by Hibo Wardere
A number of projects have been established in various African countries, dedicated to finding alternatives to FGM while preserving cultural traditions. Given how firmly rooted it is within certain cultures, it is no wonder that health practitioners in Britain are concerned about the 173,000 girls, identified in a recent report, who have been born in the UK to women from FGM-practising countries.6 The same report looked at the reasons behind the continuation of cutting here in the UK.
In a number of communities, young women who do not undergo FGM may face stigma, discrimination and threats from family and community members . . . A recurring theme for the justification of FGM in practising communities is to attenuate the sexual desire of females in order to conform to prescribed social norms relating to girls’ and women’s moral conduct. FGM is often linked to marriagability of girls and family ‘honour’. A commonly held belief in FGM-practising communities is that girls and women who have not undergone FGM have an insatiable sexual appetite which has to be restrained to prevent bringing dishonour and shame to families.
My three daughters will have been among those 173,000 girls identified in that report, and yet they are safe because I decided that the practising of FGM within my family would end with me. There are many other mothers out there like me, who prioritised their child’s safety and wellbeing, and their right to a body free from pain and infections. But despite the best intentions of some mothers, the cultural pressures prove stronger than their individual will. I have heard stories from my friends of their mothers doing everything they could to prevent their child from being cut and yet it was the wishes of the rest of the family that prevailed. One friend of mine remembers seeing her mother at the door, battling to get in as she herself was forced down on to the floor and cut. Imagine that mother’s pain at seeing her child suffer the same as she had, and being physically restrained from trying to prevent the abuse.
Another FGM survivor who, like me, has asked herself many times how her mother could have subjected her to the practice is Fatuma Farah, who was cut in Somalia as a child and now lives and works in London as a psychotherapist, often working with women who have been cut. Much like my own story, Fatuma describes a loving mother who fiercely protected her daughter until she was cut at five. Fatuma came from a family of eight boys – as her parents’ only daughter, she felt very much loved and cherished. As such, she found it even harder to understand how her mother could have allowed her to suffer such an abuse, but it only goes to illustrate how deeply ingrained the practice is.
My mum passed away two years ago and it was always a sore point between us even until the end. I cared for her in the last three months before her death and we had a lot of conversations. My mum was a very lovely and caring woman and she apologised for all the mistakes she’d made, but she never apologised for the FGM. Until her dying day she didn’t think she’d done anything wrong. My mother was illiterate and she didn’t have any education, and she thought wrongly that it was a religious requirement. She also didn’t have the medical knowledge to know or understand the complications of it. Of course she knew there was a lot of pain involved, but she didn’t know any better. As far as she was concerned, she’d had it, her mother had it, everyone around her was having it and I would have it.
Fatuma is sure that had her father been around more when she was that age instead of out at work, he would have convinced her mother not to have her cut. ‘He was more educated than my mother, he would have spoken to her and said don’t do it.’ As I’ve explained, men were often absent from the daily run of things, it was very common in Somalian households at that time. However, unlike Fatuma, even if there had been more input from my father, I am not convinced that it would have made a difference because men traditionally see gudnin as women’s business. For that reason, they turn a blind eye because they tell themselves that it doesn’t concern them. Just like other aspects of child-rearing, there are certain men who are happy to leave it to women, and because they don’t concern themselves with FGM, they never talk to women about it.
When I recently gave a talk to a packed town-hall meeting in north-east London, I didn’t expect any husbands or fathers to turn up, so I was amazed when I walked in and found sixty men waiting patiently to hear about a subject they’d long avoided. One of them was forty-two-year-old Abbas. Like most of the men there, he didn’t know what to expect when he’d walked into the room, perhaps wall-to-wall women, and yet every single chair was taken up by a man. One of the reasons Abbas had been persuaded to attend was because, as well as having three sons, he had a nine-year-old daughter, and he felt this talk might be relevant to him. He hadn’t had his little girl cut, not because he thought the practice was bad – he hadn’t given it too much thought before – but mostly because it appeared to him to be old-fashioned.
However, what he heard in that room that night, during the talk I gave, would change the way he thought about FGM forever.
I didn’t know until that talk about the medical problems. I didn’t know about the side effects, and I didn’t think that this was still practised a lot. FGM is not something that we talk to other Somalians about. Men don’t speak about women’s problems in our culture; it’s not something you have an open conversation about, not even within your own family.
Telling a roomful of Somalian men exactly what FGM was, I watched as realisation dawned on each of their faces. I saw them swallow hard when I used words like ‘clitoris’ and ‘vagina’, words that are not shared between men and women in our culture. But if FGM is carried out in the name of men, isn’t it important that we hear what they have to say?
Abbas describes how most Somalian men first encounter the practice:
I was very young, maybe eight or ten years old, when I first heard of FGM. It wasn’t called that in Somalia, it was called gudnin. As a young boy you can’t help but notice when your neighbours go through it, or your sisters . . .
