Canada must do more to protect women,
The Canadian government, our front line health-care system and social service networks across the GTA need to address the issue of female genital mutilation (FGM) immediately. Women in some ethnocultural communities are already tackling this practice, but they need to be more effectively supported if Canada really wants to deal with what the government acknowledges is an “abhorrent practice.”
As reported by the Star’s Jayme Poisson and Michele Henry, the practice of sending girls abroad for female genital mutilation occurs around the GTA, affecting potentially thousands of Canadians. Young women and girls have the surgical mutilation performed on them, sometimes by health-care practitioners and sometimes by people with no formal medical training.
According to the World Health Organization, FGM has no medical benefits but nonetheless has been practised in some 30 countries, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, on more than 200 million women and girls alive today. It can cause severe pain, urinary problems, infection and even death. At the same time, the psychological impacts can be devastating.
Some other countries, such as the United Kingdom, are ahead of Canada in fighting FGM. Britain has gathered data on the practice — an estimated137,000 women in Britain have been affected. And a committee of the British House of Commons last year called it a “national scandal” that no one has ever been convicted under that country’s law banning FGM.
Canada has no such statistics to even begin understanding the scope of the issue here. Whether legislative action like the U.K.’s Female Genital Mutilation Act, prohibiting any association with the practice on girls at home or abroad, is the right approach for Canada, is debatable (it is a Criminal Code offence to perform female circumcision). But more work to understand the complex issue here, and possible approaches to addressing it, is certainly needed.
As Corinne Packer, a public health researcher at the University of Ottawa, says: “We’re behind the ball.” Canada, she adds, is “putting (its) head in the ground” on the issue of FGM.
Agovernment that proudly professes itself to be feminist can and should do more. In response to the Star’s reports, the minister for the status of women, Maryam Monsef, and the minister for international development, Marie-Claude Bibeau, on Monday condemned the practice of FGM as “a form of gender-based violence that our government is committed to addressing both at home and abroad.” They promised that “anyone who commits these crimes will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
But the measures they pointed to in order to demonstrate the government’s opposition to FGM fall considerably short of what’s needed. Last month, they noted, the government announced $101 million for a strategy to fight gender-based violence. Part of that money should be directed at efforts to eradicate this extreme form of violence against girls and young women.
In addition, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced Canada’s commitment to women’s issues around the world, pledging $650 million to promote reproductive health and other rights globally, along with a new approach to foreign aid that will see 95 per cent of such funding directly tied to gender equality and female empowerment by 2022.
With hundreds of millions of dollars being promised for such causes, relevant ministries and government agencies here at home also need funding to begin properly tracking FGM and understanding what needs to be done to better address the issue.
Toronto doctors Rachel Spitzer and Joseph Daly, both obstetrician-gynecologists, perform surgeries on female patients to reverse the effects of FGM. They say many women in the GTA don’t feel comfortable addressing what has happened to them with healthcare professionals unfamiliar with FGM, a practice surrounded by complex, centuries-old cultural traditions and values.
Addressing this uneasiness will also require proper funding. That could include clinics to educate practitioners while providing medical or counselling services to help women and their families deal with the painful legacy of FGM.
One thing is clear about the FGM issue in the GTA and Canada: women like Yasmin Mumed should be at the forefront of initiatives to understand and address the issue. The 23-year-old, raised in Scarborough, now attends the University of Guelph. Three years before arriving in Canada at the age of nine, Mumed was subjected to FGM. She is now fundraising to have surgery to reverse the effects at a California clinic that specializes in the procedure.
She looked, but could not find any type of support network or group in the GTA.
Mumed told the Star that the way to tackle FGM in this country is by “complicating the conversation.” Governments must walk a fine line in fighting the practice while not demonizing families or whole communities where it has been carried on by generation after generation. Mumed and her friends talk about it “stopping with us.”
Her generation represents the key to addressing FGM in Canada. For women like Mumed who understand both sides of the issue, the work many of them have already begun will really see benefits if the government funds and supports much-needed initiatives.
Trudeau has made women’s health — physical and emotional — and their empowerment a key global initiative by putting forward a “feminist” foreign assistance policy. For the same reasons, his government needs to tackle FGM in Canada in a more determined and effective way.
Governments must walk a fine line in fighting the practice while not demonizing families or whole communities where it has been carried on by generation after generation