FGM: A Human Rights Violation Against Girls
In previous DVM For Hope posts, I have covered some difficult subjects: genocide, child marriage, and of course human trafficking. Of all the subjects that I’ve studied, though, Female Genital Mutilation, or FGM, is perhaps the most difficult to write about. FGM is an act of extreme brutality inflicted upon young girls for obscure cultural reasons, and the emotional and physical scars that it leaves on them can be profound.
What is FGM?
FGM is easier to define than it is to comprehend. The AHA Foundation is American organization founded by Ayaan Hirsi Ali to combat female genital mutilation, child marriage, and honor violence. They define FGM as “any procedure involving the partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs.” (1) Other terms used to describe FGM include female circumcision, cutting, or excision (2). These definitions and terms might give the reader the impression that FGM is a sterile, surgical procedure, but generally, it is anything but.
Before I get into more specifics about when, how, and why FGM is performed, there is a little more ground to cover. There are actually four types of FGM, I, II, III, and IV, involving successively more invasive cutting. My intention here is not to provide medical information. Anyone who is interested in a deeper anatomical understanding is referred to Rosemarie Skaine’s Female Genital Mutilation: Legal, Cultural, and Medical Issues, which covers the four types of FGM in more detail. My goal here is to show FGM as a medically pointless procedure performed on innocent young girls under often barbaric circumstances.
Why is FGM Performed?
Now that we have a basic idea of what FGM is, we need to look at who the victims of FGM are, and at why the procedure is done. FGM is a cultural practice inflicted on girls usually between the ages of 4 and 14 (3). According to the World Health Organization (WHO), it is performed in 30 countries, mostly in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia (4). Because the procedure frequently occurs in predominantly Muslim countries, readers might be led to believe that it is a religious practice, but that generally isn’t the case. FGM in some form or another was practiced prior to the establishment of Islam or Christianity, and historical records suggest that it was even practiced in ancient Egypt (5). Islamic law does not specifically forbid female circumcision, but Islamic legal scholars generally seem to think that any extreme form of female genital cutting would violate the law. According to Imad-Ad-Dean Ahmad of the Minaret of Freedom Institute:
For Muslims, cliterodectomy and infibulations should be considered haram (prohibited) practices and opposition to it should be part of our ongoing mandate to fight against superstition and oppression. As to the mildest form of female circumcision, the risks to the girl’s future ability to enjoy sexual relations with her husband must place it at best in the category of makruh (disliked) practices. Since it has neither hygienic nor religious value, there is no justification for Muslims to engage in this painful and potentially harmful practice and it would be best to avoid it completely.
Since, then, FGM is not performed for religious reasons, could there be health benefits to the procedure? Could there be a medically necessary reason to perform FGM on a girl? The answer is a resounding no. According to the WHO, FGM has absolutely no benefits and can cause only harm to the girls. And, the more invasive the procedure, the worse the complications are. The WHO provides a list of the possible short term consequences of FGM:
- severe pain
- excessive bleeding (haemorrhage)
- genital tissue swelling
- fever
- infections e.g., tetanus
- urinary problems
- wound healing problems
- injury to surrounding genital tissue
- shock
- death
And these are only the short term consequences. Long term, the girls may suffer chronic infections, difficulty in childbirth, severe problems and pain during sex, the need for corrective surgeries, difficulty urinating, complications during menstruation, and psychological problems (7).
So, if FGM is not a religious requirement, isn’t medically necessary, and can lead to so many complications, why is the procedure done? Basically, FGM is considered by the cultures who practice it to be a “right of passage” into womanhood. It is thought that it controls sexuality in girls and makes them more pure (8) and that it ensures “their virginity until marriage.” (9) Hibo Wardere, a Somalian immigrant to the UK who underwent the procedure under horrific circumstances as a very young girl, puts it in more personal terms:
In some cultures, to be a woman is to be condemned to a lifetime of pain. To be a woman means subjection to child abuse, to ensure that your ‘virtue’ remains intact, that your sexuality is controlled and that you are accepted by your community. Unfortunately, by chance, I was born into one of these cultures—just like 60,000 other girls in Britain. (10).
The Brutality of FGM
FGM would be bad enough if it were performed in a surgical suite with anesthesia and under sterile conditions.✽ Unfortunately, the reality is so bad that it is practically unimaginable. A typical FGM in Africa or the Middle East might involve a girl being taken to a hut and held down by relatives while a local woman known as a “cutter,” who is more or less a witch doctor, cuts her with unsterile or even rusty implements such as knives or razor blades. Then she is sewn up with string or thread, leaving only a small hole to urinate out of. This is done while the girl is awake, with no local or general anesthesia. Hibo Wardere describes being left to heal, bleeding and wrapped in bandages in a steaming hot hut, then, weak from blood loss, lying in bed for many days too weak to stand (11). After all of this, the girls can look forward to a lifetime of pain, medical, and psychological problems, most of which I’ve already listed above.
