hide page
Did you know the Halo Project is part of a Global campaign to end FGM and CEFM (childhood early forced marriage)? We attended an event organised by World Leaders to show our commitment and pledge to stop this abuse-Halo Project, working to put our region, our voice on a Global platform
They call the Gambia the smiling coast, and as 100 young people from across the country poured into the Paradise Suites Hotel in Kololi beach on Wednesday, it was easy to see why.
They came from all corners of the nation – girls and boys, rural and urban, in school and out, uniting for the first ever youth summit on female genital mutilation. Chatting, smiling and laughing – but determined that FGM would end with their generation.
It’s the first time young people in this small west African nation have decided to take the fight against FGM into their own hands, but they also remembered to invite the grown-ups. Key officials of the Gambian government came to the event on Tuesday, in a move described as “groundbreaking” by campaigners against the practice.
Spearheaded by Gambian-born Jaha Dukureh, the face of a Guardian-backed campaign to combat FGM in the US, the youth summit has brought 100 Gambians between the ages of 17 and 25 together to teach campaigning and social media skills and equip them with the legal and medical knowledge to go out and spread the word among their own generation.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/oct/07/gambian-youth-conference-fgm
Up to 2,000 girls are believed to be at risk of female genital mutilation (FGM) in Greater Manchester, the area’s police and crime commissioner has said.
Tony Lloyd said the practice was “barbaric” as he campaigned to raise awareness and support victims.
In the past two days, officers intercepted 20 families at Manchester Airport, mostly on flights from Africa.
Police are also investigating cases in Wigan and Bury and have reports of girls at risk in Trafford.
FGM involves procedures that include the partial or total removal of the external female genital organs for cultural or other non-medical reasons.
Although banned in the UK, thousands of girls are subjected to FGM each year, with Greater Manchester identified as one of six “hotspots” in the UK.
The poster is stamped with the statement that 137,000 women in the UK are living with the consequences of genital mutilation. But for the team behind the play Little Stitches, opening at a London theatre on Friday it is the individual stories behind the statistic that really matter.
The four writers of the play, opening at Theatre503, in Battersea, spent months talking to those affected by FGM, or female genital mutilation, as well as to campaigners, doctors and teachers. Each of the four – Karis Halsall, Raul Quiros Molina, Bahar Brunton and Isley Lynn – used verbatim interviews and accounts to write a piece tackling the issue, and, as the director, Alex Crampton, said, to give FGM a “living breathing presence that makes it hard to ignore”.
The decision to tackle the issue came from Melissa Dean, the founder of BAREtruth theatre company which is staging the play. She said theatre was a powerful vehicle that could break through the taboos and secrecy surrounding FGM and bring real-life stories to an audience who might otherwise be at some distance from the issue.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/21/play-fgm-trauma-damage-little-stitches-baretruth-theatre
A petition that calls on the Obama administration to tackle the issue of female genital mutilation (FGM) in the United States has been signed by nearly 200,000 people.
Jaha Dukureh, a victim of FGM who has spearheaded the Change.org petition, will be on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to meet some of the more than 50 members of Congress who have lent their support to Dukureh’s petition, which calls on Barack Obama and the Department of Health and Human Services to commission research into the scale and severity of the problem in the US. Dukureh launched her campaign at the Guardian’s New York office last month with UN representative Nafissatou Diop, US congressman Joe Crowley and Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger.
Doctors treating women and girls with FGM say the research is badly needed. “We would know, we’d have a better sense of it nationally … The challenge that I’ve faced over my entire career has been that often times we do not have data,” said Dr Crista Johnson-Agbakwu, who treats women from 43 countries at the Refugee Women’s Health Clinic in Phoenix, Arizona, where a “staggering amount” of her patients have been cut.
FGM is a 5,000-year-old practice that takes place across large parts of Africa, the Middle East and south-east Asia. While there are varying types of severity, it essentially involves the partial or entire removal of the external female genitalia. Type III FGM, the most severe, requires the girl to be sewn closed until her wedding night. While there are grassroots movements in some African countries to phase out the practice, many diaspora communities still require a girl to be cut.