You don’t question it because everyone does it; it is the norm and if you don’t do it you are different to the rest of the people. You are brainwashed about this idea, they make you believe that if girls don’t go through this then they are different, they are not normal girls, they are not good girls. That’s the only point of carrying out FGM, to protect her virginity until she gets married. It could be to stop the woman from having sex with a man, or stop the man from having sex with her, but old cultures don’t hold a man accountable; they’re instead always looking at women’s actions. I thought it was unfair and way out of date, but this was the seventies. I left Somalia for London in the nineties and I’m forty-two now. I didn’t think anyone was still doing it.
Abbas’s acknowledgement of the fact that he thought of FGM as simply a ‘woman’s problem’ is a sentiment that is repeated by many men, and it is exactly this mindset that means men play their part in allowing this practice to continue, simply by not asking any questions.
I didn’t know until your talk that it was [not prescribed by] religion. I didn’t know because I wasn’t interested that much, I was just neutral. I wasn’t saying no, and I wasn’t saying yes; I didn’t have good evidence to dismiss it or good evidence to accept it. I was standing in the middle of this argument, but when I heard it from your point of view and from a cleric who said from a religious point of view it’s not right, I was amazed.
I took the cleric, a friend of Yusuf’s, along with me for that reason, to tell the men who were there that this was not a religious practice, it was a cultural one. I have always found it impossible to understand how people who believe in God think that He would have created something imperfect, that we need to slice bits off girls because God didn’t create the female of the species properly the first time round. But there was no point in me telling people that; they needed to hear it from a religious person, and as Mohamed Abdulle spoke, I saw the men look up and pay closer attention. They really were learning something new.
Abbas also had no idea about the side effects that women suffer. He had no idea about the medic
al complications or the problems that can occur when giving birth. He had grown up, just like me, in a culture where FGM was so ingrained as a belief that nobody thought to question it, and, also like me, he thought that he’d left these ‘old-fashioned’ practices behind in Somalia. He had no idea that they had reached British shores.
I spoke to other men and everyone understood that something needs to be done, the reaction was very positive. It would be good if men stood up together and said, ‘Don’t do this for us.’ If we stood up and said no then it would stop. Women are doing this practice thinking that it is for men, but if we marched, if we signed petitions, if we went on television and told them that we don’t want FGM then maybe that would take the pressure off women.
I agree with Abbas: until men stand up against FGM and say, ‘I do not want this done to girls in my name’, the practice will continue. While men accept the practice thinking that women want it, women will do it thinking that men want it – this is what UNICEF referred to in a 2013 report as ‘pluralistic ignorance’.7 That’s why men are absolutely key to ending FGM.
Fatuma Farah used to work for the Ministry of Health in Somalia, and in her role there, she met a male doctor who was mobilising a group of men to go marching, to make it clear that they did not want little girls to be mutilated in their name. ‘I really do believe that had it happened, a big shift would have taken place,’ Farah told me, ‘but men didn’t want to do it; they said it was a big shame in their culture to talk about women’s genitals. I still believe it would have a huge impact on FGM if men stood up and marched and said no to it. And it’s very achievable.’
There have been other more successful instances of men taking a stand. There are thought to be more than one million cricket teams across the world – but there is only one Maasai team. The men compete in traditional dress, bowling in their shuka shawls and scoring runs while ornately decorated with colourful beaded headdresses. They look quite striking as they hit fours and sixes, and yet the message they deliver through their game is equally inspiring: end FGM. These young men are Maasai warriors, each of them between seventeen and twenty-two, an age when most of them would traditionally be ready for marriage. Instead, they are on a mission to convince their village elders to end the barbaric practice that has blighted the lives of young girls in their community for generations, via the game of cricket. These boys live in a remote tribe in the shadow of Mount Kenya. In their community, it is customary to cut girls at around the age of eleven or twelve. And once a girl has been cut, she is ready for marriage, which means she must also abandon her education.
Benjamin and Daniel are two of these Maasai warrior-cricketers. Their younger sister, Nancy, works hard at school – so hard, in fact, that she won a scholarship to study at an American secondary school in Kenya. When the time came for her to be cut and married off among her tribe, her brothers could not stand by and watch her education and her life be destroyed by FGM. Benjamin and Daniel managed to persuade their parents not to have Nancy cut and to let her continue her studies, but they received threats of physical violence from other members of their community as a result of speaking out. The brothers’ mission wasn’t just to save Nancy, it was to save other girls too, and so they turned to a British charity called Cricket Without Boundaries (CWB) to help them with their cause.
CWB was founded in the UK ten years ago and is primarily an HIV and AIDS awareness charity. Its aim is to teach boys and girls in African communities how to play cricket, alongside delivering valuable educational messages. They’d been working with the Maasai Cricket Warriors for seven or eight years, but this was the first time that the charity had been asked to deliver an anti-FGM message. ‘The boys had gained status in their community through cricket,’ says Hannah Weaver, chief executive of the charity. ‘It made them stars in their tribe, and it gave them the voice and the confidence to speak out. That’s the power of sport. But we knew that FGM was extremely culturally sensitive and we had to think long and hard about how we could make it work and deliver the project, while attempting to limit as much potential kick-back on the boys as possible.’ CWB enrolled the help of 28 Too Many and Hannah went out to Kenya to deliver the first programme in early 2015.
