Survivors share their stories

Around 27 women and their family members from across the world have come forward to speak about their lives after female genital mutilation or cutting (FGM/C) was performed on them.

As a part of International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation on February 6, NGO Sahiyo and Storycenter released a story of one of such survivors under the series Voices to End FGM/C.

For the next 26 weeks, a story

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each would be released every Monday. Speaking about the release and the exercise of making women comfortable to speak about their incident, Aarefa Johri, co-founder, Sahiyo, said that these participants received training at workshops so as to make them comfortable to create videos and share their own stories.

“It is relieving experience wherein women can come out and share their stories, because keeping all of that bottled up further affects them, and at times they don’t know how to put their perspective in their words,” said Johri.

A participant from the country, who went by the pseudonym Su Sun, said, “To share this process with other women was a beautiful process of collective empowerment that allowed us not to be invisible and do so while using our imagination, art, poetry, music, colours.” FGC is a process which involves removal or cutting of skin from the clitoral hood of women, mostly when they are children.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), it has no known health benefits.