feast with the initiates. The girls receive gifts from the project, parents and friends," said Ann Nzomo, an assistant program manager at the Maendeleo ya Wanawake Organization. "Through the songs, dances and drama, the girls announce they have left female genital mutilation."

At such a ceremony, the girls appeal to their elders to cease circumcising them, but let them complete their education, and then they will decide whether to be circumcised. They protest through the market centers, where they dance and sing traditional songs that urge their mothers not give them out for marriage.

"I see joy in the young girls' faces. It is an exciting day for me and I am delighted to see young women speaking for themselves," said Nzomo. "But we sometimes lose one or two to the traditional circumcisers," she warned.

The first "Cutting Through Words" ceremony occurred in 1996, when 30 families from Gatunga village in Tharaka, about 200 miles east of Nairobi, initiated their daughters through words. Since then, the alternative rite has been performed in three other communities of the Maasai and Kalenjins of the Rift Valley Province and the Abagusii of Western Kenya.

Nzomo says that a single-week ceremony costs about $4,000 dollars. The funds are spent in secluding the girls, feeding them and purchasing gifts for the girls.

"We have had no problem so far and we hope to replicate it in others areas," she said.

"It is feasible and sustainable. We chose those months that traditional rites are likely to occur to stage the alternative rite," adds Eva Mukhwana, a communication officer at the National Focal Point on Female Genital Mutilation, a coalition of organizations fighting to end the rite.

Rite May Face Serious Opposition
Priscilla Nangurai, headmistress of African Inland Church Primary Boarding School in Kajiado, Kenya, attended a rite of passage ceremony in Narok, one of the areas with highest number of cases of female genital mutilation. She expressed fears that the rite may face serious opposition in some areas.

"Local women I have talked to cannot see how a tradition they have carried out for so many years can be replaced by songs and dances," she said. "They are keen to understand what kinds of gifts are given to the girls on this. They want to know what kind of T-shirts are worn during the pass out (graduation) ceremony. They laughed it off when they hear that some get only a T-shirt," she added.

Priscilla Nangurai has been rescuing young girls from circumcision and early marriage among the Maasai, a herder community, and housing them at the Kajiado African Inland Church rescue center, where they are able to complete their education. The Kajiado rescue center is one of Forum for African Women Educationalists Centres of Excellence. The other three are in Senegal, Tanzania and Rwanda.

Nangurai explained that after aggressive campaigns started by women's lobbying groups, the Maasai parents responded by lowering the age of circumcision to as young as 4 years to 13 years, instead of 6 years to 18 years--a new development that could challenge the alternative rite.

"We need to tread carefully since female genital mutilation is deeply rooted into the culture. We can end it through education, advocacy and religion," added Nangurai.

Fredrick Nzwili is a freelance journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For more information:
Rising Daughters Aware--FGM Information Index Page
"New Rite Is Alternative To Female Circumcision":
http://www.fgm.org/chelala.html

The United Nations Population Fund--November 1999, Dispatches
"East African Groups, Governments Plan to End FGM by 2015":
http://www.unfpa.org/modules/dispatch/issues99/nov99/eafrican.htm

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Nigeria
Gender - Women
Nigeria adopts anti-Female Genital Mutilation day
afrol News, 10 February - The Nigerian government has decided to observe the International Day for Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). The fight against the harmful practice is to be marked on 6 February each year, the Nigerian government announced yesterday. Around 50 percent of Nigeria's women are victim to the practice of FGM.

As from next year, 6 February is to be "observed as Nigeria's Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) Elimination Day," the Nigerian federal government announced yesterday. The date earlier had been declared by the World Health Assembly and approved by the Federal Executive Council.

Female Genital Mutilation - sometimes misleadingly called Female Circumcision - is one of the traditional practices that are deeply entrenched in many cultures and traditions worldwide. This practice has over the years received global attention and condemnation because of its many serious physical and mental consequences, which have social, economic and political implications.

Nigeria is one of the 27 countries in Africa where FGM is still practiced. In Nigeria, the harmful practice has a prevalence rate of between 40 and 50 percent, according to earlier Nigerian estimates. UN estimates however puts the FGM rate at approximately 60 percent among the nation's female population, with local rates reaching 90 percent.

