WUNRN
FGM – LAUNCH OF FEMINIST
STATEMENT AGAINST FGM
By Hilary Burrage – Sociologist
writing a book on Eradicating FGM (UK)
28
August 2013 is the day when a small group of women, me included, launch
our Feminist
Statement On Female Genital Mutilation. We hope that many people
around the world will choose to support us by putting their names also to this
statement.
READ STATEMENT IN FULL:
http://statementonfgm.com/
ADD YOUR SUPPORT TO FGM STATEMENT:
The basic premise of our statement is this: Patriarchal oppression is the
bedrock of female genital mutilation (FGM) and related harmful traditional
practices… female genital mutilation (FGM) in all its forms is cruelty and
abuse.
And our aim in publishing the statement is: To gather support, from
concerned citizens and from people directly working to abolish FGM, for
research, dialogue and activism which derives from such an understanding. To
that end we insist, for instance, that FGM be correctly named – as specifically
‘mutilation’ and not, in formal discourse, by any evasive or softening
euphemism.
Our core team of authors and signatories is small: Tomi Adeaga, Paula
Ferrari, Tobe Levin, Lucy Mashua Sharp, Linda Weil-Curiel and myself. Coming
respectively (by home or origin) from Germany, Nigeria, Australia, the USA,
Kenya, France and the UK, mostly we have never met in person; but in some cases
we have ‘met’ almost daily over many months by email, as we discovered through
the power of the internet our mutual horror at the deadly cruelty that is the
female genital mutilation of girls and even babies.
Millions still suffer
The number of women and girls forced to undergo this barbaric torture hovers
steadily at around thirty-plus million a year, increasing annually in the
‘developed’ countries of Europe, and in the USA and Australia.
Yes, there are reports of reduced incidence; but still there are nations where
almost all the female population remains, to use the euphemism we resolutely
refuse to accept, ‘circumcised’, where almost no woman or girl is ‘intact’.
Indeed, the World Health Organisation (WHO) is alarmed that, e.g. in
Egypt, traditional so-called ‘practices’ are being replaced by ‘treatment’ –
‘medicalisation’ lucratively delivered in make-shift clinics by professionally
trained operatives.
And now a recently published UNFPA
report suggests that the currently favoured approach to erasing FGM, seeking to
‘respect’ FGM as a traditional practice and substituting non-harmful rites of
passage, does not alone deliver.
It’s good to respect people of all cultures, but absolutely not good to
respect things they do – because everyone else has for millennia – which kill
and maim their children.
Zero tolerance
The basic human rights of children must always over-ride the ‘cultural’
sensitivities of adults.
Each person in the FGM statement core group explains the issues in her own
way, but our general analysis of the dire failure to protect girls from
practices which will damage them forever, is, bluntly put, something like this:
Until nations everywhere perceive FGM not as a custom, but rather as an
epidemic which must be addressed by governments as well as community workers,
it will continue to blight the lives of millions. Whole communities over
generations suffer because of it.
Yes, explanations, education and support to do things another way are
crucial, as is the engagement of faith leaders to reinforce the message that
FGM has no religious validity (rather, the converse) .
But in the end the state must reinforce the message with zero tolerance of
FGM as a crime – which almost all nations now declare in statute (and they all
declare in the UN Resolution of 2012) that it is.
So law enforcement, across the globe, is as important as education, and much
more important in this age of universally shared knowledge than ‘respect’ for
the grievous bodily harm of FGM.
Powerful invisible interests
It is however equally important to recognise that behind this grim tradition
lies the iron grip of many, many generations of self-interest, of powerful
people who benefit financially and in terms of influence and control from the
enforced mutilation of female children.
Some of those who benefit are the grandes dames of the mutilating
communities – the secret Sande Society women who control or perpetrate the torture.
But always behind them stand the shadowy men who pull the real strings: the men
who prefer child brides, the men who sell their barely teenage daughters,
freshly mutilated, into marital slavery, the men who decree, perhaps via their
womenfolk, that ‘unclean’ (uncircumcised) women are unfit to be members of the
community.
Consider the latest evidence for our position that FGM is patriarchy
incarnate: the Maasai are a tribe has practised FGM down the ages; but it is
also one of the few where women own land. Now, those women are beginning to
think they should stop mutilating their daughters. If they do, however, it’s
said the men insist women will have to give up their land.
International support
Each of us in the core group who produced the FGM Statement, as we
acknowledge, has our own reasons for choosing to fight FGM with our keyboards
and our words across the world-wide-web, wherever we are. We are very proud
that people who also support our position with their words include Elfriede Jelinek, Nobel Laureate in Literature, 2004, and
Dr Morissanda Kouyaté, Executive Director of the Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting
the Health of Women and Children (IAC).
Enough of the respectful musings on ‘cutting’. FGM is mutilation, sometimes
murder.
And it’s also about massive control and power. How can girls still tortured
become the beacons of hope for the future which their nations, and all of us
across the global community, need them to be?
Will you please use your keyboard, like us, to demand that FGM be labelled
for what it is, a cruelly oppressive crime, a matter of zero FGM tolerance,
right now?
Categories: Releases