Authors: Hibo Wardere
When we’re teaching communities about AIDS, we use cricket as a metaphor – we explain how important it is to protect yourself and your stumps in the game of
cricket, and then liken that to protecting yourself by wearing a condom. We had to come up with similar analogies in the context of FGM, so we created the acronym ‘BAT’.
‘B’ stood for ‘breaking the silence’, and we likened it to how you have to use your voice in cricket – you have to call the ball and say, ‘It’s
mine’, and you have to talk to your team-mates. The message was that if we break the silence of FGM then we can beat it. ‘A’ stood for ‘advocate of change’, so we
talked about how in a game of cricket you change your game according to what’s happening with the ball. And ‘T’ stood for ‘team together’ – how working as a
team in cricket makes you stronger, and how tackling FGM is not something you can do in isolation.
The programme also enabled boys and girls to play the sport together, which in turn opened up a conversation about FGM between them, allowing for a lot of myths to be debunked, according to
Hannah.
It was really surprising to hear twelve- or thirteen-year-old boys saying that a girl had to be cut because if she wasn’t she would have lots of sex and won’t
be tame. When we women stood up and told girls in classes that we ran charities, or we were midwives, or we were engineers and we weren’t cut, you heard them gasp. One girl even asked me
if I had to ‘wrap’ myself – she thought that if you didn’t cut the clitoris it just grew longer and longer.
If these beliefs exist in this new generation of young boys, you can imagine the perceptions of men two generations before them. Mohamed is fifty-nine years old and came to live in Britain
twenty years ago. He has been married for twenty-five years and has four sons:
I did think it was a good idea when I was a young man. It is some kind of guarantee. When you go to a shop and you buy something you get a warranty; that’s the view I
had in those days, that my wife being cut was my guarantee that she was a virgin, you know that no other man has touched her. Now I’m a grown man I realise it is just an idea; whether she
was touched or not it doesn’t make any difference. From the point of view of the woman, even if she wasn’t touched by a man before you, she could still commit adultery afterwards;
it makes no sense. Looking back, it was a mixture of good and bad. The good was that you didn’t have to concern yourself that anybody had touched your wife before you; the bad side is
seeing your wife suffer and complain about being in pain when you are intimate. I didn’t like it then; there was no pleasure in the bedroom for the first month. I felt pressure on me too.
I wanted to do something about it for her – maybe some kind of lubricant – but there was nothing I could do. As a man you won’t even enjoy yourself in the bed; you can’t
ignore it if your wife is complaining of pain. But as a man you don’t go out and speak about these things, not even to a doctor. You just suffer silently.
Of course, you can’t compare a man’s suffering – his lack of sexual enjoyment – with how a woman has suffered due to FGM, but just as Mohamed confesses, the experience
isn’t good for either party. So would he want his sons to marry a woman who has been cut? He says he wouldn’t talk to them about such things, a hangover from the secrecy surrounding the
subject back in Somalia, but it’s also true that parents the world over find it uncomfortable talking to their children about intimate matters. However, from his own experiences it seems he
wouldn’t encourage them to.
I don’t think my sons will marry girls who are cut, they were born in this country. I tell them they can marry whoever they want. Children born here have a different
attitude, and their perception is different according to the British laws. Men have to stand up and say we don’t want this – if the father figure stands up then the mother
won’t do anything to the child.
Dr Comfort Momoh runs an FGM clinic at St Thomas’ Hospital in London but has travelled around FGM-prevalent countries and observed many different attitudes in men. She maintains that it is
important not to generalise the opinions of men, as they can differ just as women’s experiences of FGM can differ. However, what does seem to recur is the fact that, while men are aware of
FGM, they don’t have an insight into what actually happens. Most of the men are not involved in the celebration or the cutting – it is the realm of the women, and the women take
ownership because to their minds they are preparing their daughter for adulthood and marriage. ‘If men as the head of the family make a stand and say, “I don’t want my daughter to
have FGM”, things will change,’ she says. ‘But at the moment, men are saying, “It’s got nothing to do with me, it’s a woman’s problem.” They need to
get involved.’
How exactly? What is the best way of engaging men in a topic that they have shied away from for generations? Solomon Zewolde is a researcher at the charity FORWARD UK. He is working alongside
fellow researchers in Belgium and Holland on a project called Men Speak Out. The three-year research project started in January 2015, and aims to recruit fifteen peer educators in each country to
go out into communities and speak to men and women. Solomon grew up in Ethiopia and moved to Britain four years ago. He had experience of FGM in the community in which he grew up and knew of
relatives, friends and neighbours who had been cut.
One of the myths told about uncut women is that they will be ill-mannered, that they will misbehave if they are not cut; they need to be cut so they behave well and appear
decent, which will make them suitable for marriage and sought-after. We should never be under the illusion that women are consenting to this harm being done or that women are perpetuating the
practice because they need it – that is simply not true. As in everything else, the oppression against women appears to be something women accept but that’s not the case.
Patriarchal societies all over the world have made women submit to certain practices. This is submission, not consent, and we need to make a distinction between the two.
Over three years, the Men Speak Out initiative will conduct focus groups and surveys to find out more about the issues and concerns men have. Solomon believes the first difficulty that needs to
be overcome is getting men to acknowledge that an FGM problem both abroad and in Britain even exists.
Some would like to deny that it exists. There is a lack of knowledge; there’s a lot of ignorance of what FGM is, what the cut is, about the medical consequences, the
social consequences, the psychological consequences . . . In research I ask them, ‘Do you know exactly what the cut is?’ Most think it’s OK, that it’s just a little
prick. They say, ‘Why are you making a big fuss about this?’ I think attitudes will change once we fill that gap of knowledge. When men know the different types of FGM – that
there’s not just one type – and the severity of it, if we have medical professionals talking to them about the consequences and have some survivors coming out and telling them what
they’ve been through, how horrible it is and how it stays with them throughout their life – even when they are cut at a very early age – I can see people beginning to change.