Yesterday, the Nigerian Ministry of Women Affairs published data putting the national FGM prevalence at 41 percent and regional variations ranging from 0.60 percent to 98.60 percent. "This high rate of prevalence poses a threat to government efforts to provide adequate health care, and fight against HIV/AIDS, as one of the consequences of FGM is the transmission of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases," the Ministry said.

While the Nigerian federal government so far has publicly condemned FGM as a harmful practice, it has not taken any legal action against FGM in the past. Nigeria, like many other countries of the world, however has taken several steps aimed at eliminating all forms of practices that infringe on the dignity of women and girls, including the support of campaigns against FGM.

- To this end, Nigeria has ratified several UN Conventions and Declarations that make provision for the promotion and protection of the health of women and girls, the Nigerian Ministries of Health and of Women Affairs said in a joint statement yesterday.

By marking the International Day for Zero Tolerance to FGM, the Ministries expect to "bring together all stakeholders to join hands to achieve zero tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation in the country." This, said Minister of Information, Chief Chukwuemeka Chikelu, was to "give the necessary support that fighting against FGM deserves."

By staff writer

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Being an American woman, I find this sort of thing mutually offensive. I do have a question to ask. Why don't these women fight for rights, as American women traditionally did?

American women were not born to any rights at all in early US history. It wasn't until the late 20's (please, correct me if wrong) that women in the US even had a right to vote. My great grandmother was sent to a marriage to a widower in need of a woman to raise his children at the age of 14. She didn't even know how to read or write. She called her husband by Mr. Last Name. This was common practice an not seen as a violation of human rights.

US women, of the past, were owned like a pedigree dog. So were black people. They demanded rights as well. Freedom isn't free and never was. Many people have died for the rights we have today. When people of oppression of any government collectively object and demand change, it will happen. We can't do this for them, no matter how horrible their practice is.

American women demanded rights. Why don't others?

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In the programme i saw the mother of the child had been deterinedly refusing to have her daugher mutilated - the grandmother and aunts felt she was wrong and took the daugher of and performed the operation when she wasn't there

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Wildflower63 wrote:

Being an American woman, I find this sort of thing mutually offensive. I do have a question to ask. Why don't these women fight for rights, as American women traditionally did?

American women were not born to any rights at all in early US history. It wasn't until the late 20's (please, correct me if wrong) that women in the US even had a right to vote. My great grandmother was sent to a marriage to a widower in need of a woman to raise his children at the age of 14. She didn't even know how to read or write. She called her husband by Mr. Last Name. This was common practice an not seen as a violation of human rights.

US women, of the past, were owned like a pedigree dog. So were black people. They demanded rights as well. Freedom isn't free and never was. Many people have died for the rights we have today. When people of oppression of any government collectively object and demand change, it will happen. We can't do this for them, no matter how horrible their practice is.

American women demanded rights. Why don't others?

I am an Australian woman, and so do I.

In terms of rights, I think cultures ar ein different places.

If you read the original article, and the ones below it, you will see that women ARE fighting - I think it rather judgmental of you to seem to believe that they should be at a certain stage when the struggle is just beginning.

As I understand it, women's ability to marry in the areas where the mutilation is customary are severely compromised - and there is almost no chance for a woman to support herself economically, or any socially sanctioned role for her, as an unmarried woman.

It also seems clear that the custom has become so ingrained that the majority of women still believe that without it their daughters are bad or doomed. This sort of belief is EXTREMELY hard to change - just as beliefs about women's rights and slavery were in the US. This will be hard, slow work, I htink.

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I did not mean to be offensive. This is something, culturally dictated, of belief. Female family is doing this to the youth of female family out of some sort of belief the more advanced societies do not hold.

Of course, I see this as a violation of human rights. I question what right we have to dictate culture of another. We don't and shouldn't do that, ever. You cannot impose your belief system on another and feel just and right only because your own society is more advanced. That is wrong.

Society only changes as people demand it to. This is not without loss of life and a difficult stuggle, as people in the US fought for their rights. I don't see the people of these contries practicing such barbaric practice objecting, with their own female family either forcing or demanding this procedure.