When we’re teaching communities about AIDS, we use cricket as a metaphor – we explain how important it is to protect yourself and your stumps in the game of cricket, and then liken that to protecting yourself by wearing a condom. We had to come up with similar analogies in the context of FGM, so we created the acronym ‘BAT’. ‘B’ stood for ‘breaking the silence’, and we likened it to how you have to use your voice in cricket – you have to call the ball and say, ‘It’s mine’, and you have to talk to your team-mates. The message was that if we break the silence of FGM then we can beat it. ‘A’ stood for ‘advocate of change’, so we talked about how in a game of cricket you change your game according to what’s happening with the ball. And ‘T’ stood for ‘team together’ – how working as a team in cricket makes you stronger, and how tackling FGM is not something you can do in isolation.
The programme also enabled boys and girls to play the sport together, which in turn opened up a conversation about FGM between them, allowing for a lot of myths to be debunked, according to Hannah.
It was really surprising to hear twelve- or thirteen-year-old boys saying that a girl had to be cut because if she wasn’t she would have lots of sex and won’t be tame. When we women stood up and told girls in classes that we ran charities, or we were midwives, or we were engineers and we weren’t cut, you heard them gasp. One girl even asked me if I had to ‘wrap’ myself – she thought that if you didn’t cut the clitoris it just grew longer and longer.
If these beliefs exist in this new generation of young boys, you can imagine the perceptions of men two generations before them. Mohamed is fifty-nine years old and came to live in Britain twenty years ago. He has been married for twenty-five years and has four sons:
I did think it was a good idea when I was a young man. It is some kind of guarantee. When you go to a shop and you buy something you get a warranty; that’s the view I had in those days, that my wife being cut was my guarantee that she was a virgin, you know that no other man has touched her. Now I’m a grown man I realise it is just an idea; whether she was touched or not it doesn’t make any difference. From the point of view of the woman, even if she wasn’t touched by a man before you, she could still commit adultery afterwards; it makes no sense. Looking back, it was a mixture of good and bad. The good was that you didn’t have to concern yourself that anybody had touched your wife before you; the bad side is seeing your wife suffer and complain about being in pain when you are intimate. I didn’t like it then; there was no pleasure in the bedroom for the first month. I felt pressure on me too. I wanted to do something about it for her – maybe some kind of lubricant – but there was nothing I could do. As a man you won’t even enjoy yourself in the bed; you can’t ignore it if your wife is complaining of pain. But as a man you don’t go out and speak about these things, not even to a doctor. You just suffer silently.
Of course, you can’t compare a man’s suffering – his lack of sexual enjoyment – with how a woman has suffered due to FGM, but just as Mohamed confesses, the experience isn’t good for either party. So would he want his sons to marry a woman who has been cut? He says he wouldn’t talk to them about such things, a hangover from the secrecy surrounding the subject back in Somalia, but it’s also true that parents the world over find it uncomfortable talking to their children about intimate matters. However, from his own experiences it seems he wouldn’t encourage them to.
I don’t think my sons will marry girls who are cut, they were born in this country. I tell them they can marry whoever they want. Children born here have a different attitude, and their perception is different according to the British laws. Men have to stand up and say we don’t want this – if the father figure stands up then the mother won’t do anything to the child.
Dr Comfort Momoh runs an F
GM clinic at St Thomas’ Hospital in London but has travelled around FGM-prevalent countries and observed many different attitudes in men. She maintains that it is important not to generalise the opinions of men, as they can differ just as women’s experiences of FGM can differ. However, what does seem to recur is the fact that, while men are aware of FGM, they don’t have an insight into what actually happens. Most of the men are not involved in the celebration or the cutting – it is the realm of the women, and the women take ownership because to their minds they are preparing their daughter for adulthood and marriage. ‘If men as the head of the family make a stand and say, “I don’t want my daughter to have FGM”, things will change,’ she says. ‘But at the moment, men are saying, “It’s got nothing to do with me, it’s a woman’s problem.” They need to get involved.’
How exactly? What is the best way of engaging men in a topic that they have shied away from for generations? Solomon Zewolde is a researcher at the charity FORWARD UK. He is working alongside fellow researchers in Belgium and Holland on a project called Men Speak Out. The three-year research project started in January 2015, and aims to recruit fifteen peer educators in each country to go out into communities and speak to men and women. Solomon grew up in Ethiopia and moved to Britain four years ago. He had experience of FGM in the community in which he grew up and knew of relatives, friends and neighbours who had been cut.
One of the myths told about uncut women is that they will be ill-mannered, that they will misbehave if they are not cut; they need to be cut so they behave well and appear decent, which will make them suitable for marriage and sought-after. We should never be under the illusion that women are consenting to this harm being done or that women are perpetuating the practice because they need it – that is simply not true. As in everything else, the oppression against women appears to be something women accept but that’s not the case. Patriarchal societies all over the world have made women submit to certain practices. This is submission, not consent, and we need to make a distinction between the two.