Human rightsAs women around the globe join together today to mark International Women's Day, 6,000 girls in Africa and the Middle East will be put through one of the greatest human rights violations in the world.
Female genital mutilation (FGM), which involves the cutting away of part, or all, of the female genitalia, has been performed on an estimated 135 million girls and women. Some two million girls a year are at risk of mutilation - about 6,000 per day.
The World Vision charity, which is working to reduce the practice and, perhaps, it hopes, eradicate it, is today hoping to highlight both the practice and its own efforts to foster alternatives.
FGM is practised in more than 28 African countries and while there are few figures to indicate how common it is in Asia, it has been reported among Muslim populations in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Malaysia.
An estimated 15 per cent of all mutilations in Africa are infibulations. The procedure consists of clitoridectomy where all, or part of, the clitoris is removed, excision which is removal of all, or part of, the labia minora and cutting of the labia majora to create raw surfaces, which are then stitched or held together in order to form a cover over the vagina when they heal. A small hole is left to allow urine and menstrual blood to escape. In some less conventional forms of infibulation, less tissue is removed and a larger opening is left.
"An excruciating and sometimes deadly procedure, FGM is aimed at preserving female chastity and marriage prospects," explains Evelyn Norton, spokeswoman for World Vision Ireland. "It achieves this at the expense of the woman's sexual health and bodily integrity."
It is typically performed on young girls, aged between four and eight, though also on babies. It may be performed in a surgical setting but more often within the community by non-medical practitioners, without anaesthetic and in unhygienic conditions. The range of complications from it are "severely disabling" and even fatal, adds World Vision. .
Rodah Rotino, a victim of FGM, now works for World Vision in Kenya, to promote an alternative to the FGM ritual. Speaking from Nairobi she said there was concern about outright criminalisation of FGM for fear of driving it underground.
"Instead once a year we hold the Alternative Rights of Passage [ ARP] celebration. The girls are trained in stages for things such as their rights, embracing adulthood, career and children, their own health. There is no FGM, but the whole community celebrates in the same way when the girl comes of age." She said about 1,300 girls had undergone ARP instead of FGM since 2000.
"So far we have been promoting this in three regions in Kenya and where this has happened the number of FGMs has fallen drastically." While members of the older generations resisted the move away from FGM, she said younger Kenyans were supportive.
"I am a victim of FGM. It was carried out on me when I was 17. My mother didn't want it but everyone else said I must have it done and they were ridiculing me, making me ashamed for not having it. So I agreed too. It was very, very painful."
She has had five children since and said each birth was unbearably painful with dreadful tearing each time because of the mutilation of her genitalia.
Ms Rotino has been maligned by sections of Kenyan opinion. In 1993 she was accused by a member of parliament because of being "dangerous for peace maintenance".
