Authors: Hibo Wardere
To reduce the likelihood of the cutters making use of the loans while continuing to cut, these schemes need to be integrated into the wider context of an overall programme, one that educates
people about FGM and challenges the old beliefs. In Sierra Leone, a zero-tolerance policy was introduced, whereby a girl could no longer attend school if she had been cut, but it was felt by many
that the wrong people were being punished. Now, in some parts of the country, an organisation called Masanga Education Assistance (MEA) has rolled out a programme in which Bondo women have
committed to ‘putting down their baskets’, a symbolic giving-up of their cutting tools. Bondo is a secret all-female society that carries out and upholds age-old cultural traditions,
their purpose being to help young women earn the rites of passage into womanhood. Their ceremonies take place in the Bondo bush, a private enclosure constructed near their village, and cutting has
historically played an integral role in the transition. As part of the MEA’s scheme, the Bondo women continue to take the girls into the bush but they no longer do the cutting.
A number of projects have been established in various African countries, dedicated to finding alternatives to FGM while preserving cultural traditions. Given how firmly rooted it is within
certain cultures, it is no wonder that health practitioners in Britain are concerned about the 173,000 girls, identified in a recent report, who have been born in the UK to women from
FGM-practising countries.
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The same report looked at the reasons behind the continuation of cutting here in the UK.
In a number of communities, young women who do not undergo FGM may face stigma, discrimination and threats from family and community members . . . A recurring theme for the
justification of FGM in practising communities is to attenuate the sexual desire of females in order to conform to prescribed social norms relating to girls’ and women’s moral
conduct. FGM is often linked to marriagability of girls and family ‘honour’. A commonly held belief in FGM-practising communities is that girls and women who have not undergone FGM
have an insatiable sexual appetite which has to be restrained to prevent bringing dishonour and shame to families.
My three daughters will have been among those 173,000 girls identified in that report, and yet they are safe because I decided that the practising of FGM within my family would end with me.
There are many other mothers out there like me, who prioritised their child’s safety and wellbeing, and their right to a body free from pain and infections. But despite the best intentions of
some mothers, the cultural pressures prove stronger than their individual will. I have heard stories from my friends of their mothers doing everything they could to prevent their child from being
cut and yet it was the wishes of the rest of the family that prevailed. One friend of mine remembers seeing her mother at the door, battling to get in as she herself was forced down on to the floor
and cut. Imagine that mother’s pain at seeing her child suffer the same as she had, and being physically restrained from trying to prevent the abuse.
Another FGM survivor who, like me, has asked herself many times how her mother could have subjected her to the practice is Fatuma Farah, who was cut in Somalia as a child and now lives and works
in London as a psychotherapist, often working with women who have been cut. Much like my own story, Fatuma describes a loving mother who fiercely protected her daughter until she was cut at five.
Fatuma came from a family of eight boys – as her parents’ only daughter, she felt very much loved and cherished. As such, she found it even harder to understand how her mother could
have allowed her to suffer such an abuse, but it only goes to illustrate how deeply ingrained the practice is.
My mum passed away two years ago and it was always a sore point between us even until the end. I cared for her in the last three months before her death and we had a lot of
conversations. My mum was a very lovely and caring woman and she apologised for all the mistakes she’d made, but she never apologised for the FGM. Until her dying day she didn’t
think she’d done anything wrong. My mother was illiterate and she didn’t have any education, and she thought wrongly that it was a religious requirement. She also didn’t have
the medical knowledge to know or understand the complications of it. Of course she knew there was a lot of pain involved, but she didn’t know any better. As far as she was concerned,
she’d had it, her mother had it, everyone around her was having it and I would have it.
Fatuma is sure that had her father been around more when she was that age instead of out at work, he would have convinced her mother not to have her cut. ‘He was more educated than my
mother, he would have spoken to her and said don’t do it.’ As I’ve explained, men were often absent from the daily run of things, it was very common in Somalian households at that
time. However, unlike Fatuma, even if there had been more input from my father, I am not convinced that it would have made a difference because men traditionally see
gudnin
as
women’s business. For that reason, they turn a blind eye because they tell themselves that it doesn’t concern them. Just like other aspects of child-rearing, there are certain men who
are happy to leave it to women, and because they don’t concern themselves with FGM, they never talk to women about it.
When I recently gave a talk to a packed town-hall meeting in north-east London, I didn’t expect any husbands or fathers to turn up, so I was amazed when I walked in and found sixty men
waiting patiently to hear about a subject they’d long avoided. One of them was forty-two-year-old Abbas. Like most of the men there, he didn’t know what to expect when he’d walked
into the room, perhaps wall-to-wall women, and yet every single chair was taken up by a man. One of the reasons Abbas had been persuaded to attend was because, as well as having three sons, he had
a nine-year-old daughter, and he felt this talk might be relevant to him. He hadn’t had his little girl cut, not because he thought the practice was bad – he hadn’t given it too
much thought before – but mostly because it appeared to him to be old-fashioned.
However, what he heard in that room that night, during the talk I gave, would change the way he thought about FGM forever.
I didn’t know until that talk about the medical problems. I didn’t know about the side effects, and I didn’t think that this was still practised a lot.
FGM is not something that we talk to other Somalians about. Men don’t speak about women’s problems in our culture; it’s not something you have an open conversation about, not
even within your own family.
Telling a roomful of Somalian men exactly what FGM was, I watched as realisation dawned on each of their faces. I saw them swallow hard when I used words like ‘clitoris’ and
‘vagina’, words that are not shared between men and women in our culture. But if FGM is carried out in the name of men, isn’t it important that we hear what they have to say?