All I am saying is that when people start rejection of this sort of thing, society will change with it. The only objections are from people of higher countries with very different ideas.

Things have to evolve. No one has the right to come in and fix all with such arrogance. When young women reject this practice, it will end. That is all I am really saying. So far, they conform.

What are the rest of us realistically supposed to do? Would you like another Iraq war to teach them better ways?

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JLNobody wrote:

I'm a cultural relativist, but that does not apply to this "tradition". The practice of clitoredectomy is not bad just because WE don't like it. If all women in Kenya considered it a "good" thing. I would try not to impose my cultural values on that behavior. But not all women do. It's a male driven tradition, and little girls are too young to make an informed judgement. Frankly, I feel almost the same, but with much less intensity--can't tell you why--about the circumcision of male babies in our culture. I suspect it might reinforce the repression, described by Freud, of thoughts of mother incest--and the accompanying fear of being castrated (by father) for such a "primal sin."

JLN, don't know about your Freud references but I'm 100% in agreement with you otherwise.

We have every reason to interfere in this "tradition". It is physically dangerous, oppressive and pschologically/socially damaging.

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Sorry can't say much on this topic for feeling physically sick.

I hope this is not a debate about the merits or otherwise of fgm but just a discussion of the most effective way to put an end to it.

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Just a few links to ponder:

http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/african_history/45388
http://www.djembe.dk/no/16/16circum.html
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/36/032.html

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Incidentally, I find the practice disgusting.

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Wildflower - as I said above, I think it is very important for the west to support attempts to end this practice - as I also said, I think this needs to be through support of attempts by the people affected to end the practice, plus any way in which we can influence governments in the countries affected to implement laws (which often seem to exist) against the practice.

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kitchenpete wrote:

We have every reason to interfere in this "tradition". It is physically dangerous, oppressive and pschologically/socially damaging.

When did we become so superior to dictate our beliefs on an unevolved culture? We don't have that right at all!!

As a woman, I find this practice sickening. Consider the fact of culture beyond your own. Female family members, who love and care for the youth of society, just as any more evolved culture loves their own family, continues this practice of physically mutilation. This is their culture, not ours. If you really believe in freedom of choice, allow other cultures theirs. We don't, seeing ourselves as so superior and completely arrogant with thought.

I feel that my son wanting a pierced ear is self mutilation. He and a friend did it anyway, just one ear. I about ripped his ear off his body! I only allow my daughter one set of pierced ears, not belly button, nose, eyebrow, or cartlidge ear piercing. I will fire on my own kids over a simple tatoo as a form of immature, self mutilation. I feel teens are too young to make these decisions.

We are talking about adult mother's and grandmother's making a decision for a minor female child. I live in fear of teen pregnancy, with my own daughter. I have expectations out of her and behavior towards sexuality. I have come to the conclusion it is best to put her on The Pill.

You don't understand other cultures. Did you read about the widows of Iraq? They have children and dead husbands. They are in a male dominated society. These widows are not up to re-marriage, only because they are not virgins and have children. We don't have to live that culture, they do.

Asking for clitoral removal, so a woman cannot enjoy sexuality, just may be the right answer in a different society that women are forced to live with, as elder female family knows. It really is so vastly different than US culture. These women, who have sex and may like it, as both sexes do, pay a high price for that, being female. Do you blame these adult women, given their culture, to take sexual pleasure from a young woman with full knowledge of what their life will be the second they have sex and like it or produce a child?

These women don't live as more advanced cultures do. We cannot change that. Evolution can and will. I stand by my statement that people have to shed blood and demand change before it will naturally occur. The White Night will not always be around to protect them. They have to protect themselves within the culture they were born to and are forced to live.

I feel people are not being understanding of a culture differing from their own. These young women very well may enjoy sex, but pay a very high price for it, as their female elders already know. This is why they perform such mutilation of young women. They don't wish for them to suffer, because of sexuality, in a male dominated society.

I have to admit, if I were not attracted and sexually stimulated by men, my life would be much easier. Men can say the same fact, in free societies.

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Interesting piece on female genital mutilation

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