Cut (25 page)

A 2006 WHO study of more than 28,000 women in obstetric centres across various African countries found that women who had undergone FGM were much more likely to experience serious complications
during their labour.
²⁸
The report found that those who had been subjected to Type 3 FGM were 30 per cent more likely to require a Caesarean than women who hadn’t had any
form of FGM. There was also a 70 per cent increase in the number of women with Type 3 experiencing postpartum haemorrhages. Babies born to mothers with Type 3 FGM also had an 86 per cent higher
chance of requiring resuscitation. The death rate among babies during and immediately after birth was also worryingly higher for mothers with FGM – 15 per cent higher in those with Type 1, 32
per cent higher in those with Type 2, and 55 per cent higher in those with Type 3. I’m quite sure that had antenatal care of the kind offered by Joy and Comfort been available to women in
these African countries, such desperately sad cases could have been prevented. Babies born in Britain to FGM survivors will be much safer, but any increased risk is always of concern. Of course, no
woman knows what she will face when going into labour, but the statistics of how FGM survivors – and their babies – suffer speak for themselves.

Why this tradition, favoured by generations past, would continue today in the knowledge that it puts future generations at risk is just incomprehensible to me – or perhaps they simply
haven’t read the same information as we have. If they don’t have access to all the facts, how will they ever know? It helps to understand the conflicting messages mothers receive,
passed down from generation to generation – messages from men, from society, from their peers. I believe the more we strive to understand the context of these women’s actions, the
closer we will be to helping mothers – both abroad and in the UK – make an alternative choice, like many others already have. Joy Clarke has had many women confide to her that they,
like me, asked to be cut – as if in some way this means they were responsible for what happened to them, when clearly they were coerced or subtly pressured into it, if not by their parents,
then by the wider community. Just like the one I heard in the playground, the message from those societies is: be cut and then you will be part of this community.

Ten years ago, a young girl, very close to me, was taken to Tanzania to be cut in the school holidays. Laila had come to this country from Somalia when she was three and had thrived in Britain
– she was a bright, outgoing and happy young woman. She was an excellent student and had just sat her GCSE exams, scoring As and Bs across the board, and was due to take up a place in college
after the summer break to study chemistry. She remembered nothing of Somalia; Britain was the only home she knew. I had no idea her mother planned to take her away and have her cut until I received
a phone call from Tanzania. I begged her mother not to cut Laila, and urged her not to make the same mistake that our mothers had. But her mind was made up; she was adamant and I was thousands of
miles away unable to help. Back then I’d heard stories about women taking girls over to places like Tanzania and Dubai in the holidays, how many families paid $200 for a Type 2 procedure
under a general anaesthetic in a hospital. Nothing about the sanitised conditions made me feel any better about it.

The girl who came home from Tanzania was different to the one who’d left six weeks earlier. She was angry, at loggerheads with her mother – and remains so to this day, ten years on.
Of course I can see why, but she insists to me that it wasn’t being cut that changed her. Laila has told me: ‘It’s OK, I’m not in any pain. I don’t feel anything.
It’s not a big deal.’ I know from my own experience that this is unlikely to be the case, and I can see for myself how much it has changed her. Laila told me that she didn’t want
to be cut, but there had been five or six family members – all women – who had coerced her into it. They told her it was a good thing, that it would make her mother happy – who
was she to refuse when so many of her cousins seemed convinced that FGM was the right path to choose? And so she said yes, and it destroyed her. She was brainwashed. The girl I knew before was
high-achieving; she had great goals and a whole life ahead of her. The girl I know now drifts from job to job; she doesn’t know what she wants. All she feels is an anger burning deep inside
of her.

I knew that her mother had broken the law by taking her, but I didn’t have the courage to speak out at the time. If it had happened now, I would move mountains to stop that girl from being
cut. But back then I was only just discovering that what had happened to me was child abuse; I certainly wasn’t ready or able to accept that it was happening to others. Today I can see that
Laila is still not ready to talk about FGM, but she knows I’ll be here to listen when she is. She is just another example of the girls who are trapped between two cultures, the ones who
straddle the void between what their parents want and what they want as a child or teenager growing up in Britain. Can you imagine the pressure that she was put under to agree to be mutilated and
the number of lies that she was told to get her to agree? And these lies came from people she knew and trusted.

