Female Circumcision: A Tradition Steeped in Blood
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Independent (London), June 22, 2008
Police are to stage high-profile checks on flights to a number of African states in an attempt to stop young girls being taken abroad to be forcibly mutilated with the consent of their parents.
Research commissioned by the Department of Health suggests that more than 20,000 British girls are at risk of being forced into the agonising procedure, where all or part of their external genitals are cut off and stitched up. Officers will question all adults taking girls on certain flights, believing it is their best chance of saving thousands of children from female genital mutilation at the hands of tribal “elders” called in by their own families.
Moves to tackle the culturally sensitive issue will come as ministers from several government departments struggle to stamp out the ancient tribal tradition amid evidence that thousands of British girls are at risk from a ritual that is supposed to mark their transition into womanhood.
The campaign group the Foundation for Women’s Health and Development (Forward UK) estimates that around 11,000 British-based girls aged between nine and 15 have undergone the ritual—in the UK or in their parents’ home countries.
The study, the first to gauge the prevalence of the practice in Britain, concluded that at least 66,000 women already living in this country are victims of “female circumcision”. Hospitals and clinics across the country have reported an increasing number of women showing evidence of the mutilation, which often has a devastating impact on their health and ability to give birth naturally.
Children as young as five are held down and cut, sometimes with razor blades or broken glass, in a ritual driven by a range of cultural demands, including a desire to demonstrate a girl’s virginity on her wedding night. The practice, which survives mainly in 28 countries in East and West Africa, has been targeted as a fundamental human rights violation in recent years by the United Nations and individual states, including the UK.
The World Health Organisation estimates that up to 140 million girls and women around the world have suffered some type of genital mutilation, and around three million girls, most of them under 15, undergo the procedure every year. It is estimated that almost 175,000 women from countries that still practise the procedure now live in England and Wales.
Somalian supermodel Iman, who is married to David Bowie, avoided the mutilation thanks to her parents, who maintained that she had gone to a hospital to have the procedure done when, in fact, she was preparing to go to university. She has spoken out against the practice, like her cousin Waris Dirie. Ms Dirie, who suffered the procedure at the age of five, retired from modelling in 1997 to focus on her work against genital mutilation and was appointed Special Ambassador for the Elimination of Female Genital Mutilation by Kofi Annan, then UN Secretary-General.
She said of her ordeal: “I felt not complete with myself as a woman. Some days I felt so powerless.”
Since 1985, Britain has passed two laws banning the practice, and social workers, teachers, police and health officials have been given training in how to recognise and treat victims and children identified as being at risk. But pressure groups and opposition politicians last night warned that the Government was not doing enough to tackle the issue, or even to investigate the true extent of the problem.
Labour MP Ann Clwyd, who pushed through a bill making it illegal to perform the procedure on a British citizen anywhere in the world, complained that it was “an absolute disgrace” that no one had been prosecuted under the new regulations. And Theresa May, the shadow Minister for Women, said the Government did not have an overall national strategy for stamping out the practice.
She said: “It seems this is an area where the Government thinks it could just put down legislation and that would sort it out. But we have had no prosecutions and, in the meantime, ministers have admitted to us that they have not issued any guidance to professionals on what action to take if they find someone who has been a victim.”
Police and government officials admit that they are “disappointed” at the failure to prosecute anyone accused of carrying out or aiding and abetting genital mutilation. A £20,000 reward offered last year by the Metropolitan Police in partnership with the Waris Dirie Foundation failed to generate any prosecutions. Senior officers claim this demonstrates the ties of family and community loyalty that keep the practice underground.
However, Detective Sergeant Clare Chelsom, of Project Azure, an operation set up by Scotland Yard’s Child Abuse Investigation Command specifically to deal with the issue, said she believed that police had managed to prevent a number of new cases.
She said: “The project has three separate strands—educating the communities and making sure they understand what they are doing to their daughters, raising awareness of the problem and finally enforcing the law against it.
“There is a problem in victims coming forward because reporting it means reporting on their own families. But the reports we have received have gone up from three to 33 since we launched our campaign last summer and we feel the interventions we have made as a result of these have protected young girls.”
However, DS Chelsom admits that colleagues in some of Britain’s biggest police forces remain unaware of the problem—despite evidence that health centres are seeing growing numbers of women who have been mutilated. Maternity clinics in Liverpool have identified 237 women who have suffered the procedure in the past three years. The city’s Alder Hey children’s hospital has also reported seeing young girls suffering complications after the mutilation.
Campaigners have warned that some families have flown “excisors” into Britain from their home countries specially to carry out the practice on their daughters, while many more have taken their children out of the country for the procedure.
Police are now planning to mount spotchecks on flights to destinations including Somalia and Senegal, beginning with a high-profile swoop on Heathrow airport next month to try to prevent girls being taken out of Britain to face mutilation. A senior Met officer said the operation, along with new training for airline staff, was the last chance to safeguard children being taken out of the country to undergo the mutilation.
