THE FORGOTTEN. Millions of little girls affected by female genital mutilation

While most of the children spend their days surrounded by a loving family, playing outside with their friends and going to school, let’s not forget about the other children that are not that fortunate. THE FORGOTTEN: children exposed to poverty and famine, forced labour, violence or suffering in the war zones.

EvoNews will publish a series of articles which aim to bring awareness to these serious issues and inspire people to take action to improve the worrisome situation of millions of children that are struggling instead of living their childhood without a care in the world.

Female genital mutilation is an old traditional practice of removing a woman’s clitoris and sometimes the entire external genitalia as a way to control the woman’s sexual drive and maintain her virginity until marriage. The practice is widely carried out in Africa, especially in Egypt, where up to 91% of women aged 15 to 49 have been mutilated in this way, according to Egyptian government figures.

UNICEF estimates that in Africa and the Middle East, one in five women who have been forced to undergo the procedure lives in Egypt. There are approximately 125 million women worldwide that have undergone genital cutting in 29 countries.

However, very few talk about it, except a number of tireless Egyptian activists like Nawal El Saadawi, now 85, who has been fighting the practice since she was a Health Minister back in the 70s when she published the book `Women and sex`. It was the first in a series of over 40 books about the regressions carried out against women’s bodies like female circumcision and the fixation with women’s virginity in traditional Middle Eastern societies. Saadawi lost her public function as a result of speaking out against female mutilation and in the 80’s she was even imprisoned for her views, she went into exile for a few years and returned to Egypt in 1996.

During all this time she never stopped talking and writing about the aggression carried out against women. In an interview with the Guardian, she said that even though Egypt has passed a law in 2008 that bans female genital mutilation and imposes sentences of up to two years in prison or fines of up to 5,000 Egyptian pounds (about 700 dollars), the practice is still present.

Education, the only way to stop the practice

”It has stayed the same. You can’t change such a deep-rooted habit by passing a law. You need education. The law was passed to satisfy the west. They wanted to cover that disgrace, not to eradicate the practice itself. You have to change the minds of the mothers and fathers and even of the girls themselves, who have been brainwashed to accept it,” she told the Guardian.

Typically carried out by a traditional circumciser using a blade, genital mutilation is conducted in childhood, as early as a few days after birth, to puberty and even into adulthood. In half the countries for which national figures are available, most girls are cut before the age of five and procedures differ according to the country or ethnic group.

They include removal of the clitoral hood and clitoral glans, removal of the inner labia and removal of the inner and outer labia and closure of the vulva. In this last procedure, known as infibulation, a small hole is left for the passage of urine and menstrual fluid. The vagina is opened for intercourse and opened further for childbirth, through surgical procedure.

The practice is rooted in gender inequality, attempts to control women’s sexuality and it is usually initiated and carried out by the mothers, who see it as a source of honour, and who fear that failing to have their daughters cut will expose the girls to social exclusion.

There are no health benefits

The health issues resulting can include recurrent infections, difficulty urinating and passing menstrual flow, chronic pain, the development of cysts, an inability to get pregnant, complications during childbirth and fatal bleeding.

There have been international efforts since the 1970s to persuade practitioners to abandon the practice, and since 2010 the United Nations has called upon health care providers to stop performing all forms of the procedure. Even though it has been outlawed or restricted in most of the countries in which it occurs, the laws are poorly enforced, as Nawal El Saadawi explained. Saadawi herself was a victim of genital mutilation. At the age of six, in the summer of 1937, she was pinned down by four women in her home in Egypt, who carried out the procedure.

“Since I was a child that deep wound left in my body has never healed. I lay in a pool of blood. After a few days, the bleeding stopped, and the daya (midwife) peered between my thighs and said, ‘All is well. The wound has healed, thanks be to God.’ But the pain was there, like an abscess in my flesh,” she wrote in her first autobiography, `A Daughter of Isis`.

In 2007, UNFPA and UNICEF launched a joint programme in Africa to reduce the practice of female genital mutilation by 40 percent within the 0–15 age group and eliminate it from at least one country by 2012. However, the practice was to firmly rooted in culture and tradition for that to happen and the goals were not met.

In 2008, several UN bodies recognized female genital mutilation as a human rights violation and in 2010, the UN called upon health care providers to stop carrying out the procedures, including reinfibulation after childbirth and symbolic nicking. In 2012 the General Assembly passed resolution 67/146, “Intensifying global efforts for the elimination of female genital mutilations”