The Incidence Of FGM
Far from being a rare and obscure procedure, FGM is performed over 2 million times a year on girls all over the world. The number of girls who have undergone the procedure is as high as 200 million worldwide. According to Rosemarie Skaine, the percentage of girls having undergone “female circumcision” may be over 90% in Egypt, Somalia, Guinea, Mali, and Eritrea among others (12).
As shocking as the worldwide statistics are, though, equally startling is the incidence of FGM in the United States and the United Kingdom. As immigrants enter the U.S. and the U.K. from at-risk countries, they often bring their cultural practices with them. Unfortunately, for some immigrant groups this may include FGM. Hibo Wardere quotes a study suggesting that there are 137,000 girls in the U.K. who have undergone the procedure, and 60,000 “at risk of being mutilated.” (13) The statistics in the united States are even worse. The CDC reports that over 500,000 girls “are at risk or have already undergone FGM in the U.S.” (14) That means that half a million girls on United States soil could undergo a barbaric cultural procedure, leaving them physically and emotionally scarred for life!
FGM Laws in the U.S.
In the united state, there is a federal law that criminalizes FGM, providing for a 5 year prison sentence for performing the procedure. The law has been amended to make it illegal to take girls out of the U.S. to have the procedure performed. According to The AHA Foundation”
In January 2013, the federal FGM law was amended by the Transport for Female Genital Mutilation Act, which prohibits knowingly transporting a girl out of the country for the purpose of undergoing FGM. The Act was designed to address the problem of “vacation cutting”, in which girls living in the United States are taken to their parents’ country of origin (typically during school breaks) to undergo the procedure. Under the new federal law, anyone found guilty of doing so may be sentenced to up to five years in prison.
Surprisingly, though, only 26 states have laws against FGM. I was very glad to find out that Georgia has an anti-FGM law, and there was also a recent attempt to strengthen the sentences here. Unfortunately, though, “cultural sensitivity” has prevented most cases from being prosecuted on the Federal level, with only one case tried in federal court since 1996. The record is equally dismal in the U.K. (15) The AHA Foundation is actively advocating for better legal protection for at-risk girls on both the state and federal level.
What Can You Do About FGM?
Reading a description of FGM and its catastrophic effect on the lives of girls is a heart-rending experience. FGM is a practice that needs to be abolished, but it won’t happen without a public outcry. These girls need for us to not look away. Here is my list of recommendations for those who want to fight FGM:
❏ Get educated about FGM. Read Cut by Hibo Wardere, Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and maybe even Female Genital Mutilation by Rosemarie Skaine. The latter is much more descriptive and graphic, suitable for a healthcare provider.
❏ Join and Donate to The AHA Foundation. They are leading the fight against female genital mutilation, honor violence, and enforced marriage in the United States.
❏ Find out if your state has laws criminalizing FGM (The AHA Foundation website would be a good place to start). Call your state’s senators and representatives and make your voice heard. Often, it only takes a few constituents expressing concern about an issue to get it on their radar.
❏ If your state has weak laws, advocate to get them strengthened.
❏ Share information about FGM on social media. It’s a difficult subject, but you might just help prevent a girl somewhere from a lifetime of suffering.
✽ In an attempt to make the procedure more palatable, it is sometimes done under “better” circumstances by healthcare professionals, but in my opinion, this just makes them complicit in the barbarism, and the procedure is still considered a violation of human rights by the international community.
Sources:
- ahafoundation.org
- Skaine, Rosemarie. Female Genital Mutilation: Legal, Cultural, and Medical Issues. McFarland and Company, 2005.
- ahafoundation.org
- “Female Genital Mutilation.” www.who.int, 31 January, 2018.
- Wardere, Hibo. Cut: One Woman’s Fight Against FGM in Britain Today. Simon and Schuster, 2016.
- Ahmad, Imad-Ad-Dean. “Female Genital Mutilation: An Islamic Perspective,” islamicity.org 2 March, 2004.
- www.who.int
- Skaine.
- ahafoundation.org
- Wardere.
- ibid.
- Skaine.
- Wardere.
- ahafoundation.org
- Ibid.
1 thought on “FGM: A Human Rights Violation Against Girls”
Wow i knew about this practice but had NO idea how prevalent it was. I thought it was only a handful of 3rd world cultures that practiced it!
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