Ms Clwyd, whose act increased the penalty for genital mutilation from five to 14 years’ imprisonment, welcomed the attempt to protect girls from the “obscene practice” and she pledged: “I will be meeting with colleagues to discuss how to put more pressure on the authorities to bring these criminals to justice.”
‘I was five. It hurt so much that I thought I would die’
Brought up in a Muslim community in Senegal, Salimata Badji-Knight was circumcised when she was five. She now lives in London and works as an advocate for Forward in the UK.
“When it happened I was five, and I didn’t even know this practice existed. I was taken off with my cousins and other girls that I knew—we thought that we were going to a party. I was reassured because so many people I knew were there. Then the atmosphere changed, and the adult women became more aggressive. They took one of the girls away, and I heard her scream—I was the 20th girl to be taken, so I heard that scream over and over again. I heard them saying ‘No, don’t cut me’, but I didn’t know what they were cutting.
“Then it was my turn. I didn’t know what was happening, but it hurt so much I thought that I was going to die. They must have used a knife but I couldn’t see it. It felt like having all of your nails ripped off at the same moment. There was no anaesthetic. Physically, it took a long time for me to heal. Every day when I have a shower I am reminded of the fact that I have been mutilated.
“We need to stop this practice; it is terrorising people for life. I visited my father and explained what had been done to me. He cried and vowed that no other girls in the family would have this happen to them.
“For a long time, I didn’t want to talk about what happened to me, but if it will help one person to put down the knife, I’m happy to tell my story.”
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(Posted on June 24, 2008)
Comments
Britain continues to “enjoy” the great benefits of diversity.
Posted by at 6:26 PM on June 24
“Diversity is our strength.”
/sarcasm
Posted by at 6:55 PM on June 24
Oh Great! They can stop them from leaving, but not from coming! What`s up with that?!? THe death of common sense is as blatant as the ethnic and tradtional culture dsplacement it helps protect and foster.
Posted by Tim Mc Hugh at 7:30 PM on June 24
So it is child abuse to remove part of a girl’s genitals but it is good medicine to remove part of a boy’s genitals. Aren’t both child abuse? Let’s not be hypocrites.
Posted by at 8:04 PM on June 24
I’m happy if the Africans want to do this, as long as they leave Whites alone. But apparently, feminism trumps multiculturalism.
Posted by Schoolteacher at 8:07 PM on June 24
I wonder how many girls are going to read about this female mutilation in horror in the UK and then go out and proudly be tattooed or have their tongue or eyebrow pierced and think nothing of it.
Posted by at 8:24 PM on June 24
To 8:04
In the west the circumcison of males is left up to the parents to decide, and it is not forced upon them. Circumsion of males involved the removal of the foreskin, whereas with female circumsion involves the removal of the outer orgins. For African muslims, parents have no choice in the matter.
Posted by at 10:24 PM on June 24
I wonder how many girls are going to read about this female mutilation in horror in the UK and then go out and proudly be tattooed or have their tongue or eyebrow pierced and think nothing of it.
Posted by at 8:24 PM on June 24
Good question!! I’m so glad I never did that stuff, never wanted to. Sorry, but I do have pierced ears—but only one hole per ear! But I really cannot understand why white women desecrate their bodies that way, just don’t get the attraction.
Posted by kitty at 11:12 PM on June 24
“apparently, feminism trumps multiculturalism.”
Black pride rules over them both
Posted by at 11:22 PM on June 24
“Ms Dirie, who suffered the procedure at the age of five, retired from modelling in 1997 to focus on her work against genital mutilation and was appointed Special Ambassador for the Elimination of Female Genital Mutilation by Kofi Annan, then UN Secretary-General.”
This is such a joke…..years ago a whole special victims group received the green light from the State Dept to move to America….when the women heard that this practice was illegal they all had there mutilation done before moving to the U.S.
This is the leftist propaganda to turn all people into misery by contantly forcing things like this down your throat and demanding that you to feel sorry for people who don’t feel sorry for themselves….it is insane…(sic)
Posted by Lisette at 12:32 AM on June 25
It is strange that the multiculturalists don’t want *true* multiculturalism.
But who are they to say that forced marriages, beating women, polygamy, or “honor killings” aren’t wholesome values?
Posted by Jeff at 3:32 AM on June 25
BLACK PRIDE, what the heck is this supposed to mean? What have they EVER done to be proud of, ANYWHERE in the world? All I ever see is where they wait for others to build something good, then they DEMAND to be included, proceeding to drag that down to the level they exist at. I have seen blacks swarm malls in Kansas City that were doing quite well, turning them into african outposts and then forcing them to close down before moving on to their next victim. (Bannister Mall) Kansas City. They are like leaches and maggots who thrive on what they have taken the life out of.
Posted by at 10:42 AM on June 25
Too bad the Africans didn’t come up with male castration rather than female circumcision.
