by Hibo Wardere
Over three years, the Men Speak Out initiative will conduct focus groups and surveys to find out more about the issues and concerns men have. Solomon believes the first difficulty that needs to be overcome is getting men to acknowledge that an FGM problem both abroad and in Britain even exists.
Some would like to deny that it exists. There is a lack of knowledge; there’s a lot of ignorance of what FGM is, what the cut is, about the medical consequences, the social consequences, the psychological consequences . . . In research I ask them, ‘Do you know exactly what the cut is?’ Most think it’s OK, that it’s just a little prick. They say, ‘Why are you making a big fuss about this?’ I think attitudes will change once we fill that gap of knowledge. When men know the different types of FGM – that there’s not just one type – and the severity of it, if we have medical professionals talking to them about the consequences and have some survivors coming out and telling them what they’ve been through, how horrible it is and how it stays with them throughout their life – even when they are cut at a very early age – I can see people beginning to change. Education is key, along with the law.
Until men stand up against FGM, women may be encouraged to continue the practice because they will still be concerned that their daughter won’t find a husband. In some cultures, being cut or uncut affects every aspect of their daughter’s life: her acceptance by society, her marriageability and therefore her future. That is why Solomon’s project is so important – we need to galvanise men to speak out and reassure mothers that their daughters won’t be disadvantaged if they are not cut.
It is difficult to understand why women, when they know the pain involved, continue the practice. Then, when you hear stories like Mohamed’s, who saw how his wife suffered, you wonder equally how fathers could decide to put their daughters through that. When I put this to Solomon, that surely witnessing for themselves the pain women suffer must make men want to turn away from the practice, he told me about a darker side of FGM that has come to light through the research project.
One of my colleagues in Holland was told by a Somalian man in a focus group discussion that he feels more pleasure when his wife feels more pain. He told them that he feels more masculine, more happy, the more pain she feels. I honestly believe that he represents a significant number of people in many countries who believe that putting a woman through pain during sex makes them feel more masculine.
Solomon believes that this is connected to wider issues which affect communities all over the world who don’t discuss sex – even between couples. He feels that if this taboo subject was discussed more, how each partner could receive more pleasure during sex, attitudes like this would change.
For every man like the one Solomon describes, there are also men, like Mohamed, who take no pleasure in seeing their wife suffer. And sadly, a common story that Solomon has heard is of the men who divorce or cheat on wives who have been cut because they don’t have a fulfilling sex life. Remember that men are not encouraged to save themselves for sex after marriage, so a man knows that a different sex life is available to him out there.
This to me is the double abuse that women often suffer. A man can dump his wife for not sexually satisfying him because sex is very painful for her because of the cut or because, in some cultures, a woman might be opened and closed, and opened and closed at different milestones like after giving birth. So she denies him, and he in turn divorces her or dumps her at home and goes out and has sex with uncut women. That is not uncommon, and yet again she suffers through no fault of her own. People never talk about this. They camouflage it and instead give many other reasons for the break-up of a marriage – no one will tell you it’s because of bad sexual experiences.
In that case, FGM is actually breaking down family units. The premise of it, somewhere very far back, was surely to prevent adultery (at least on the woman’s part), and yet accounts of FGM being the cause of adultery or divorce are very common. I myself have lived with this fear my whole married life, despite having a husband who is devoted to me; when your body has let you down you feel like you are less of a woman, you worry that you won’t be enough for your man.
Educating men about FGM is clearly a very good thing indeed and definitely the way forward, but there is still the worry that modern men – particularly those in Britain – who have already turned their backs on the practice may then also reject girls who’ve been cut. Solomon has a strong message for men about that.
Education is the first place but the message has to be to stand up against the cut, not against the cut woman. This is a very important message. Say no, you can’t cut girls, but we don’t want men to stand against girls who have already been cut; we want men to stand with them, to try to help these women who are having problems. Men play a very decisive role in ending this practice. The important thing is to root the belief and commitment in them that it really needs to stop, and that requires a lot of education and a lot of effort, but it is possible.
We need to bring men on board to work alongside women, for men and women to stand shoulder to shoulder in the fight to end this practice both in African and Middle Eastern countries as well as in the UK.
15
A Very British Problem
According to the City University London/Equality Now report published in 2014, with every decade that passes, FGM becomes even more of a British problem. In 2001, it was estimated that there were 66,000 women aged fifteen to forty-nine living in England and Wales who were born in countries where FGM was widely practised. By 2011, that figure had swollen to 103,000.8
Twenty-one women out of every 1,000 are victims of FGM in London. In towns like Milton Keynes, Cardiff, Coventry, Sheffield, Reading, Thurrock, Northampton and Oxford, seven females in every 1,000 are victims. In rural areas, fewer than one in 1,000 women are living with FGM, but that’s still more than zero. Researchers came up with these estimates based on the 2011 census, migration figures and surveys of how prevalent FGM is in those countries from which women have migrated. The numbers could be lower, of course, but they could also be much higher.
