The first lady of Sierra Leone has denied that she supports female genital mutilation amid rising anger around her perceived approval of the practice.
But in an exclusive response to the Guardian, Fatima Maada Bio, the wife of President Julius Maada Bio, also said she would not openly condemn FGM until she saw “reliable data” that the practice was harmful.
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An estimated 4.5 million girls worldwide are at risk of undergoing female genital mutilation this year, the United Nations warned on Friday.
Many of the girls at risk are under the age of five, the UN’s children’s agency UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a joint statement that was issued on the International Day of Zero Tolerance for FGM.
A new paper in a highly regarded British Medical Journal publication has sparked outrage for attempting to launch a debate on the so-called “harms of the current global anti-female genital mutilation (FGM) campaign.”
It says coverage of the practice, where the female genitals are deliberately cut, injured or changed, often relies on “titillating sensationalism,” and complains that this “leads to vilification of migrants, infantilisation of people and their cultures, and failure to recognise the agency of the women concerned and their communities.”
Yesterday as I went through boarding at Gatwick Airport I smiled as I watched all the excited children going off on their holidays with their families. Everyone had on their new holiday clothes, and despite the crowded check-ins, people were in a good mood. I boarded my flight to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. Addis is a busy hub with connections across Africa.
As we began to cruise, I noticed that many of the women on my flight were wearing full black abayas with hijabs, as were the girls they were with, who were aged between eight and 12. I soon realised that these groups consisted only of women: little girls with their mothers and grannies. There were no men. I remembered that this was the start of the long summer holiday, and that these children did not know what was going to happen to them.
The Center for the Study of Political Islam (CSPII) has published the first of its yearly FGM Indexes. It includes an estimate of the number of girls and women who have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM), plus what proportion of this estimate is attributable to Islamic communities and to non-Islamic communities . A second report analyses the most important references to FGM in the foundational texts of Islamic doctrine.
Child was taken from London to Africa for procedure and confided in secondary school teacher years later
A woman has been convicted of assisting in the mutilation of the genitals of a three-year-old British girl after claiming she would be “cursed” if she objected.
Amina Noor, 39, from London, took the girl for the procedure in Africa. She told the Old Bailey she would have been “disowned” by community members if she did not take part.
The victim kept the mutilation secret for 13 years until confiding in her English teacher at a London secondary school. An examination by doctors at University College London found that the girl’s clitoris had been completely removed.
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And God forbid you give a misbehaving child a swat!
Judge throws out historic female genital mutilation case, calls feds ‘vindictive’
A federal judge on Tuesday threw out the nation’s first female genital mutilation case, delivering a major blow to the prosecution and FGM survivors who had hoped the Detroit case would help end a practice that is still performed on millions of girls worldwide.
In dismissing the four-year-old case, U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman concluded the prosecution was vindictive in seeking new charges against the accused, who had previously convinced the judge to declare the federal FGM ban as unconstitutional.
A 13-year-old girl has died after undergoing female genital mutilation (FGM) in Somalia, as activists report a rise in the practice during the pandemic.
Fartun Hassan Ahmed, the daughter of nomadic pastoralists, bled to death after being cut earlier this month in the village of Jeerinle in the state of Galmudug, her mother said.
Activists believe it is the first reported case of an FGM fatality in Somalia since the death of 10-year-old Deeqa Dahir Nuur in 2018. With one of the highest rates of cutting in the world, the east African country has no national law against the practice.
FGM has been banned in Egypt since 2008, yet the country still has one of the highest rates of the practice in the world.
Among some conservative Muslim communities there, women are regarded as “unclean” and “not ready for marriage” unless FGM – the deliberate cutting or removal of a female’s external genitalia – is performed. Under the law, doctors can be jailed for up to seven years if found guilty of carrying out the procedure, and anyone who requests it faces up to three years in prison.
