Tue, Feb 22, 2022 page9

• Men must be involved to eradicate female mutilation, advocates say

  Female genital mutilation cannot be considered solely a ‘women’s issue’ if it is to be stamped out by 2030, say male campaigners in Guinea, Kenya, Nigeria and Somalia by Sarah Johnson The Guardian

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  There is a case from Morissanda Kouyate’s career that stays with him.

  In 1983, Kouyate, then 32, was working at a village hospital in Guinea when 12-year-old twins, Hassantou and Housseynatou, were brought in. Through wails, their relatives told him that earlier that day, the girls had been taken into the bush to be submitted to genital mutilation.

  They were barely conscious and bleeding heavily.

  

  Illustration: Yusha

  For the next 48 hours, Kouyate and his colleagues tried to save them; his wife came and donated blood. The girls died.

  “We did everything,” he said. “I was very sad, because at that time, I had my two daughters who were very young. I thought about the people who had lost their twins.”

  Kouyate wrote a letter to the Guinean Ministry of Health and Public Hygiene, recounting what had happened and that the practice must be controlled. His letter ended up at the headquarters of the WHO, which invited Kouyate to Geneva to learn more about female genital mutilation (FGM).

  Since then, Kouyate has dedicated much of his life to fighting FGM and was instrumental in founding the Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children, which brought 16 countries together to address the issue.

  In 2003, the committee organized a conference where several first ladies declared Feb. 6 as a day to mark zero tolerance of FGM, which was adopted by the UN in 2012. In 2020, Kouyate received the UN Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela Prize for his work.

  Kouyate, who last year became Guinean minister of foreign affairs, was one of the few male campaigners in the early 1980s.

  He said that many more men are now involved, something he believes is essential for FGM to be eradicated by the UN’s target date of 2030.

  “If you consider FGM a female issue, that is minimizing the effect of this practice,” he said. “It is a violation of human rights; men must be involved in the fight against that. Of course women and girls are direct physical victims, but men are indirect victims —the consequences of the practice affect men.”

  In Somalia, where an estimated 99 percent of women have been mutilated — the highest level anywhere in the world, advocate Hassan Istiila, 30, is often asked why he, as a man, is so involved in the anti-FGM campaign.

  “People say to me: ‘You are male, why are you talking about a women’s issue?’” Istiila said. “In Somalia, culturally, men dominate the house. They are the decisionmakers. If they don’t agree, women can’t refuse.”

  Istiila became aware of FGM and the resulting dangers to life and risks around childbirth while attending university. As a campaigner, he received training in 2017 from the anti-FGM Global Media Campaign and now works to change the narrative in a country where anti-FGM legislation does not exist.

  There is a great deal of stigma around speaking about it, but over the past five years, he said he has noticed a change in attitudes.

  “There is an increasing number of people, especially women, who are talking about the issue on the radio or on social media,” he said. “It’s not a big number, but it’s good when you look back to five or six years ago.”

  Istiila worked as a journalist, including on a story about Fartun Hassan Ahmed a 13-year-old girl who bled to death last year after being cut and whose loss was keenly felt by her blind father.

  “That story touched me. The girl was the right hand of her father,” he said. “I asked him why he submitted her to FGM, and he told me his wife had decided and he accepted it. He said if he had refused, his daughter would still be alive.”

  A few months later, Fartun’s father joined the anti-FGM movement.

  In Kenya, Jeremiah Kipainoi, 29, an award-winning journalist, said that the time for raising awareness is over.

  “There’s no need to keep sensitizing people,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anyone who doesn’t know FGM is wrong.”

  He points to Kenya’s Female Genital Mutilation Act of 2011, which made FGM punishable by imprisonment or a hefty fine. Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta has pledged to end FGM by this year.

  In Kenya, 21 percent of girls and women aged 15 to 49 have had their genitals mutilated.

  Kipainoi is doing what he calls accountability activism.

  “FGM is happening,” he said. “I have to task those people who are supposed to prevent it from happening to do their job.”

  When the COVID-19 pandemic started, Kipainoi started End FGM Live, which broadcasts over the Internet, interviewing officials whose mandate it is to end the practice, and enabling people to directly address their questions and concerns to those in power.

  In December last year, when he heard that hundreds of girls in southwest Kenya had been cut, he called the county commissioner, who was on vacation at the time.

  “It was a little bit confrontational, but from that we were able to get them to act and arrest people,” he said.

  Wilberforce Oti, a lecturer and pastor, is similarly determined to end FGM in his native Nigeria, where the UN Population Fund estimates that 25 percent of female Nigerians aged 15 to 49 have undergone the practice.

  The 2015 Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act makes it a federal offense, but it has not been passed in all 36 states, and implementation is low, Oti said.

  Oti’s resolve was sparked by a training session in 2016 for religious leaders.

  “That was the first time I got deep information about the adverse effects of FGM,” he said. “I began to imagine what my own mother must have gone through. She told me every time she gave birth they had to cut her open. She shared this with me, and I found I was going to do everything in my power to not let anybody I know go through this and to stop it happening to as many people as possible.”

  He uses his position to talk to traditional rulers, the “custodians of culture and tradition,” and hosts a radio program, Brand New Me.

  He said that he has seen a drop in support for FGM and in his own state of Ebonyi — statistics suggest that prevalence has fallen from 74 percent in 2013 to 53.2 percent in 2018; nationwide, prevalence has dropped from 25 to 20 percent.

  Oti is encouraged but doubtful over the UN’s 2030 goal.

  “If we are going at the pace we are going right now, we will minimize FGM, but this is not the same as eradicating it completely,” he said. “We are doing our best, but I wish we could do more.”

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