Back in wintry February, I hosted an event for a charity I support – Orchid Project – to mark the International Day against female genital cutting (FGC, also known as female circumcision). At the event, Senegalese hip-hop artist and activist Sister Fa stood alongside two Government Ministers and spoke about her belief that FGC can end within a generation.
Sister Fa has seen progress in her home country of Senegal, including the region where she grew up and underwent FGC as a girl. Today girls from this village are no longer cut because the community has declared its abandonment of this centuries old practice.
Sister Fa working in Mboumba, Senegal
3 million girls are estimated to undergo the practice every year in Africa alone – as well as girls in the UK with African connections. Orchid believes that the way to achieve change is to persuade whole communities to abandon the practice.
In recent months there has been a significant step forward in global commitment to ending FGC which is vital to underpinning the excellent work at grass roots going on in pockets of the world. The UK Government has recently committed £35m to this important task. And last December in New York, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution committing member states to the elimination of FGC.
With the right investment, we might indeed see an end to this practice within a generation
Investment?
Very simple. Prosecute the parents and jail them. That gets the message across.
It’s violence against the child. They need to be removed from the parents and placed with people who are prepared not to mutilate them.
It is the law.
You are just apologizing on the basis of a perverted cultural sensitivity.
What next? Classes in how to understand the Nazi view of the holocaust for fear of offending someone
An extremely worthwhile cause Baroness. But should you not bring it to an end here in Britain first?
I agree with both Old Albion and Blagger.
However, the overriding question here has to be why government, whether it be EU generated or UK pushed, was mass immigration into this country allowed to extend to those who are unable to understand or accept the laws of this country? This practice was well known by officials when considering migration practice.
Why has it been tolerated here? Why is it not an offense taken as seriously as any other kind of mutilation would be? Why are people who want to continue in a barbaric lifestyle found acceptable individuals as civilians of the UK?
If you are serious about stopping this practice, right here in the UK, why are the people who carry out such horror allowed to remain? This is a family practice which is now being serviced in Harley Street. And has been for some time. Why are those who take money to do this not being charged and sent to prison?
And lastly, the entire family of a child found mutilated this way should be deported. No legal aid and no access to court. It is barbaric and unacceptable. If people want to live in a society that has stringent laws against a habit such as this, and it is not adhered to, those concerned are not suitable for our Western society.
Want to see how quickly it stops. Deportation, not jail, as that is only another extreme cost to the public purse. And our prisons are a lifestyle leg up to most of those who come here with this as a major commitment.
You see when you start pretending you want this kind of horror to stop, it turns out to be a pretense because it keeps you employed if it continues and remains a subject for fake disgust. Genuine disgust takes the severe steps needed to stop it.
As these people were and are allowed to settle here, having either already taken this step, or, alternatively take the step whilst here, then allowing them the right to remain simply encourages them to continue with it.
I wonder how long it would be allowed to continue if the practice involved removing the testicles of boy children at around three to eight? Without anesthetic and performed with a blunt knife in a dirty tent.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0NuCMKaRpY
It would never have happened here in the first place, would it?
It’s always good to read of initiatives which raise the profile of work to eradicate what you refer to as ‘FGC’, so thank you for that.
But PLEASE call female genital *mutilation* by the name which virtually all authorities, including WHO and the UN, say it should be called. This *is* MUTILATION, and when, in mainstream discussion, we side-step that terrible truth we do a great dis-service to those who have endured it or who remain at risk of having it done to them.
I am very fully aware of the ‘reasons’ some workers and individual organisations have for using the term FGC, and perhaps, in the field in certain situations, reference to ‘cutting’ is OK.
But it is NOT OK to avoid the stark truth of FGM when there is still much work needed to persuade people in places such as the UK that this is an appalling abuse and a dreadful crime, and that it must be stopped as a pressing priority above much else.
Skirting around the grim horror of FGM by using euphemisms is one of the underlying factors in its continuation. It’s criminal MUTILATION, and we must all say so loud and clear.
Thanks.
Since this deadening inhibition upon best possible human reproduction and balance derives
[by the deliberately-imposed and guiltily-covert cutting-out of an essentially living, regulating and guiding reproductive and socially-stabilising organ from young girls’ and women’s bodies-minds-and-spirits,
appears to be “just-one-of-those ‘too hard-for-us-mere-life-livers’ to be caring and mobilising about]; so female excision slaves along, as “just another politico-economo-educatio foreign-body hangover,
to be band-aided, fleetingly publicised, and only minimally tackled]
(derives) from a dominant under-knowledge and outright ignorance of new-knowledge-&-know-how,
from failed education on the one hand,
and from deliberate and criminal enslavement and social-and-religious imbalance and enmity on the other.
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It is our total lack of Individual Human Development, Inter-human-racial Education, and Win-Win-Win Problem Solving, that is the Major-Cause of all such imbalancers and destabilisers; and of the world-wide stultifications and bloody wars that are proliferating.
As well as utter neglect of Cooperative Problem Solving. the educational and politico-socio-religious failure to progress with better knowledge and know-how skills long since been published is at a similar inhibitive fault
e.g when a five levels model of social-control was published by USA California universiies’ Jim Fadiman,
the xenophobic reaction was to not only impede its educational progress but to fail to further detail how the middle band of “Competition” needs to be radically seen as conflictingly including on the “exploitation” side “Genocidal, Bio, Chemical and Nuclear War” and at the other “nurturing & integrative” end such activities as “tiddleywinks with the children” as well as The Olympic Games.
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We have also failed, and deliberately, spin-doctoringly so, to clearly distinguish “cooperative and co-constructive competition” from “aggressive market-competition”.
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So I think governments, education-authorities, and community-bodies need to get all of that education, nurturance, and integration need genericly clarifified and ”moving forward” as its first big priority;
whilst increasing “interventioning” at the criminal cutting-front itself.
How overwhelmingly noticeable that ‘gay’ marriage takes precedence over the mutilation of female children in this country. What low lives we have appointed to lead us. Even the fate of badgers are a bigger issue to these wimps than the abuse of our children.
Stop obfuscating and address the fact that not only has a great deal of money from the British tax payer been put aside to deal with FGM in the UK but it is a major UK problem. You are tring to make it sound a problem in other countries not ours and that simply is not the truth and “IF” you truly are involved you would know that is true.
Quote”Female Genital Mutilation is not cultural, it’s violence’: 66,000 women in the UK endure the agony of brutal circumcision.
20,000 girls are at risk of being taken abroad for circumcision”
Social workers and police were criticised today by MPs for failing to put girls in danger of genital mutilation on the child protection register.
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/female-genital-mutilation-victims-being-failed-by-police-and-social-workers-8656967.html
Lots of money spent overseas.
Nothing happening here.
Not PC apparently.