FGM in the UK

[PotholeParadies]

I don't know if this was discussed at the time, but I came across this earlier.

However, CCGs for North Kirklees, Airedale and Scarborough & Ryedale found most victims had been cut in the UK where the practice is banned.

Cut. In. The. UK.

This is horrendous.

It goes on to say

In March last year, a woman was jailed for 11 years at the Old Bailey for carrying out FGM on her daughter when she had been three years old. The landmark case was the first - and to date, only - where someone in this country has been jailed for the practice.

One conviction.

I recognise that perhaps it may not always be in a child's best interests to prosecute, but all of them?

www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/crime/horrifying-figures-reveal-extent-female-genital-mutilation-victims-yorkshire-2881897

The podcast i linked is very eye opening about the pressures girls are under and why they have FGM. Hibo Wardere asked her mum to be cut because all the girls at school were asking if she had been, kind of like a rite of passage. But she didn't know what she was asking for.
I'm not sure its as simple as "men demanding it" or "women doing it".It's embedded in the culture and so very hard to change.

This link gives Orchid Project’s analysis of why FGC happens
www.orchidproject.org/about-fgc/why-does-fgc-happen/

This other link gives a case study example of how one local community organisation is working to end the practice in one community
www.orchidproject.org/how-non-judgemental-open-dialogue-can-support-an-end-to-fgc-a-case-study/

This is a complicated problem, not soluble through simple measures. Calling the women who do it barbarians or criminals will only end the opportunity for dialogue, potentially making it more difficult to actually stop the practice, which should be the goal. Regarding men, who are usually less directly involved (except in the case of doctors practicing FGC which should in my view be prosecuted as the crime that it is), instead of blaming the men, educating them about the practice, including how it will impact their own sex lives, could help to bring them on as allies in making the practice stop. Here is an example of that.
www.orchidproject.org/maasai-moran-tour-to-break-silence-around-fgc-s-a-f-e-maa-case-study/

The good news is, complicated does not mean insoluble. Also, because this practice is a social norm, and the behaviour is therefore persistent, it means that the practice of not cutting also has an excellent chance of become persistent, each time the norm can be changed within a particular community. That takes effort and money, which is why I think good charities working on this problem are a good way to spend one’s charity budget: Unlike many other “causes”, this is a problem to which any solution could become permanent under its own inertia.

It will only stop when the adults (and leaders) in the communities concerned no longer see it as a custom the want to continue.

So working with groups who are from those communities is the best hope of ending it.

What I am not sure is whether a young woman fearing being cut is eligible to make use of refuges.

Whilst the custom is still practiced there has to be an escape route for young women who feel able / want to escape.

The FGM centre doesn't seem to offer any escape routes, but seems more focused on other adults eg a teacher or doctot, reporting a girl at risk. ie it comes down to children's services being informed. Which bring up the issued of cultural barriers again.

I hadn't realised but both the Orchid Project and Forward are just about advocacy. They do not offer actual support services!

This seems to mean that if a young girl wants to go against her family she has to approach statutory services and be taken into care?

Okay - have just checked women can ring the Domestic Violence National Helpline.

But I wonder how many would think of turning to this number, and it isn't signposted on any of the community web sites nor the National FGM Centre.

Most are too young to seek help... just children and so defenceless

Just unbearable.

@stumbledin You are correct that Orchid Project's work in the UK is mainly about advocacy. I think it is worth funding this work because aside from getting it onto the UK press agenda and foreign policy agenda, the advocacy has helped to secure at least one large grant out of DFID (£50 million in 2018) to fund field programmes aimed at reducing the incidence of the practice in countries where it is common. Hopefully this can be repeated even after the organisational changes that have occurred with DFID.

In the field, some anti-FGM charities focus on providing a refuge so that an individual girl who does not want to be cut can go somewhere to avoid that. That is laudable, but it requires any such girl to give up her home, her family relationships and her community, and it does not change whether the practice continues to occur in her community. So those charities can help a few girls choose to make a very difficult individual decision, but they do not try to stop the practice from occurring in general.
For this reason, I think it may be more effective to support charities who are trying to stop the practice at the level of an entire community As a Western charity, Orchid Project does not directly go into communities and tell people what to do, nor should it, but Orchid Project does provide financial, technical and organisational support to in-country grassroots organisations trying to drive that sort of change. Based on their accounts, I believe that sort of effort accounted for about 40% of their budget in 2018/2019.
In order to support them, one does have to believe that their staff is doing worthwhile work, because staff were 40% of their budget, and rent and general/admin were another 10% (with the residual 10% being advocacy programmes and communications). The staff are mostly doing the actual work of creating and sharing knowledge about the practice, and creating advocacy, training and communications programmes to make it stop.
I do personally believe in the approach or I would not have supported them. My only personal affiliation with them is as a donor who has been supporting them for almost ten years.

The main reason I have posted here is not about Orchid Project. It is rather to illustrate that there is something that women and men can do about this, which is to research, identify and then financially support organisations such as Orchid - and I am sure there are others - who are doing serious work to try to make this stop. The sums involved are really not that large: Orchid Project had an annual budget of £1 million in the most recently reported year. So it would not take that many donors to meaningfully increase the strength of the effort to make this stop.

