Hibo Wardere had not been a teaching assistant at her youngest daughter’s primary school for very long when the headteacher asked her to sit in on a meeting. It was 2012, and a 10-year-old pupil, Halima, was about to be taken out of school and sent to Somalia. Wardere wasn’t sure why she had been asked to be there, other than the fact she had grown up in Somalia and might be able to persuade the parents to let their daughter stay at school. The thing the head suspected, and which soon became apparent to Wardere, was never mentioned – the fear that Halima would be subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM) during this trip. The girl, and her parents, left the country and never returned. What the headteacher didn’t know at that point, but may have suspected, was that Wardere had also been a victim of FGM.
“I wish I’d been more vocal,” she says. “Had the courage to say: ‘You need to stop this.’” She had heard rumours in the London Somali community about girls going to be cut, “but I chose not to get involved with them. I knew that if I heard about it, it would drag my emotions up and I wasn’t ready to tackle that. I stayed away from the community and concentrated on raising my kids, being busy. Until that 10-year-old, I wasn’t ready to face what was happening here.”
We sit outside a cafe in Walthamstow, east London, near where Wardere lives and works as FGM mediator for the borough, educating police, social workers, healthcare professionals, teachers and children. The sun bounces off the sequins on her hijab; the effect is like bursts of red and gold fireworks going off around her face.
That meeting marked the point Wardere became a campaigner against FGM. Before, she didn’t want to talk, or think, about it. “You are always running from it,” she says. “It is there, but you don’t want to face what happened. For millions of women just like me, we ran. We didn’t want to confront it, we normalised it. But sometimes you get tired and you stop and take a deep breath and have to confront it. For me, that came in the shape of a 10-year-old girl.”
As part of her training, Wardere had been asked to write an essay about abuse, and that night, when she went home, she knew she had to write about FGM. It wasn’t something that she had heard talked about, and wasn’t on the school’s recently revised child protection policy. She scoured the internet, looking for the stories of survivors she could use until her husband said: “Why are you looking for stories? What is it that is blocking you from writing about yourself?” And so, tentatively, she started writing. She didn’t finish writing until 5am, eyes red with tears.
She has repeated the account in her new memoir, Cut. When she was six, the rituals she had seen performed for her cousins and sisters – the feasts, the presents, the attention, the erection of a small canvas hut at the end of the garden of their house in Mogadishu – were performed for her. She had no idea what would happen in that hut, only that her mother and aunt who led her there early one morning told her she had to be “brave”. What happened was this: she was pinned down by three women, her dress was lifted and another woman, a “cutter” employed by her family, slashed at her vagina with rusty, blood-caked razors. Her clitoris and labia were removed, and the raw wound was stitched up using a thorn and thick thread, leaving only a small hole where her vagina had once been. She remembers the cloying smell of her own blood, being exhausted by her screams and convulsing in shock. Her legs were tightly bound together in rags that quickly became blood-soaked and she was left, virtually alone, for 10 days in the hut to “heal”.
Wardere had become one of the estimated 200 million girls and women alive today living with female genital mutilation, which ranges from removal of the clitoral hood to the complete excision of genitalia before the wound is sewn up. It is usually performed on girls under 15, sometimes on babies, usually to “protect” a girl’s virginity – and therefore her family’s “honour” – and is a cultural, rather than religious, tradition. In Somalia, where Wardere was born, 98% of women have been cut; it is most commonly practised in west, east and north Africa. It is also practised in parts of the Middle East and Asia, particularly Indonesia, but, with migration, girls in any country can be at risk. It is estimated there are 170,000 women and girls in England and Wales who have been affected by it, and 63,000 who are at risk.
Even if a girl survives such butchery – and many don’t – the torture of the initial mutilation is only the start of it. “They decided that my life was going to be filled with pain,” says Wardere. The childhood pleasures she had enjoyed, such as running and skipping, were off-limits, as they caused too much pain. Going to the loo several times a day was agony – the opening to the urethra had been covered by skin, and urine would have to find its way down inside the wound to trickle out. It would take about 15 minutes to empty her bladder; many women, Wardere included, have almost constant urinary infections. She came to dread her period, which caused intense pain. “You know you’re going to have sex and it will be painful and you’re going to have a baby and it’s going to be worse. I thought: when is the pain going to end?” Just sitting down for long periods is uncomfortable; other FGM survivors report difficulty walking years after the mutilation. “You normalise it as part of your life, you have no choice but to do that,” she says.
If you want to see the potential that is lost when girls are not encouraged to achieve much, look at Wardere. Dazzlingly bright, she constantly asked questions at school and was punished for it – the teachers caned her or made her stand in the sun for hours. What did she want to do? And before I’ve even finished the question, she says: “Doctor. I found it fascinating that you could fix a human body.” But she adds that she knew it was impossible for her. She wouldn’t have continued at school past 16, and would have been married off to a cousin by the time she was 17. “They just wanted women to be able to read and write and that’s it, they didn’t want you to get anything more.”
It was the civil war that erupted in Somalia in the late 1980s that provided an unexpected escape route from all this – marriage, brutality, the probability that any future daughters she had would suffer FGM, however much she would have protested.
