Successful prosecution for assisting FGM (TW: horrible)

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A woman has been jailed for taking a 3 year old to Kenya for FGM 18 years ago.

I'll add the link.

I want to donate to anti FGM charities this morning. I hope one day all cultures stop promoting surgical and ritual attacks on children.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/16/amina-noor-handed-over-british-girl-3-fgm-kenya-gets-seven-years-jail

Good!

How brave of that young woman to continue the case. Thank you for standing up.

Three years old!!! 😢😢
I hope the young woman finds some closure now and makes the most of her life despite the horrific act she was subjected to as a child. Must have been very difficult pursuing a court case.

I think this is the only second prosecution? I don't know why there aren't more of them considering how widespread it is. I suppose it depends a lot on the victims coming forward.

In so many cases a woman would have to accuse her parents of the crime, knowing that they could potentially be imprisoned. That is some burden to carry.

I hope there are more and more girls who will take action by refusing it for their daughters.

And of course more men who will speak clearly about it. I remember a documentary a few years ago where young British men at first wouldn't say anything but eventually one said that he'd been told by his mother to marry a 'clean girl' by which they both knew she meant a woman who had been mutilated. You could see by the way he said it that he hadn't distanced himself from the idea.

Yes, both women and men need to discard these cultural practices and mindsets. Ironically, I think it's easier for the men to do it than the women.

Seven years not remotely long enough. Absolutely barbaric.

I know. Something better than nothing. Hopefully it encourages more women to come forward.

It boggles my mind how few prosecutions there have been. Every time a mutilated British-born woman visits a doctor for an intimate examination, the evidence of a crime is there. I guess without knowing who exactly to pin it on, prosecution is impossible.

Horrific. Noor is a Somali refugee living in the UK who said she was under pressure from her community to do this. How can this be happening in this day and age? Even children born into this country where laws could protect them can be returned to another country to be butchered. How can women, often those who have been mutilated themselves, want this for another generation? Sickening. Thank goodness for the bravery of the victim. We need many more coming forward, and a proper jail sentence reflecting GBH, and child cruelty and then deportation after sentencing.

The only thinking that helps me even begin to understand it is to imagine what it would be like to bring girls into a subsistence society with zero welfare provision. To eat and survive, those girls must marry - the only means of support they have is essentially the sale of their sexual and childbearing potential. Therefore you do whatever it takes to make them marriageable - otherwise they will at worst starve, or at best be completely dependent on a brother with zero status. God knows our society was organised in much the same way not very long ago. It just happens that this bizarre outcrop of torture became associated with marriageability at some point and spread in certain societies.

I read some more articles yesterday. In Somali society, there was a good level of knowledge of the negatives of FGM but a very high proportion of people believed it is a religious obligation. This makes me so angry but does offer a route of hope if religious leaders will participate in dispelling that view.

Incidence IS reducing a great deal - Somali societies are outliers in a way they weren't a couple of decades ago. All power to the Somali women fighting it.

What religion is it associated with, by those who think it a religious obligation?

Um, their own religion, obviously? Just to be clear, no religion officially requires it.

I’m guessing from the fact you don’t want to answer that it’s Islam?

I wanted to know which religious leaders need to speak up, to be honest. Some brave women are campaigning and speaking up, but as you say others think it’s a religious obligation so we need those leaders to speak against it.

Refusing to name problems doesn’t make them go away.

There are quite substantial Christian communities in some African countries (Niger for example) that practice it, in fact.

But it's true that there are far more women in Muslim communities who suffer it and local religious leaders could do a lot more to fight it.