I am glad you posted. I've donated to other FGM charities before, but I hadn't heard of that one.

It's particularly topical right now, as many MNers have recently cancelled direct debits to large international charities on account of policy changes and are seeking alternative beneficiaries.

I think we can all agree that FGM charities know what a woman is.

Giving this thread a little bumpette, because I know this board is experiencing more traffic than usual and I thought DadSupportingOrchid's explanations of Orchid's work deserved to be seen more widely.

Another speaker on FGM who didn't get linked last time this thread was live is Hibo Wardere.

I admire HIbo so much, she's an absolute warrior. So depressing it is still so rife. My cousin left her husband after he tried to send their daughter abroad to be cut. She was 10.

@justgeton

This is one of the very few subjects I would generalise men as being mostly to blame for this.

My understanding is it is because men prefer to have a bride who has undergone this.

Men need to be educated and change their thinking.

Why do men like it though? It’s odd, surely as an adult human youre almost certainly going to want sex at some point in your life. If you choose a woman surely you’d want them to be ‘complete’ (god thats awful but you know what I mean) where they can enjoy it and therefore want it more often than if they didn’t enjoy it..

Seems counter intuitive to make it worse for the woman. Unless they don’t have a choice in having sex too?

Mollyollydolly Really glad your cousin saved her daughter.

Nimko Ali has said her target is to stop FGM by 2030. That's only nine years away now.

I recognise that perhaps it may not always be in a child's best interests to prosecute, but all of them?

'Practitioners' who aren't the parents presumably should always be prosecuted.

I don't know about parents - if they knew that it will be prosecuted, that it is completely unacceptable, would that be a deterrent? If not, is there ever any way of prosecuting but delaying custodial elements of the sentence until the child is an adult?

FTEngineerM

Think you already hit on it. So awful.

You could have a look at twitter.com/thegirdlengr?s=09. It's a campaigning organisation against FGM, and they tweet stories from parents, former cutters and so on about why they used to support the practice.

There is an utterly heartbreaking episode of Storyville, 'Defying the Cutting Season'. It is horrendous watching the girls struggle to comprehend how the family that they love would want to hurt them like this.
It's very difficult viewing, but there are some courageous stories being told.

I work in a school where before all holidays we subtly try and find out where the girls are going on holiday and if at all concerned we report. The police have confiscated passports before. Whereas, now it’s harder as even if the passport is taken away it’s happening in the U.K.

Thanks for bumping this thread. For those of us not from a community where FGM is practiced it does seem like how do you fight against this, practically speaking. I’ve read survivors testimony to learn about it, support and share content online, donated when I have seen stalls etc.

What else can we do?

I have just found this link on the Forward site www.forwarduk.org.uk./forward-publications/fgm-safeguarding-bristol-study/ going to read it in detail now, it’s a small sample size and seems to be self-reported research but the claim is U.K. safeguarding policies against FGM may actually be counterproductive, which is very concerning.

I’m going to have a bit more of a read in detail.

QuentinWInters, in Sue Lloyd-Roberts' book 'The War on Women', there's a chapter on FGM where she interviews some UK men with heritage from cultures that practice it,and she says they 'did not seem to care much either way', but mothers etc say their daughters couldn't get married without being cut. But some powerful men she spoke to (imams, even Presidents) were very pro-it. She seemed to think one reason it was done was to curb 'women's natural inclination to enjoy illicit sex'.

It is just horrendous.

The fact that procuring FGM has been a criminal act since 1985 with so few prosecutions and just one conviction is depressing. As has been so clearly explained, parents believe that FGM makes their daughters more marriageable. Changing that mindset seems so difficult and that's why supporting courageous women like Hibo Wardere and Nimko Ali is so important.
It is depressing that arrogant activists believe they can lecture these women about wrongthink while completely ignoring the terrible damage done to women.

Thanks for the thread, OP. Such a difficult topic, and so hard to know how to even start to challenge it.

I think what we can do, is support, at a grassroots level, women leading the fight.

When I first read about it, I was naturally horrified, but I sort of trusted that the grown-ups (the politicians, the charities and so on) were sorting it out.

Now I'm a grown-up, it's still happening and I don't think it's a priority for the people I trusted to sort it out. Women like Nimko Ali and Hibo Wardere can explain the community dynamics of why it happens until they're blue in the face, but they need help to get their messages out. That's us.

Hibo is an absolute star, she shares her story regularly to highlight the practice.

I do remember seeing on Twitter about a woman who had grown up in the Middle East but was married to a man in Africa as a second or third wife where he wanted her to be subjected to infibulation because he preferred having sex with that barbarity having been carried out.

Thanks for bumping.

I learned from another goady thread that Hibo is selling t shirts to help fund her campaigns. She's a

Oh yes. Only 5 days left to buy, and the proceeds will fund Hibo's work. Get yours now for when we all meet up in RL post-lockdown. www.mercht.com/c/i-am-a-woman

It’s so unbearably sad that in the U.K. today the sources of support for these victims are shrinking all the time. Why would any girl or woman in these communities reach out to a wider society that’s fighting a rearguard action to classify a woman, and where women in prisons are legally allowed to be raped?