Wardere’s father sent her and other family members to Kenya, where they stayed illegally, moving from friends’ houses every day or so, and paying off policemen who came to arrest them. When Wardere was 18, and there was no hope of returning to Somalia, she decided to claim asylum in London. In her book, she writes of arriving at Heathrow with tears in her eyes, overwhelmed by what it would mean for her. “I have described it as a freedom, I don’t know what other word there is,” she says. “I just felt that I began, and for me it meant that I could take decisions for myself and I was in charge of my life and I could decide what I did with it. It was an amazing feeling.”
She met her husband, Yusuf, who had also come to London as a refugee from Somalia, three months after she arrived. Before they got married, they both agreed that if they ever had daughters – they have gone on to have three – there was no way they would be subjected to FGM. Yusuf has always been extremely supportive and understanding, but although Wardere enjoys the closeness, intimacy is still painful. It is not uncommon for women who have suffered FGM to experience domestic violence; some are simply left by their husbands, who are frustrated by the woman’s inability (physically or psychologically) to have a sexual relationship. “It’s crazy,” says Wardere, voice rising. “To think that this has been done to her for you, and then you decide that you can’t cope with her because she doesn’t want to have sex. Most men are quiet about FGM, they don’t say anything about it. But why? It affects them, it affects their little girls. What are they frightened of? They say it’s a women’s issue, but it’s a human issue and a parenting issue. Where is the humanity? You know your wife is suffering – why would you want that for your daughter?”
When she came to the UK, Wardere had never heard of female genital mutilation, and it was only after the birth of her first child that she saw the letters “FGM” – they were written at the top of her maternity file, although nobody had explained what it meant. Eventually, after teaching herself English using her son’s children’s books, she found a book on it at her local library. “It was such a relief,” she says. “Other people knowing ... I felt relieved that it wasn’t only our pain. I saw other countries were involved. Reading about that was like reading about myself.”
It took her a year to translate the book, line by line. “I was determined to know what was in that book. It was just a revelation to me. It was like: I’m not alone any more. There was a flicker of light in my head. There are millions of us out there. I was thinking: there must be so many girls out there, how are they living, how are they coping?”
But it was years before had a conversation about FGM with anyone other than her husband. It wasn’t talked about among the other Somali women she knew in London, except for vague references to pain and infections. Even throughout the births of her next six children, none of the medical professionals asked her about it – she would look away when a midwife or doctor examined her so she wouldn’t have to see the horror on their faces. It wasn’t until after that meeting at school, when the parents of the 10-year-old girl had gone home and Wardere asked the headteacher what he suspected, that she heard the words FGM out loud. She was amazed he had heard of it.
The next day, he read the assignment she had written, and asked her to give a talk on FGM to the other teachers; she was soon in demand to talk to teachers and pupils in schools all over the borough. Within months, she was giving talks to local councillors, police officers, social workers, midwives and doctors. A new educational role of FGM mediator was created for the borough, and Wardere got the job. Best of all, she says, was speaking to young boys and girls about the practice and being able to step in when children at risk approached her. Only yesterday, she says, it emerged that a young girl was at risk and social services intervened.
Not everyone has been pleased about her work, particularly in the Somali community. “When I started talking about it, the community thought I was a traitor. My argument was: I love my culture, but this was an evil part of it and they all know it. They chose not to discuss it; I chose not to ignore it.” Four years on, she says, attitudes are improving. “They are coming to my events, they are supportive, women are calling, asking for help. There are women who didn’t know where to go for help, or connect that the [physical] problems they have every day come from FGM. They are starting to understand the laws of this country, that they have rights. This country offers beautiful freedom as a woman, why are you not being part of society, why are you not integrating, why are you here 30 years and can’t say a word of English? So it’s not only about FGM, it’s about empowering women.”
She is furious whenever anyone suggests FGM should be tolerated as a cultural tradition, as part of a multicultural society. “Are you going to tell me you’re going to ignore child abuse because it’s not happening to somebody from your culture? You should get involved. It’s everybody’s fight. Some [professionals] think if they talk about this they will be seen as a racist. I always say this is child abuse and they need to look at it as that. It is a child protection issue.”
She says she is “really proud” of the UK’s recent response to FGM. This has included increased training, the introduction last year of protection orders – which can prevent girls from being taken out of the country – and the requirement of health and social care professionals and teachers to report cases of FGM in under-18s to the police. On Friday, the government put this on a statutory footing. “The one wish I have is to make [FGM education] mandatory in schools as part of PSHE [personal, social and health education]. Here in Waltham Forest, we are ahead of the whole of the UK, because I go to every school and teach the students. Knowledge is the best way to eradicate FGM.” Is education really enough? How does she feel about prosecutions? “No girl wants to prosecute her mother, because they know her mother didn’t do it out of hate or abuse, they did it out of a misguided notion of love and protecting her. But it is child abuse and people should face the legality of the UK.” Prosecuting parents, she says, “doesn’t help, but [it is the law] of this country. So what should you do? Avoid that by not abusing your children.”
Having come so far in just a few years, Wardere has no plans to ease off. Talking about FGM has changed her life, she says, and helped her come to terms with what was inflicted on her – to an extent. “I’m an extremely proud woman and I never felt like that before,” she says. “It has been a healing process for me, talking about it and knowing I can help somebody else. I am never going to stop. As long as FGM exists, I exist to fight it.”
Cut by Hibo Wardere (Simon & Schuster, £12.99) is published on April 7. Click here to buy a copy from the Guardian bookshop for £10.39
