Our Media Officer Karin Goodwin went to meet a woman in Glasgow who has undergone FGM. It didn’t go the way she had planned.
Blog by Karin Goodwin, Media Officer
You weren’t meant to be hearing from me today. To mark the International Day for Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) I was hoping to write a blog from the perspective of a woman who had undergone it. After all, it’s pretty simple: reading about that experience first-hand is always going to be far more powerful.
So I went to meet her. We’d agreed in advance that she was more than glad to support our call for FGM to be stopped across the globe. But it soon became clear we weren’t going to be able to talk about her experience at this meeting.
Instead we talked about how low she’s been feeling, the horrible crushing depression of waiting in the limbo of the asylum system. And, the crucial point, how until her need for protection is recognised, she is unable to bring her daughter to Scotland, and to safety.
And we talked about that awful sinking feeling of being unable to stop her daughter from having the very same practice that she has suffered, carried out on her.
It’s difficult to imagine how destructive that total loss of power must be. I’ve got a daughter too – she’s five, an age at which she’d be at risk if she came from a community where FGM was carried out.
I don’t imagine I’d sleep much if I were thousands of miles away and unable to protect her. I don’t imagine I’d feel very much like talking about what the abuse that I’d suffered, at the hands of my own community, or that I’d like to be reminded about the fact that it was happening to millions of girls around the world.
Grim facts
In fact, it is estimated that FGM affects more than 125 million women and girls from 29 countries worldwide. The practice is concentrated in countries across western, central and eastern Africa, from the Atlantic Coast to the Horn of Africa, though prevalence rates vary dramatically both within and across countries.
But it’s also practiced in communities in the Middle East, Asia and the Americas, and in diaspora communities all over the world. The highest global prevalence rates are found in Somalia (98 per cent), Guinea (96 per cent), Djibouti (93 per cent), and Egypt (91per cent), where FGM is near universal. In Egypt alone, UNICEF estimates that 27.2 million women and girls have undergone FGM.
In 50 per cent of practicing countries, girls undergo FGM before the age of five; in the remainder, most FGM is carried out on girls aged 5-14yrs.
FGM in Scotland
In Scotland, the figures are far less clear. That’s an issue that Scottish Refugee Council is hoping to address in coming months as we start a scoping exercise to estimate the scale of FGM across Scotland and to identify learning from initiatives to tackle, prevent and respond to FGM in other parts of the UK and Europe.
Our final report will also make recommendations for future work with communities and organisations in Scotland to tackle and prevent FGM. We hope to get started very soon.
But that in itself is not enough. That’s why we believe that we all need to be committed to calling for the eradication of FGM on a global scale.
And if you’re not sure why you should care, it would be worth remembering that tonight there will be more than one woman in Glasgow, unable to sleep, worrying about the fate of their daughters who are thousands of miles away.