Posted by dave at 10:48 AM on June 25
The practice of circumcision, for either sex, is based on primitive lifestyle necessities that have been encoded into religious texts. It serves no useful purpose in modernised society whatsoever.
Posted by ODDL at 12:32 PM on June 25
Male circumcision does a great deal to prevent succeptability to venereal diseases, which also protects women. It was done to me when I was a baby. I’m told I didn’t like it very much.
Female clitordectomy (sp?) is merely a device to prevent women from enjoying sex they way they should. I got married at 40, but had girlfriends before, and the more excited they were, the more I liked it. Female “circumcision” produces no benefit, and reduces women from our best friends to mere baby-factories.
Posted by Michael C. Scott at 1:12 PM on June 25
From 1910 to 1940, the ruling nationalist party of China eliminated the ancient custom of footbinding. They did not rely on persuasion and “questioning” known liars.
Every village and city neighborhood had a foot inspector, a government employee. They were always women, generally middleaged and from well regarded powerful families. Every month from the time a baby girl was born until she was about 14, the foot inspector went to the child’s home and inspected the child’s feet. If there was a baby boom or increase in population more foot inspectors were hired.
If any evidence of binding was found, the parents were fined and imprisoned. Problem solved in one generation. And remember, that era was a real mess in China. Warlords carving out independent territories, a powerful communist party supported by Russia, Japanese invasion, local civil wars all over the place. But the foot inspectors still managed to eradicate foot binding.
Of the course the nationalists had some advantages in the campaing. For one thing, not all Chinese practiced foot binding. The ruling manchus never did. Nor did the western mongolians and central asians. Poor families only bound the feet of one daughter if she was pretty enough to sell as a sex slave when she was 12 or 13. Foot binding was primarily an upper class Han Chinese thing.
The nationalists also carried on a massive propaganda campaign against foot binding. The unrest and wars helped. Even the wealthiest and most powerful realized that if things went bad their women would have to be able to walk and run from the enemy.
Send visiting nurses accompanied by armed guards to every muslim home. If the family refuses admittance deny them their welfare benefits. Put them on an old military plane and dump them in a remote area of whatever hellhole they came from.
But the British won’t do this. They will probably put these mutiliations on the national health. Done by muslim women medics of course.
And when the muslims take over completely and have access to British women as harem slaves the muslim women will be happy to mutilate the British women. At home, with rusty paring knives.
Posted by at 2:09 PM on June 25
Islam around the world
Melbourne sheik backs
calls to legalise polygamy
The Age [Melbourne, AU], by Barney Zwartz & Sarah Smiles Original Article
Posted By: FLgator - 6/25/2008 11:09:38 AM Post Reply
THE leader of Melbourne’s Somali community yesterday backed calls for polygamy to be made legal, as an Islamic women’s organisation said it was on the rise in Victoria. African community leader Berhan Ahmed estimated there were perhaps 20 polygamous families in Melbourne’s African community, mostly Somalis and mostly refugees.
Posted by at 3:51 PM on June 25
At www.intact.ca, you can watch a video of infant male circumcision being performed, and you can get a lot of other information.
We have been conditioned to believe that what is cut off and thrown away is of no significance—that is so untrue.
Strap down a baby’s arms and legs and cut off an important part of his genital, and still (about half the time it’s done) without anesthetic. Certainly there is no harm in that.
People can be conditioned to accept anything. White people are no exception. Just look at our currently prevalent ideas on race.
Posted by H. Dumpty at 11:12 AM on June 26
I ssaw an internet video of a female circumcision of a 3 year old girl. It took a long time. What struck me was what was done to her legs. Her legs were forced almost up to her shoulders and then spread out. It looked to me as though the child would have a lot of hip and knee problems from the way her legs were forcibly held down in that position.
Posted by at 5:30 PM on June 26
MAIN GROUPS COMING TO THE U.K.:
1 GHANA 2 NIGERIA 3 NIGER 4 ERITREA 5 ETHIPOIA 6 SOMALIA 7 YEMEN
WHY are these groups coming to the U.K.? What for? Why are they being allowed into Britain? Did the British people ever ask for them to come? Hasn’t Britain got enough people already? What do ANY of these groups have in common with Britons?
Posted by at 7:33 PM on June 26
Do not equate FGM with circumcision. Female genital mutilation is hideously barbaric—and, in many cases, removing (yes, removing) the clitoris is not the only “procedure”. This is done without any anesthesia, by women (what a shocker!)who verify that the mutilation is complete. There is a graphic video of this on the internet.
If that is too much, read Ayan Hrsi Ali (spelling?).
Posted by at 8:46 PM on June 26
I think maybe it is time to raise a Black Legion and send it into Africa to shape the place up. It is time for some radical changes in the world. One of those changes could be to raise a legion of volunteer blacks from America and equip them and let them go into Africa and let them get the violence under control. Think about it. No one could blame the country for being racist. This would be volunteer force, made up of young dedicated Black Men and Women who could carve out a brave new world in an old world. Wow1
Posted by at 2:48 PM on July 4