Cairo urged to end ‘silence’ over FGM
Ahead of ‘cutting season’
LONDON, April 5, (Agencies): Silence around female genital mutilation (FGM) in Egypt is costing lives, campaigners warned on Tuesday ahead of the traditional “cutting season” when thousands of girls are expected to undergo the ancient ritual.
They called for better sex education in schools and urged clerics to talk about FGM at Friday prayers.
National data suggests almost 90 percent of girls and women in Egypt have undergone FGM, which involves the partial or total removal of the external genitalia.
Egypt banned the practice in 2008, but it remains widespread with around three quarters of procedures carried out by health professionals, a report by antiFGM group 28 Too Many said on Tuesday.
There has been mounting concern following the deaths of several girls during botched procedures, including a teenager who bled to death in a hospital last May.
“The silence around the harmful practice ... has cost too many Egyptian girls their lives,” said Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy, a leading voice on women’s rights in the Arab world.
Egypt, which has the highest number of women affected by FGM in the world, strengthened its law last year, but 28 Too Many said convictions were rare and sentences light.
It called for law enforcement officers and community leaders to be especially vigilant during the cutting season which peaks in May and June.
Campaigners said a lack of sex education and information about FGM were preventing its eradication.
Taboo
“Something that hurts so many girls and women is kept silent and taboo because it has to do with our vaginas and with sex,” Eltahawy said in a statement.
The report said FGM in Egypt was often carried out in the name of religion and perpetuated by a “pervasive idea that women are ‘oversexed’, and that FGM curbs their sexual appetite”.
More than half of Egyptians believe a husband prefers his wife to be cut and around half of men think it prevents adultery, it said.
Surveys suggest around half of Egyptians believe FGM is a religious requirement even though it is not mentioned in the Holy Quran or Bible.
Even medical practitioners will often defer to their cleric over anything taught in medical school, 28 Too Many said.
Campaigners said religious leaders from all faiths must speak out against FGM and called for better training for medical staff.
“... it is incredibly disappointing to see that despite encouraging work to end FGM in Egypt, medicalisation continues to be a huge concern and the prevalence of FGM remains extremely high,” said 28 Too Many founder Ann-Marie Wilson.
Worldwide, more than 200 million girls and women have undergone FGM, according to UN estimates.
Last year, Egypt has approved a law that will increase jail terms for those who perform female circumcisions, raising the maximum sentence to seven years from two, according to the state’s official gazette on Wednesday.
Genital cutting of girls, often referred to as female genital mutilation (FGM) or circumcision, is banned in Egypt but the practice remains common as a rite of passage and is often viewed as a way to protect their chastity.
More than nine in 10 women and girls aged 15 to 49 in Egypt have undergone FGM, but the number has declined in recent years, according to data collected by the United Nations.
Female genital cutting is performed on both Muslim and Christian girls in Egypt and Sudan, but is rare elsewhere in the Arab world. It is also common in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia.
The new law stipulates jail sentences of between five and seven years for doctors who perform the operation and one to three for parents who order it.
Egypt’s parliament passed the bill on increased sentences in August, but it required presidential approval to come into law.
The Egyptian court acquitted a doctor in November charged with committing female genital mutilation that led to a 13-year-old girl’s death in a Nile Delta village, the country’s first trial on charges of breaking the ban on the practice.
Raslan Fadl, the first doctor in Egypt to be put on trial for committing female genital mutilation, is still practising. And in this Nile Delta Village, he has plenty of patients.
Young girls and their families on a recent day sat in Fadl’s waiting room, where the bright yellow walls are decorated with Winnie the Pooh pictures, in the same building where Sohair el-Batea came for her operation last year. Residents call him a well-respected figure in the community, known for his charity work.
It could not be determined whether any were at his office for “circumcision”, as it is known here. But Fadl’s continued popularity demonstrates the challenges to curbing the practice in Egypt, where more than 90 per cent of women are estimated to have undergone it one of the highest rates in the world.
Female genital mutilation was criminalised in 2008 and the most important Sunni Muslim religious authority has declared it dangerous and without any religious justification. The UN says there appears to be a slow reduction in the rate of the practice, but that it is still widespread.
Outcry
Even in the home village of the girl, Dierb Biqtaris, there is little outcry against the practice.
Rasha Mohammed, a friend of Sohair, remembers that the girl felt scared before the operation and didn’t want to go. But Rasha chalks up her death to an accident, saying 11 other girls underwent FGM with the doctor that day and “nothing happened to them.”
Sohair’s grandmother declined to comment on the case, saying a year and a half has passed and she doesn’t want to bring up the topic again. “It was her destiny,” she said.
Emad Hamdi, a local worker, said he is still weighing whether to circumcise his daughters. He said he’s heard that without it, a girl would be “sexually voracious”, which could be “dangerous for her” a common justification for the practice. A widely-used Egyptian Arabic term for it translates literally as “purification.”
Genital mutilation is practised in 29 countries, most of them in East and West Africa, but also in Egypt and parts of Iraq and Yemen.