This is not a story that is unfamiliar to Dr Comfort Momoh. She sees plenty of women in her London clinic who were taken and cut against their will by parents who wanted to abide by old
traditions, and yet wanted their children to be able to have all the very best that a life in the West could afford them.

‘We need to empower the young people,’ she says. ‘Young people will say, “I have to follow my culture”, but they get trapped between two cultures – they want
to satisfy their parents’ needs but at the same time they want to belong to the West’s community and culture.’

So many girls must fall into this trap, the space between two cultures, of naturally feeling loyalty towards their family, and yet holding dear the British values that they’ve been brought
up with. All children want to please their parents; none of them want to cause disappointment or upset. And yet what is being done to them is totally at odds with Western values, where they may
have learned in schools that FGM is wrong. In Britain, we might bring our daughters up to value their bodies, to not become intimate with someone until they are really sure about them. Guidance and
information about relationships and sex are gained from within the family; we want our children to be safe. What we don’t do is sew them up from top to bottom to make absolutely sure that
they save themselves for their future husbands.

A 2013 UNICEF report revealed that social acceptance is still the most frequently cited reason for supporting the practice of FGM.
²⁹
I can well believe it because I saw it for
myself. I wanted to be accepted by my friends, so I asked my mother to cut me. Therefore, I was complicit in my own abuse, just like so many of the other girls I played with, although none of us
would have realised that at the time. But it is impossible at four, six, or even sixteen, to know just what FGM is and how it will affect your life. ‘It’s just a little cut,’ they
tell you. I often thought about that as I lay recovering from the butchering I received at my own request. Just like most children, we thought we knew everything. We talked about these adult words
and phrases as if they meant the same to us as they did to our parents, and yet we had no idea what we were in for.

In FGM-practising communities, society and family tell girls that it is shameful not to be cut, that’s the lie they spin, or rather that’s the myth they themselves believe. As well
as the fact that it’s portrayed as only a tiny cut, you are told that you are ‘brave’ if you are cut, that you are not ‘dirty’, that it will make you a ‘good
girl’, a ‘big girl’– who doesn’t want to hear those things as a child? Who wants to be labelled as an unclean coward? Being cut seems like a small price to pay
compared to being called that. One FGM survivor explained to the authors of the report, ‘Uncharted Territory: Violence against migrant, refugee and asylum-seeking women in Wales’:
‘Growing up, no one says it’s wrong. At school there was a perception that you are not a woman unless you have been circumcised. Now I am in Wales, I can see it’s
wrong.’
³⁰

A further aspect of this debate to consider is the women who are forced into work as cutters. A few years ago, the Home Office heard an asylum application from a woman from Sierra Leone, who had
inherited the mantle of cutter in the Bondo society. These women-only societies wield great power in Sierra Leone, and cutters are held in very high esteem within their community, which is why
their powers are handed down through generations. Here, the women are not cut for men, but as a form of initiation into these societies of women which hold significant political sway. Except this
woman didn’t want it, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to continue to survive in that society if she didn’t take over the role, which would also put her own daughters at risk. It
was a dilemma that, had she stayed within her community, would have affected her psychologically and, perhaps, physically. What penalties would she have faced for going against her community and
tradition? She probably knew that it was not an option she could consider, and so she applied for asylum to this country on the basis that she had the right not to be coerced into becoming a cutter
and therefore a perpetrator of FGM. The Supreme Court accepted her argument in principle, yet rejected her claim on the basis that she came from a rural area in Sierra Leone, so she would be able
to live peacefully in the capital, Freetown. We can only hope that she did, rather than succumb to the pressure to comply with this age-old custom that she seemed to determined to escape.

