Female genital mutilation is still practised at a rate of one girl every 11 seconds around the world in 29 countries. At least 130 million women and girls live with the consequences of having their sexual organs forcibly mutilated, with many suffering from fistula, maternal mortality, child mortality, infection from Aids and typhus, and post-traumatic stress.
Just 10 minutes before Yahya Jammeh, president of the Gambia, announced on Monday night that the controversial surgical intervention would be outlawed in his country, Jaha Dukureh, an anti-FGM campaigner, received a call from the president’s office to let her know that her work had been successful. They told her the president would announce that the Gambia was moving into the 21st century and there was no place for FGM in the modern state.
Over the past two years Dukureh has become the most prominent young woman campaigning against FGM in the Gambia. Buoyed by her profile as head of the Guardian Global Media Campaign, she is part of a new generation of young women in the Gambia who are working to make sure that the mutilation that has happened to them is not repeated on their daughters.
They are part of groups of young women (and men) across the world who are trying to break the silence on FGM. Their argument, and ours at the Guardian Global Media Campaign, is that FGM – practised on the most vulnerable in our world – continues because no one has made stopping this barbaric procedure a political or media priority. It is carried out in silence, by women who inherit the right to be a “cutter” and men who remain silent because it is “women’s business”. And no one is more silent than the girl child.
The Guardian Global Media Campaign has been able to give a platform, support and training to local journalists and activists such as Dukureh, who can raise the issue in their communities and with their governments and shine a light into the darkest of places.
Our thesis: campaigns are about giving voice to the voiceless and that this unbelievable brutal practice, which has destroyed the lives of millions of women and girls around the world, ends only when those at the top of the political establishment see it as a priority.
Nothing can be more dark than a cutting hut in a Gambian forest where one campaigner, Virginia Lekumoisa, at the age of eight, had four women hold her legs apart as her clitoris and labia were cut off.
“I remember the terrible pain and the beautiful beads around her neck when she was cutting me … yellow, orange, green and then looking over at my mother who wasn’t allowed to come to me, who was crying and I was thinking to myself how hopeless she looked because she could not help me,” said Lekumoisa.
In Iraqi-Kurdistan, FGM had been ignored by the local government until a photo essay about the subject in the country published in the Washington Post led to an uproar in parliament. At first there was denial, cries that this barbaric act was not happening in Kurdistan, followed by admission and, finally, legislation to end FGM.
It was a similar situation in the UK, where FGM campaigners had struggled for years to get an audience with the then education secretary, Michael Gove. Fahma Mohammed wanted Gove to write to all schools in the UK warning that British schoolgirls born to families from FGM-practising countries, such as Somalia, Yemen and Egypt were at risk. A powerful response to her petition launched on the campaign platform change.org publicised by the Guardian led to more than 250,000 signatures in 19 days. Gove invited Mohammed to meet him and agreed to write to all schools.
Monday’s announcement by the Gambian president is welcome, but the country will still need to put its declaration into legislation and then enforce it. Much more will need to be done to protect girls and women in the country. But we will go on working with activists on the ground in the Gambia, as well as Kenya and Nigeria, to speak up for girls and women.
Next week, a Guardian-backed radio campaign will be launched to get the message to the isolated communities where those that cut their daughters have only community radio to bring them the news.
As we left the Gambia a few days ago, the three customs officers, curious about our visit, wanted to know why the girls in the west and in America weren’t cut. The officers all had daughters who had been cut. “It was my wife’s business to cut her,” one said. “See where the silence has got us.”
The Guardian Global Media campaign is part of our ongoing campaign to end FGM worldwide. By teaming up with grassroots campaigners in Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Uganda, we are hoping to do what individual girls cannot always do: break that silence.
