There are 2,500 victims of female genital mutilation living in Ireland, but the global drive to eliminate the practice is proving difficult. Can western opposition alone overcome deep-rooted cultural traditions? asks RUADHAN Mac CORMAICMigration Correspondent
WHEN IFRAH AHMED’S memory tries to impose order on the inchoate jumble of a life that had her flee the turmoil of Somalia and travel alone to Ireland before she had even turned 18, it returns each time to the one watershed. Before and after. Then and now. She was eight years old.
“People remember their birthday every year – they say, ‘This is the day I was born.’ But I remember this every single month – I get sick, I cry, and I stay at home. That’s the only thing I remember,” she says evenly, holding her gaze. The drone of the lunchtime Dublin traffic is so loud it might be passing through the room.
“I didn’t get morphine for the pain. My heart goes ‘click’ when I think about . It was really painful. If I sit now, close my eyes and think about it, I remember, and it’s just like an electric shock in my body. It goes like that. I just think, oh God.”
Three years have passed since Ahmed, now 20, arrived here with little notion of where she found herself, what language she would need or what turns might lie ahead. It’s an almost implausibly short time, listening to her talk so easily, so assuredly, her reserve outdone by remarkable poise and a chatty warmth.
What Ahmed recalls – tahoor or “purification” in Sudan, bondo or “initiation” in Sierra Leone, female genital mutilation (FGM) in English – is a procedure she underwent twice. First it was carried out by a relative at home when she was eight, and then again five years later due to complications the first time.
By the World Health Organisation’s estimate, it puts her among between 100 million and 140 million girls and women who have been subjected to FGM in more than two dozen African countries, as well as in parts of Asia and the Middle East. Unicef reckons three million girls undergo it every year. And according to AkiDwA, a Dublin-based network of African women, she can be counted among 2,500 women who are living with its consequences in Ireland.
In the mildest form of genital cutting, a girl has the skin covering her clitoris nicked or excised. The severest variety, called infibulation, involves cutting away her external genitalia and the sewing up of her vagina. Prevalence varies between regions and countries, but in seven African countries it’s almost universal (more than 85 per cent) and in four more the rate is more than 60 per cent. The procedure is generally carried out on girls under the age of 15, but 50 per cent of girls who are subjected to it in Ethiopia, Mali and Mauritania are thought to be under five years of age.
Ahmed describes how, apart from the innumerable health effects female circumcision can cause – among them chronic pain, excessive bleeding, shock, infection, depression, potentially lethal complications with childbirth and increased susceptibility to HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases – there are the countless quieter ordeals that never show up on a medical chart.
She relates the sense of embarrassment that keeps many girls from explaining their condition to Irish doctors, the worries she has about childbirth and how excruciating it can be to tell people what she has gone through.
“For myself, it’s really very painful when I get my period. I can’t go to school, I can’t do anything . . . All girls who have been through this same as me.”
“I’m not talking about my religion or my culture – I love my country – but you feel ashamed of yourself, telling your doctor everything. What if I see him on the street? You just feel ashamed.”
A WORLDWIDE PUSH to eliminate FGM in recent years has resulted in the practice being outlawed in a number of African and European countries, but enforcement of such laws is notoriously patchy. And in countries where genital cutting is deeply rooted and widespread, stamping it out is a slow process. In Sierra Leone, where the prevalence rate is estimated at 94 per cent and cutting is usually carried out by older women with knives, razor blades or shards of glass, politicians see it as a vote-winner. The wife of one candidate in the 2002 presidential election sponsored the circumcision of 1,500 young girls during the election campaign, while Zainab Bangura, the only female candidate in the same election, blamed her poor showing on a rumour that she opposed female circumcision. She got 1 per cent of the vote.
According to Brima Sheriff, Amnesty International’s director in Sierra Leone, such firm popular support makes it difficult for those with misgivings to raise their voice. Women who speak out against it face being ostracised, while the unique social status and connections (not to mention income) enjoyed by practitioners mean dissent is rarely heard.
“When you speak openly against the practice, you are considered as a deviant and not a member of the community, and some people, because of the stigma, refuse to speak out openly,” he says by telephone.
As if to underline his point, Sheriff describes how, when he made an amateur film about FGM in Sierra Leone in 2005, he received threatening phone calls and had a bottle thrown at his window at night.
But despite such ample cause for discouragement, Sheriff sees tentative signs of progress. “Five or 10 years ago, if you went into a community and started to talk about FGM, you would be chased out of that community. It would be a risk to your life. But now we even have traditional practitioners who have abandoned it working with us there’s a lot of discussion now.”
In Sierra Leone as elsewhere, the FGM debate is fraught and highly charged, and opinion is divided on how best to put the case against. Its cultural meaning varies across Africa, among Christians and Muslims; it is considered variously as a female rite of passage, a spiritual requirement, a guarantor of chastity, a boost to fertility, a prerequisite to marriage and a cleansing ritual. Many Africans react indignantly when the tradition is denounced by westerners as barbaric or primitive. The best way to bring about change, campaigners agree, is to steer clear of cultural judgment and focus on health. Sheriff also puts a monetary case when he visits communities, speaking to parents’ ambitions for the girls to convince them not to circumcise.
“You tell them, if you cut this girl, she is normally going to be forced into early marriage. And if she is forced into early marriage, that means she is going to drop out of school, and if she drops out of school, she’s not going to get the requisite education to attain the sort of positions that can benefit the family,” he says. Sometimes people shift silently in their seats; others can be persuaded.
Many campaigners insist that outlawing FGM is counter-productive in countries where prevalence rates are so high that virtually the whole population would be criminalised. They point to places where the introduction of a straight ban fed resentment and pushed the practice into the shadows, making it more difficult for opponents to be heard.
BUT IN EUROPE, momentum is gathering behind further action. Amnesty International has begun an online campaign to lobby the EU Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security, Jacques Barrot, to adopt a strategy to deal with FGM and to assist those who underwent the practice and are now living in Europe. For its part, the European Parliament this week endorsed a report calling for an outright ban on the practice on EU territory.
In Ireland, Minister for Health Mary Harney confirmed last week that she is considering the introduction of specific legislation to ban FGM. The Government had previously argued that the practice already constituted an offence under the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997, but a recommendation from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child that Ireland enact a law similar to those in countries such as Belgium, Italy and Spain has put the issue back on the agenda.
Campaigners see further cause for optimism in the adoption last November of the Republic’s first action plan on female circumcision, which repeated the call for criminalisation and stressed the need for improved support in the health and asylum services for women who have undergone mutilation. At present, says Siobán O’Brien Green of AkiDwA, there are no professional medical guidelines in Ireland for dealing with FGM, and it doesn’t feature on any midwifery curriculum here.
The action plan also stated that any new legislation should include the principle of extraterritoriality, which would make it an offence to bring a girl out of the country to be circumcised. In those countries where such a provision exists, it has rarely been used, but O’Brien Green says its significance should not be underestimated.
“It acts as a very strong deterrent,” she says. “It’s a powerful message, to say ‘We value children’ – and not just citizens, but girls who are ordinarily resident in the country.”
Ifrah Ahmed has been thriving of late. She recently took part in the Miss Africa pageant in Dublin, and has just finished a literacy course that she excelled at and loved. One of her hopes is some day to become a nurse. Another is that there soon won’t be a need for her to put herself forward as proof that FGM is just not a problem to be dealt with over there, but one that needs to be reckoned with here as well. Why else would she keep making her voice heard, she says to herself.
“I don’t want children to go through it again. I just want children to be safe . . . They’re innocent. They don’t need that. Let them live fully.”