This woman is an example of the next generation desperate to move away from a life they would otherwise have been expected to continue. It is another example of how attitudes are changing
between generations, but it feels like frustratingly slow progress. One thing that does seem to speed up the process is migration. A 2004 academic report found that the younger girls and boys are
when they come to live in Britain, the more likely they are to abandon these traditions.
³¹
The authors of the report interviewed 200 single male and female Somalians between the
ages of sixteen and twenty-two living in Greater London. They found that those who were living in Britain before the age of six (the usual time a girl would be circumcised) were less likely to be
circumcised (42 per cent) than those who arrived after the usual age for circumcision (91 per cent). So we could assume that for many, although sadly not all, coming to Britain itself seems a huge
reason to abandon the practice. But of course this is dictated by the parents. What of the children, though – how does it affect how they think and feel about FGM?

In 2013 a report by UNICEF – ‘Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: A statistical overview and exploration of the dynamics of change’ – revealed some interesting data about
the difference between how girls aged fifteen to nineteen viewed the practice as opposed to women aged forty-five to forty-nine.
³²
In my country, Somalia, for example, 64 per
cent of women were in favour of FGM continuing, and 60 per cent of girls. However, in Egypt, the difference of opinion was much greater, with 64 per cent of women being in favour of FGM, as opposed
to 34 per cent of girls. In the majority of cases, support for FGM is a lot stronger in the older group of women, and yet in Uganda just 4 per cent of women think the practice should continue and
13 per cent of girls. However, and overwhelmingly, all the evidence seems to indicate that, with each generation that passes, support lessens, which is exactly what we want to hear, and more
education on the subject will only decrease the number of supporters in both age ranges.

I know myself that education plays a huge part in the abandonment of FGM. Many surveys have revealed that girls who are in secondary education are less likely to be cut and more likely to want
the practice abolished. In the 2013 UNICEF report, for example, girls and women in Sudan who have had no formal education are nearly four times more likely to support FGM than girls and women with
secondary or higher education. Perhaps unsurprisingly, more than 60 per cent of Somalian girls who have received a Koranic education support FGM, compared to almost 50 per cent of those
who’ve received a secondary education – despite the fact that it is not a religious practice.

What of the attitudes of migrants living in Britain, or British girls whose parents were born in practising countries? Can their migration, or that of their parents, be enough to turn them away
from FGM? Personally, I don’t believe that migration itself is enough. For example, in some cultures, migration has proved to be a
reason
to continue the practice as a way of
identifying and reestablishing tribes once they have settled into new countries they plan to call home. Nor do I believe that the law alone is enough to turn people away from this barbaric
practice. The most effective way to change attitudes is through education, and not just of children born into migrant communities, but all British children. I’m amazed, when I give talks in
secondary schools, just how few hands go up when I ask who has heard of FGM. If white British teenage girls don’t know what FGM is, how can they help their friends who might be at risk?

That is exactly what Muna Hassan has found. Muna is a twenty-one-year-old FGM campaigner from Bristol. Her Somalian parents came over to Britain when she was three, although Muna was actually
born in Sweden. She and her friends co-founded Integrate Bristol four years ago along with teacher, Lisa Zimmerman. The charity was aimed at promoting gender equality among migrant communities, but
they quickly made FGM one of their top priorities. Muna is a great example of the changing attitudes of British girls with regard to FGM today. When I spoke to her, she told me she had seen a huge
shift in thinking since her campaigning began a few years ago. ‘Attitudes towards FGM have changed so much within the last couple of years. The things I was seeing when I was sixteen and
things I’m hearing now are worlds apart,’ she says. Muna started Integrate Bristol with three other girls. When FGM came up in discussion, Muna had never heard of it, even though both
her parents are from Somalia. She and her co-campaigners were talking about violence towards women and girls, about rape, forced marriage, child marriage, and when someone mentioned FGM, Muna
assumed it was something to do with the economy, or a bank. She was horrified when she later Googled the term and discovered that 98 per cent of Somalian girls are cut. She then came across the
word
gudnin
and realised that over the years she had heard it mentioned in her own community – she just hadn’t known what it was.