Education is key, along with the law.
Until men stand up against FGM, women may be encouraged to continue the practice because they will still be concerned that their daughter won’t find a husband. In some cultures, being cut
or uncut affects every aspect of their daughter’s life: her acceptance by society, her marriageability and therefore her future. That is why Solomon’s project is so important – we
need to galvanise men to speak out and reassure mothers that their daughters won’t be disadvantaged if they are not cut.
It is difficult to understand why women, when they know the pain involved, continue the practice. Then, when you hear stories like Mohamed’s, who saw how his wife suffered, you wonder
equally how fathers could decide to put their daughters through that. When I put this to Solomon, that surely witnessing for themselves the pain women suffer must make men want to turn away from
the practice, he told me about a darker side of FGM that has come to light through the research project.
One of my colleagues in Holland was told by a Somalian man in a focus group discussion that he feels more pleasure when his wife feels more pain. He told them that he feels
more masculine, more happy, the more pain she feels. I honestly believe that he represents a significant number of people in many countries who believe that putting a woman through pain during
sex makes them feel more masculine.
Solomon believes that this is connected to wider issues which affect communities all over the world who don’t discuss sex – even between couples. He feels that if this taboo subject
was discussed more, how each partner could receive more pleasure during sex, attitudes like this would change.
For every man like the one Solomon describes, there are also men, like Mohamed, who take no pleasure in seeing their wife suffer. And sadly, a common story that Solomon has heard is of the men
who divorce or cheat on wives who have been cut because they don’t have a fulfilling sex life. Remember that men are not encouraged to save themselves for sex after marriage, so a man knows
that a different sex life is available to him out there.
This to me is the double abuse that women often suffer. A man can dump his wife for not sexually satisfying him because sex is very painful for her because of the cut or
because, in some cultures, a woman might be opened and closed, and opened and closed at different milestones like after giving birth. So she denies him, and he in turn divorces her or dumps her
at home and goes out and has sex with uncut women. That is not uncommon, and yet again she suffers through no fault of her own. People never talk about this. They camouflage it and instead give
many other reasons for the break-up of a marriage – no one will tell you it’s because of bad sexual experiences.
In that case, FGM is actually breaking down family units. The premise of it, somewhere very far back, was surely to prevent adultery (at least on the woman’s part), and yet accounts of FGM
being the cause of adultery or divorce are very common. I myself have lived with this fear my whole married life, despite having a husband who is devoted to me; when your body has let you down you
feel like you are less of a woman, you worry that you won’t be enough for your man.
Educating men about FGM is clearly a very good thing indeed and definitely the way forward, but there is still the worry that modern men – particularly those in Britain – who have
already turned their backs on the practice may then also reject girls who’ve been cut. Solomon has a strong message for men about that.
Education is the first place but the message has to be to stand up against the cut, not against the cut
woman
. This is a very important message. Say no, you
can’t cut girls, but we don’t want men to stand against girls who have already been cut; we want men to stand with them, to try to help these women who are having problems. Men play
a very decisive role in ending this practice. The important thing is to root the belief and commitment in them that it really needs to stop, and that requires a lot of education and a lot of
effort, but it is possible.
We need to bring men on board to work alongside women, for men and women to stand shoulder to shoulder in the fight to end this practice both in African and Middle Eastern countries as well as
in the UK.
15
A
ccording to the City University London/Equality Now report published in 2014, with every decade that passes, FGM becomes even more of a
British problem. In 2001, it was estimated that there were 66,000 women aged fifteen to forty-nine living in England and Wales who were born in countries where FGM was widely practised. By 2011,
that figure had swollen to 103,000.
8
Twenty-one women out of every 1,000 are victims of FGM in London. In towns like Milton Keynes, Cardiff, Coventry, Sheffield, Reading, Thurrock, Northampton and Oxford, seven females in every
1,000 are victims. In rural areas, fewer than one in 1,000 women are living with FGM, but that’s still more than zero. Researchers came up with these estimates based on the 2011 census,
migration figures and surveys of how prevalent FGM is in those countries from which women have migrated. The numbers could be lower, of course, but they could also be much higher.
More accurate statistics are perhaps those provided by health professionals in Britain. In 2015, the government released figures of actual cases of FGM that had been recorded over a five-month
period.
9
Doctors, nurses and healthcare professionals were asked to keep the first record of the number of new women and girls presenting to them with symptoms of FGM, and those
being treated for ongoing problems. There are thousands of women being identified as victims of FGM every single year in Britain. Between September 2014 and January 2015, more than 2,600 new cases
of FGM were identified. Forty-four of those were children under eighteen. More than 9,500 women were deinfibulated. And remember, these are only the women and girls who have sought medical
treatment – many more must be suffering in silence.
As Halima’s story shows, such is the pressure within FGM-practising communities in Britain to maintain traditions that, despite the fact that FGM has been illegal in the UK since 1985 and
that, since 2003, it is against the law to take UK nationals out of the country to be cut, parents will risk prosecution and return with their children to their homelands in order for them to be
mutilated. Back in 2013, when my head teacher and I were faced with the obvious truth that Halima’s parents were planning exactly this, we were frustratingly helpless to do anything other
than plead with them not to take her out of school in term time. But new legislation introduced in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in 2015 meant that one woman was able to protect her three
daughters from FGM in Britain just hours after that change in the law came into effect.