Female
genital mutilation is on Egypt's
political agenda again, after the death of two young girls. But can legislation
banish it?
September 2007
Last week, KarimaRahimMassoud, a 13-year-old Egyptian girl from a village in the Nile Delta province of Gharbiya, died
due to complications with the anaesthesia administered during a procedure
popularly referred to as “female circumcision”.
On Friday, her father, not wishing to alert the
authorities to the illegal surgery his late daughter had undergone, tried to
pass her death off as being due to “natural causes”. I wonder how the man must
have felt during his dismal attempt to save his own skin so soon after costing
his daughter hers. The doctor who performed the operation has been referred to
the public prosecutor and his clinic has been shut down.
A medical examination revealed the father's
claims to be false and the story was all over the Egyptian press on Saturday.
The international media soon followed suit.
For those unfamiliar with it, there are several
types of female genital mutilation (FGM) categorised according to their
severity. Type I, known as a clitoridectomy, involves
the removal or splitting of the clitoral hood. Type II, or excision, entails
the additional partial or total removal of the inner lips of the vulva. Type
III, infibulation or “pharaonic
circumcision”, is the most extreme form and involves extensive tissue removal
of the external genitalia, leaving a raw open wound. Type II is the most common
in Egypt.
Karima's was the second such death in the
last few weeks. In June, the death of Budour Ahmed Shaker, 12, caused public outrage and calls
to re-impose a ban on this cruel practice.
In June, the Egyptian health ministry responded
with a decree banning all doctors or other personnel from carrying out FGM
operations at any time or under any circumstances. Following the latest
tragedy, the government has promised to fast track new legislation when
parliament reconvenes in the coming weeks.
Religious leaders have leant their muscle to
the cause and Egypt’s
first lady, Suzanne Mubarak, has been an outspoken opponent of FGM. The grand sheikh of Cairo’s
Al-Azhar mosque, Mohammad SayyedTantawi, Egypt’s foremost authority on Islam, and the
Coptic patriarch Pope Shenouda III have both declared
that FGM has “no foundation in the religious texts” of either Islam or
Christianity.
MahmoudHamdyZakzouk, the Egyptian minister of religious endowments (awqaf), called on all imams to condemn the practice as
un-Islamic in their Friday sermons. “During your Friday sermons, you must stress
that female circumcision is just one of the ‘bad’ habits widespread in some
countries of the Nile basin, including Egypt,
and that it is not at all a sign of Islamic worship,” he told potential imams during a training
session at the Nour mosque in Cairo.
Egypt’s National Council for Childhood
and Motherhood has set up an FGM hotline, a freephone
number staffed 24 hours a day, to answer the queries and concerns of parents
and to enable concerned citizens to report any illegal operations.
The alarming figures tell a
depressing story. In 2000, aUSAid-funded study of over 15,000 Egyptian women
found that 97% of them had undergone FGM. Accustomed only to seeing that kind
of overwhelming majority in Egyptian presidential elections (and even there,
this has fallen off), I find the figure hard to swallow, because I’d always
been under the impression that the practice was rare among the urban
population.
Mohamed Badawi, an
epidemiologist at the JohnsHopkinsBloombergSchool of public health,
collated the findings of several surveys to reach an average of just over 80% -
hardly more heartening. That means that at least four out of every five of the
thousands of Egyptian women I have met in my life have been scarred by this
shocking practice at sometime between their sixth and 11th birthdays.
The medical consequences can de deadly. Although the two girls mentioned above died of anaesthesia-related
complications, many more die of excessive bleeding, contamination due to the
use of unclean instruments by unqualified personnel, or death through shock
when no anaesthetic is used in underground operations performed by village
midwives. Although most girls survive, the trauma scars them for life.
Here are a few of the emotional reactions recorded by Badawi during his
research:
“I cried like mad, shouting ‘You all cheated
me’.” (Then the respondent wept silently with a choking voice.)
“I couldn’t believe my mother was with them;
they all attacked me one early morning while I was still sleeping.”
“Please don’t make me remember what happened, I
am trying to forget.”
FGM can also have serious psychosexual
consequences. It can seriously hamper a woman’s ability to achieve orgasm and,
in some cases, make sex painful. In addition, the trauma has been known to put
some women off sex entirely.
The better efforts over the past few decades of
the government, civil society campaigners, religious leaders whose opinion
normally counts in this conservative society, the medical profession and
feminists have only partially turned the tide and FGM still cuts across social
class and religious affiliation, with Muslims and Christians practising it
widely.
This raises the question of why, despite such
overwhelming condemnation and disapproval, this outdated and cruel practice
still survives. Ignorance is one major factor, as many Muslims and Christians –
not just in Egypt, but also
in the Sudan, eastern,
central and western Africa – believe that
cutting their daughters is an important religious rite of passage. The
ridiculous cherishing of female “chastity” is another reason. Many of FGM’s strongest advocates are from insular rural
communities or poorer inner city slums and are not educated enough to realise
the severe consequences it could have for their daughters nor to resist the
peer pressure to conform.
The origins of FGM are shrouded in the mists of
time. But the generally accepted theory is that it originated in ancient Egypt. I find
this at odds with the empowered status of ancient Egyptian women, unrivalled
anywhere in the ancient world and only surpassed perhaps in the 20th century.
Perhaps then, too, it was a frowned-upon practice that had survived from a
murky tribal past before written history began.
Whatever its origins, FGM has
been around for millennia and legislation alone is not enough, as Egypt’s
own experience attests. The Egyptian government first outlawed the practice in
1959, but relaxed and re-imposed the prohibition in an attempt to stamp out the
dangerous operations being conducted in backstreet clinics and at home or in
reaction to criticism of the “medicalisation” of the
procedure.
So what can be done?
Grassroots work holds out the most promise. One
example is what are known as “positive deviants” –
those who did not succumb to FGM and are passionately against it. One such
woman is Awatef Ramadan, who works for the FGM Abandonment
Programme implemented by the Assiut Childhood and
Development Qssociation (ACDA) with the support of Unicef.
“I appeal to future mothers not to subject
their children to this operation which is an act of abuse,” she was quoted as
saying by UnicefEgypt.
“I tell people that if they really love their daughters they should take good
care of them and see that they are well educated. This is something much more
important to give a girl and her future husband than circumcising her.” Her
efforts have been so successful that local women put on a play entitled ‘No to
FGM’ which was seen by large audiences.
And efforts are slowly paying off. A recent
study by Egypt’s
Ministry of Health and Population found that only half of all girls between the
age of 10-18 years have been circumcised.
Another important step is to bring sexual
health issues out of the closet in this traditionally reticent society. With
religious leaders now openly speaking out against FGM and the superstar status
of Egypt's
first Islamic TV sex therapist, things seem to be moving in the
right direction.