More accurate statistics are perhaps those provided by health professionals in Britain. In 2015, the government released figures of actual cases of FGM that had been recorded over a five-month period.9 Doctors, nurses and healthcare professionals were asked to keep the first record of the number of new women and girls presenting to them with symptoms of FGM, and those being treated for ongoing problems. There are thousands of women being identified as victims of FGM every single year in Britain. Between September 2014 and January 2015, more than 2,600 new cases of FGM were identified. Forty-four of those were children under eighteen. More than 9,500 women were deinfibulated. And remember, these are only the women and girls who have sought medical treatment – many more must be suffering in silence.
As Halima’s story shows, such is the pressure within FGM-practising communities in Britain to maintain traditions that, despite the fact that FGM has been illegal in the UK since 1985 and that, since 2003, it is against the law to take UK nationals out of the country to be cut, parents will risk prosecution and return with their children to their homelands in order for them to be mutilated. Back in 2013, when my head teacher and I were faced with the obvious truth that Halima’s parents were planning exactly this, we were frustratingly helpless to do anything other than plead with them not to take her out of school in term time. But new legislation introduced in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in 2015 meant that one woman was able to protect her three daughters from FGM in Britain just hours after that change in the law came into effect.
Funke was a survivor of FGM, which was carried out when she was in her teens at the request of the family of the man she would be forced to marry back in Nigeria. She was forced to undergo the Type 2 procedure, and had her clitoris and labia removed against her will. The wounds never properly healed, and would usually open up again after sexual intercourse, causing her horrific pain each time. Given her suffering, she was adama
nt that her daughters, who were aged twelve, nine and six, would not experience the same agony. Her children were born in Nigeria, but have had British residency since Funke divorced their father and moved with them to the UK. She was well aware that her ex-husband, who has a history of violence, had always been keen to get the girls cut. Early in 2015, he started applying pressure on her via telephone calls and texts from Nigeria, demanding that the girls undergo circumcision. Funke knew her ex-husband viewed mutilating the girls as both ‘inevitable and necessary’ and, despite the fact that FGM was outlawed in Nigeria in May 2015, he ordered Funke to prepare the girls for travel in the summer holidays.
Here, in a family court transcript, as she made a request to the judge to ban the girls’ father from cutting them, she describes what she was up against.
In February 2015, he sent the ceremonial robes from Nigeria in preparation for [the cutting]. Now the school holiday is upon us he has told me, via messages, that he expects to see the children immediately. He has requested that the two elder girls be sent now. He is angry because the eldest is over ten years old and past the usual age for the procedure to happen . . .
She goes on to describe how he also requested the umbilical cords and first teeth of the children to be used as part of the ceremony. Upon hearing her testimony, the judge granted Funke a FGM Protection Order. This is a civil measure that can be requested by either the female in jeopardy, a relevant third party or any other person with the permission of the court, which offers protection to victims and potential victims of FGM, the breach of which is a criminal offence. The order came into effect immediately, and was then served on their father in Nigeria, along with injunctions that stopped him coming within 100 metres of the girls’ mother, their home or their school.
The situation that Funke found herself in is far from uncommon – there must have been thousands of mothers before her who were desperate to protect their daughters but lacked the knowledge, resources and, until 2015, law to make it happen. However, just as the legal system adapts to try to protect children like Funke’s daughters, the face of FGM in Britain is also changing to evade it. With the price of airline tickets soaring, families in the UK are now holding what are referred to as ‘FGM parties’, whereby relatives can avoid the cost of sending a group of girls back to villages where they will be cut by clubbing together to pay the cost of one single village cutter to travel to the UK instead.
Imagine the scene: in a suburban living room in Bristol, eight girls line up alongside their cousins. They are not sure why, but a buzz of excitement has been building all week. They are wearing special clothes which have been bought for the occasion, and their favourite foods have filled the family home for days. Their extended families have gathered, and everyone seems happy. The girls don’t know what is about to take place, or who the strange woman with wrinkled hands is, although she seems to be someone of great importance, and each of their parents makes a point of thanking her in turn for undertaking the journey alone. All the eight girls understand is that whatever is about to happen to them will prepare them for being a woman. An hour later the living room smells of fear and blood, and hot tears streak the girls’ faces, as the stranger wreaks havoc on their young bodies with the razor blades their parents have bought for the job.