Abbas describes how most Somalian men first encounter the practice:
I was very young, maybe eight or ten years old, when I first heard of FGM. It wasn’t called that in Somalia, it was called
gudnin
. As a young boy you
can’t help but notice when your neighbours go through it, or your sisters . . .
You don’t question it because everyone does it; it is the norm and if you don’t do it you are different to the rest of the people. You are brainwashed about this idea, they make
you believe that if girls don’t go through this then they are different, they are not normal girls, they are not good girls. That’s the only point of carrying out FGM, to protect
her virginity until she gets married. It could be to stop the woman from having sex with a man, or stop the man from having sex with her, but old cultures don’t hold a man accountable;
they’re instead always looking at women’s actions. I thought it was unfair and way out of date, but this was the seventies. I left Somalia for London in the nineties and I’m
forty-two now. I didn’t think anyone was still doing it.
Abbas’s acknowledgement of the fact that he thought of FGM as simply a ‘woman’s problem’ is a sentiment that is repeated by many men, and it is exactly this mindset that
means men play their part in allowing this practice to continue, simply by not asking any questions.
I didn’t know until your talk that it was [not prescribed by] religion. I didn’t know because I wasn’t interested that much, I was just neutral. I
wasn’t saying no, and I wasn’t saying yes; I didn’t have good evidence to dismiss it or good evidence to accept it. I was standing in the middle of this argument, but when I
heard it from your point of view and from a cleric who said from a religious point of view it’s not right, I was amazed.
I took the cleric, a friend of Yusuf’s, along with me for that reason, to tell the men who were there that this was not a religious practice, it was a cultural one. I have always found it
impossible to understand how people who believe in God think that He would have created something imperfect, that we need to slice bits off girls because God didn’t create the female of the
species properly the first time round. But there was no point in me telling people that; they needed to hear it from a religious person, and as Mohamed Abdulle spoke, I saw the men look up and pay
closer attention. They really were learning something new.
Abbas also had no idea about the side effects that women suffer. He had no idea about the medical complications or the problems that can occur when giving birth. He had grown up, just like me,
in a culture where FGM was so ingrained as a belief that nobody thought to question it, and, also like me, he thought that he’d left these ‘old-fashioned’ practices behind in
Somalia. He had no idea that they had reached British shores.
I spoke to other men and everyone understood that something needs to be done, the reaction was very positive. It would be good if men stood up together and said,
‘Don’t do this for us.’ If we stood up and said no then it would stop. Women are doing this practice thinking that it is for men, but if we marched, if we signed petitions, if
we went on television and told them that we don’t want FGM then maybe that would take the pressure off women.
I agree with Abbas: until men stand up against FGM and say, ‘I do not want this done to girls in my name’, the practice will continue. While men accept the practice thinking that
women want it, women will do it thinking that men want it – this is what UNICEF referred to in a 2013 report as ‘pluralistic ignorance’.
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That’s why men
are absolutely key to ending FGM.
Fatuma Farah used to work for the Ministry of Health in Somalia, and in her role there, she met a male doctor who was mobilising a group of men to go marching, to make it clear that they did not
want little girls to be mutilated in their name. ‘I really do believe that had it happened, a big shift would have taken place,’ Farah told me, ‘but men didn’t want to do
it; they said it was a big shame in their culture to talk about women’s genitals. I still believe it would have a huge impact on FGM if men stood up and marched and said no to it. And
it’s very achievable.’
There have been other more successful instances of men taking a stand. There are thought to be more than one million cricket teams across the world – but there is only one Maasai team. The
men compete in traditional dress, bowling in their
shuka
shawls and scoring runs while ornately decorated with colourful beaded headdresses. They look quite striking as they hit fours and
sixes, and yet the message they deliver through their game is equally inspiring: end FGM. These young men are Maasai warriors, each of them between seventeen and twenty-two, an age when most of
them would traditionally be ready for marriage. Instead, they are on a mission to convince their village elders to end the barbaric practice that has blighted the lives of young girls in their
community for generations, via the game of cricket. These boys live in a remote tribe in the shadow of Mount Kenya. In their community, it is customary to cut girls at around the age of eleven or
twelve. And once a girl has been cut, she is ready for marriage, which means she must also abandon her education.
Benjamin and Daniel are two of these Maasai warrior-cricketers. Their younger sister, Nancy, works hard at school – so hard, in fact, that she won a scholarship to study at an American
secondary school in Kenya. When the time came for her to be cut and married off among her tribe, her brothers could not stand by and watch her education and her life be destroyed by FGM. Benjamin
and Daniel managed to persuade their parents not to have Nancy cut and to let her continue her studies, but they received threats of physical violence from other members of their community as a
result of speaking out. The brothers’ mission wasn’t just to save Nancy, it was to save other girls too, and so they turned to a British charity called Cricket Without Boundaries (CWB)
to help them with their cause.
CWB was founded in the UK ten years ago and is primarily an HIV and AIDS awareness charity. Its aim is to teach boys and girls in African communities how to play cricket, alongside delivering
valuable educational messages. They’d been working with the Maasai Cricket Warriors for seven or eight years, but this was the first time that the charity had been asked to deliver an
anti-FGM message. ‘The boys had gained status in their community through cricket,’ says Hannah Weaver, chief executive of the charity. ‘It made them stars in their tribe, and it
gave them the voice and the confidence to speak out. That’s the power of sport. But we knew that FGM was extremely culturally sensitive and we had to think long and hard about how we could
make it work and deliver the project, while attempting to limit as much potential kick-back on the boys as possible.’ CWB enrolled the help of 28 Too Many and Hannah went out to Kenya to
deliver the first programme in early 2015.