FGM worldwide
• Reasons given for female circumcision include traditional requirements, religious cleansing, rites of passage, tribal or group identity, and loyalty.
• FGM is a violation of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. The majority of cases—75 percent—occur in Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Egypt, Kenya and Nigeria. Some cases were reported in Malaysia, Australia, South America, Europe, the Middle East and in U.S. immigrant populations. It was also practiced in Europe and the U.S. until the 1930s by some medical practitioners as a treatment for “hysteria.”
You can’t tell the trauma a woman goes through
just by looking at her, says Rachel Ramadhani, director of women’s work
for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania.
Three
photos testify to this truth. They reveal three generations of women
who have suffered from female circumcision, also known as FGM—female
genital mutilation.
Bertha gazes up at me from the faded paper
with a sweet, solemn expression on her plump baby face (her name and
others have been changed). When this girl from Singida was circumcised
at age 4, she was cut so deeply her nerves were affected. She died in
1997 at age 6—gaunt, hollow-cheeked and mentally deteriorated.
Then
there’s Habiba, glowing as she balances a heavy bundle on her head.
Married at 16, she became pregnant one year later. When Habiba arrived
at the hospital, it was too late for her stillborn child. Instead of a
baby, she took home a severe form of fistulae—large holes in the muscle
wall—that caused urinary and fecal incontinence.
The photo of
Rehema shows a faint smile breaking through the wrinkles of her
weathered face. At age 60, Rehema was finally treated for fistulae that
caused her to suffer 30 years of urinary incontinence. The
complications began during her third pregnancy, which ended in a
stillbirth.
In Tanzania and other African countries, ending
female circumcision, a traditional practice among Muslims, Christians
and traditionalists, is becoming a priority for Lutherans.
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