The cutter herself will be on a plane home before there is any chance of her being detected, her bags heavy with the money that exchanged hands for her trouble. After all, an elderly woman travelling alone, claiming to be visiting family, would be no cause for concern to Border Agency staff. With the cutting done at the beginning of the summer holidays, by the time the girls are fit and recovered enough to return to school in September, the last thing they will want to do is alert anyone and go over the awful events of that day. Instead, they say nothing, and neither do their parents, and another case of FGM in Britain goes unprosecuted.
Families have changed tack now that the authorities have cottoned on to the practice of taking girls out of the country to be cut, intercepting them before they can make the journey abroad. Instead, girls are being cut in living rooms up and down the country. Such is the secrecy of this practice that it goes undetected, until, that is, a girl shows up years later in an antenatal ward, pregnant herself, when it is impossible to tell when – let alone where or how – she was cut, and at which stage she’s unlikely to want to see her parents jailed for their actions, or to rake up the past that they have long buried. And so it continues.
It is, of course, impossible to get anyone to go on record with firm evidence of these FGM parties. There are rumours of them in any community where families have been practising FGM for generations, but the minute the police press anyone for further details about who is involved and what takes place and where, all conversations are shut down. No one will give specific details; they only insist time and time again that it happens.
This is the problem that the police, social services and healthcare workers in the UK face constantly. Aniso was a young teenage girl living with her mother in London, in neglectful conditions. Her relationship with her mother had broken down and so she contacted social services. She was placed with a foster family and went on to tell the welfare officers that she had been a victim of FGM and that it had been arranged by her mother. An investigation by the Metropolitan Police and social services was opened immediately, and after interviews, it was agreed that there was enough evidence to bring the first criminal case against FGM since the legislation was passed in 1985. But during the investigation, presumably when officers told Aniso they were ready to prosecute her mother, she changed her mind and refused to co-operate with police. She told them she feared the community would ostracise her if she testified against her mother in court.
The officers were perplexed: she’d come to them to report this, and she’d seemed happy to give a statement when their investigation started. They tried to convince her to change her mind, offering her support from both the police and third-sector agencies, and impressed on her the importance of standing up to a practice that amounted to child abuse. But Aniso refused; she told them that if they made her go to court she would kill herself.
The officers, who had spent many man-hours on the case, were left with no other choice but to abandon it, and the paperwork was placed at the back of a file, another potential prosecution lost to them. Unfortunately, this is not an unfamiliar story for the law-enforcement agencies. Girls and young women refusing to testify against their parents is one of the major reasons why there has not been one single successful prosecution in thirty years.
However, this does not mean that the police are not trying to change this situation. Since 2012, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has decided that no further action should be taken on thirteen cases of FGM that the police have brought before them.10 That’s thirteen files, all those man-hours, all those officers, all those statements and, most importantly, thirteen children who have not had any justice for the child abuse that was carried out on them. Imagine all the other cases that came before 2012 which were also dismissed.
Too often the finger of blame is pointed at the police for not having secured any successful prosecutions, and, given this fact, some have questioned whether FGM is even a problem in Britain today. Sadly, this isn’t the case. I spoke to a detective who has been investigating child abuse for the last eleven years. She works as part of the Metropolitan Police’s Project Azure, a specialist unit set up to investigate incidents of FGM in London.
If we take a case to court, we have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that someone is guilty. We know FGM exists, but as police officers we deal in evidence and we often have none. Much of the information we receive is anecdotal. It’s very frustrating. It’s like all child abuse – children will tell you they’re being sexually abused because they want it to stop, not because they want their parents prosecuted. Your mum is still your mum.
I can understand that more than anyone. Given the chance, would I have seen my mum sent to prison for what she al
lowed to happen to me? Would I have testified against her and seen her taken from the family home, and with her everything I’d ever known? No. As much as I hated her for what she did, as great as the damage it did to our relationship, I wouldn’t have wanted to condemn her to prison. And it’s those kinds of mixed feelings that the police investigating teams are faced with each day. Add to that the fact that many children might not even know they have been victims of abuse, particularly if they were cut as a baby and have no recollection of it at all. To suddenly make that leap from thinking you’d grown up in a completely loving family to the notion of your parents being child abusers is a difficult, if not sometimes impossible, transition.
Project Azure detectives work with many ‘community champions’ – advisers who act as a ‘go-between’ for the community and officials – who tell them that FGM is happening in the UK, but when questioned further for more detail they are met with a closed door and no amount of pushing will gain access to further information. Without evidence, the police are unable to arrest anyone – and the person they want to arrest is the cutter, not a poor, uneducated mother who may not realise that the practice is illegal in this country. This, sadly, is the situation facing UK police forces across the country.