UN Wire
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres marked the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation with a speech calling for a global effort to end the practice. Studies suggest around 200 million women and girls have been subjected to FGM, a practice the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal aims to abolish by 2030.
Female Genital Mutilation is a Gruesome Impediment to the Empowerment of Women
By Ruth Kagia and Siddharth Chatterjee*
NAIROBI, Feb 6 2017 (IPS) – On 06 February 2017, the world marks the 14th International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).
Consider this, approximately 200 million girls and women alive today globally, have undergone some form of FGM.
One cannot but despair at the indolent pace towards elimination of one of the most brutal cultural norms, a practice that continues to hold women and a Nation’s development back.
While Kenya must be applauded for having brought down the national FGM prevalence from 32 percent to 21 percent in the last 12 years, there are still some communities where about nine in ten girls are mutilated, often forced to leave school and into early marriage.
An often-unnoticed reality is that the effects of FGM go far beyond the negative physical and psychosocial consequences. The social and economic damage done to entire countries has only started to be realised.
The origins of practices such as FGM and their continuation over millennia are traced to man’s objective of subjugating women. Alas, the dire consequences of such practices are affecting the entire population, including those in non-practicing communities.
In 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recognized the close connection between FGM, gender inequality and development, urging global action to end FGM by 2030.
FGM ranks as one of the worst manifestation of gender inequality. Last year, UNDP’s Africa Human Development Report estimated that gender inequality is costing sub-Saharan Africa six percent of its GDP leading to around US$ 95 billion in lost revenue.
The Government of Kenya is demonstrating commendable determination to eliminate the practice. Increased resources to the national Anti-FGM Board have resulted in good progress towards implementing the Prohibition of the FGM Act and tangible strides are being made to find alternative rites of passage.
From a medical point of view, FGM causes severe health problems as well as complications in childbirth increasing risks of newborn deaths. Adolescent girls are far more likely to die from childbirth-related complications and face greater risks of getting obstetric fistula, which is the most devastating of all childbirth related injuries. They are also at higher risk of contracting HIV.
While education is arguably the best solution for ensuring women and girls gain equal access to political and socio-economic power in society, FGM makes this impossible because very often for the girls, post-mutilation, is end of schooling, early marriage, and denial of sexual and reproductive health and rights. This is a sure recipe for perpetuation of poverty, misery and inequality in society. We therefore must seek alternative rites of passage to broaden opportunities for girls while recognizing this important milestone.
For the thousands of girls to whom every school holiday comes as a choice between running from home and facing a gruesome, dream-crushing ritual, the country must accelerate the search for lasting solutions.
To make real progress, this battle must not be seen as just a confrontation against a harmful cultural practice, but as an all-encompassing effort to address the political, economic and social drivers that hamper African women’s advancement.
Programmes must include addressing the gaps between legal provisions and practice in gender laws; transforming discriminatory institutional settings and securing women’s economic, social and political participation.
Gains in reducing gender inequality will be defined by more women finishing secondary school, more of them in the formal workplace, more women entrepreneurs accessing credit and more of them contributing in political as well as social decision-making processes.
During a visit to Kenya, former US President Barack Obama observed, just because something is part of our past doesn’t mean it defines our future. The progress towards Kenya’s Vision 2030 and beyond must include dealing with harmful traditional practices and other scourges that have held back women from progressing.
The UN Secretary General Mr Antonio Guterres has said, “Sustainable development demands full human rights for all women and girls. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development promises to an end to this practice by 2030.”
In the countdown to the realisation of SDGs and Vision 2030, Kenya must decide that FGM and gender related discrimination practices cannot stand in the way of progress any longer. The good news is; Kenya is making remarkable progress.
Ruth Kagia is a senior advisor in the office of the President of Kenya. Siddharth Chatterjee is the United Nations Resident Coordinator to Kenya.
UN Chief calls for global action against female genital mutilation
MNA- IRAN
TEHRAN, Feb. 06 (MNA) – UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in his message on the Intl. Day for Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation, 6 February 2017, called for global action against this heinous human rights violation.
“Female genital mutilation denies women and girls their dignity, endangers their health, and causes needless pain and suffering, with consequences that endure for a lifetime and can even be fatal,” UN Chief Antonio Guterres said in his message.
He went on to add, “sustainable development demands full human rights for all women and girls. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development promises an end to this practice by 2030.”
“On this Day of Zero Tolerance, let us build on positive momentum and commit to intensifying global action against this heinous human rights violation for the sake of all affected women and girls, their communities, and our common future,” his message concluded.
“Medicalisation” of female genital mutilation is serious threat – experts
by Emma Batha | Thomson Reuters Foundation
Growing awareness of FGM risks has led parents to take their daughters to clinics, where many health workers see procedure as a source of income
LONDON, Feb 6 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A growing trend for midwives and nurses to carry out female genital mutilation (FGM) is undermining global efforts to eradicate the internationally condemned practice, experts have warned.
Morissanda Kouyate head of the Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices called for courts to get tough on health workers convicted of carrying out FGM.
He also urged professional medical and health associations to expel members who repeatedly perform FGM.
“Medicalisation is one of the biggest threats against the programme to eliminate FGM,” Kouyate told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from Rome ahead of international FGM awareness day on Monday.
He called for countries to revise their laws on FGM to make clear that health professionals convicted of offences should face the maximum sentences allowed under the legislation.
An estimated 200 million girls and women worldwide have undergone FGM, which usually involves the partial or total removal of the female genitalia and can cause a host of serious health problems.
Speaking at a global conference on FGM in Rome last week, Kouyate said medicalisation was an unfortunate result of early efforts to tackle FGM, which had focussed on the health risks.
The ancient ritual – practised in at least 27 African countries and parts of Asia and the Middle East – is usually carried out by traditional cutters, often using unsterilised blades or knives.
In some cases, girls can bleed to death or die from infections. Later on, FGM can cause fatal childbirth complications.
Kouyate said growing awareness of the risks had lead parents to take their daughters to clinics.
The trend had been encouraged by “the open arms approach” of many health workers who saw FGM as a source of income.
Medicalisation is widespread in Egypt, Sudan, Guinea, Kenya, Nigeria and Yemen, according to U.N. data. In Egypt and Sudan, FGM is also carried out by doctors, Kouyate said.
LAWS FLOUTED
Campaigners and officials at the conference repeatedly voiced concerns over medicalisation which they said served to legitimise the practice.
Kouyate, a doctor from Guinea where FGM is almost universal, described FGM as “the greatest violation of a woman’s rights”.
“The time has come to call a spade a spade – it is mutilation,” he told the conference.
Unlike traditional cutters, he said health workers fully understood the implications of cutting the genitals.
“Whatever the size of the cut it’s wrong. It has to be stopped and it has to be prosecuted,” he added.
Most African countries affected by FGM have banned the ritual but laws are usually poorly enforced.
“We have a law, but everything else is missing,” Senegalese parliamentarian Aminata Diallo said. “The problem is nobody reports the situation.”
She said she was pushing for a law that would make it a crime to fail to report FGM.
Many judges were scared of handling FGM cases, Diallo said, following a trial in 2004 in which a judge was attacked and left paralysed.
Campaigners said families often circumvented laws by crossing borders to have their girls cut.
Parents were also carrying out the ritual in secret late at night and increasingly getting their daughters cut as babies or toddlers to minimise the risk of detection.
The head of Kenya’s FGM prosecution unit, Christine Nanjala, said they had handled 76 cases since 2014.
But she said there were ethical dilemmas, particularly where adult women had asked to undergo FGM. “Do you treat them as victims or criminals?” she asked.
(Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, which covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org to see more stories.)
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