Read More:http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jun/10/end-fgm-us-petition-signatures
Aissa Edon, 32, was pinned down and mutilated when she was just six-years-old. “I remember everything about it,” she says, “the place, the smell, being held down. I remember screaming – it sounded like someone else, but it was me – and I remember blood and intense pain. Pain I can’t even describe.”
Now a midwife in London specialising in FGM, she is happy to speak openly to Cosmo about her experiences. “I was living in Mali when my stepmother took me to undergo female genital mutilation (FGM). I was being adopted by a family in France and it happened before I went away – a kind of terrible going-away present. My one-year-old sister had it done then, too.
“When I arrived in France, my adopted parents knew straight away – a section of my medical records was sealed, marked ‘do not open’, and the FGM was included there. I was very lucky to be in France because I had a lot of complications – pain for months afterward, urinary tract infections, and psychological problems. To this day, I can’t look at a razor blade, and for years I carried the guilt of what happened to my sister, wondering whether she’d have escaped FGM if I hadn’t been leaving.
“I had surgery in 2004 to correct my urinary problems, and reconstructive surgery to my clitoris in 2005. The first time I knew it was working, I was walking down the street and I felt something strange happening down below! I still have some psychological issues, and intimacy is difficult at times – my body is working just fine, but my head shuts down.”
Teachers and schools should check on the holiday arrangements of pupils from communities which practice female genital mutilation (FGM), a conference was told.
Delegates at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers’ annual conference became the first teachers to discuss the issue at a national conference yesterday when they called on the Home Office to draw up a national strategy for eradicating the practice in the UK.
Helen Porter, from Berkshire, moving the motion, told the conference it was estimated 66,000 women resident in England and Wales had undergone the process and over 23,000 girls under the age of 15 were at risk or had already undergone FGM.
“As education staff, we need to raise awareness and encourage young women and women to question FGM,“ said Ms Porter. ”We need to help reposition FGM in terms of violence against women and girls not cultural practice.
Read More: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/female-genital-mutilation-teachers-told-to-check-holiday-plans-of-children-at-risk-of-fgm-9264624.html
A 15-year-old student at Newham College organised a seminar on women’s rights that featured speeches by famous campaigners.
Abdul Vijad, who lives in Manor Park, held the seminar at the College’s East Ham Campus as part of his Citizenship GCSE.
Abdul, who was born in India, says he chose to invite speakers to discuss female genital mutilation (FGM) and forced marriage because they affect the lives of many young people.
He said: “We split our class into two groups – one organised forced marriage and the other FGM. “We know that they are culturally sensitive issues and some people don’t want touch them.
“But we also know that if we don’t look at them nothing will ever change.” He added: “FGM can cause physical harm and long lasting health issues. Young people should be aware that forced marriage is a cultural issue, but they should also know that they shouldn’t have to go through it without their informed consent.”
Read More: http://www.newhamrecorder.co.uk/news/newham_college_student_organises_seminar_on_fgm_and_forced_marriage_1_3555888?usurv=skip
An anti-female genital mutilation (FGM) campaigner has urged men to play a more prominent role in tackling the issue.
According to Edna Adan, former foreign minister of Somaliland, males have often taken the “easy way out” and dismissed FGM as a “woman’s affair”, the Evening Standard reports.
She has therefore called on men to change their attitudes in order to help eradicate the practice. “The men are my target because these girls have a mother and a father,” Ms Adan commented. “You can put your foot down if you are the head of the family.”
Ms Adan went on to note that attitudes towards FGM are changing around the world and countries are increasingly taking steps to clamp down on the procedure. According to the World Health Organization, FGM offers no medical benefits to girls and women and can make victims vulnerable to a number of health issues later on, such as infection and infertility.
The body also believes people who have undergone the procedure are particularly likely to experience complications when giving birth.
Source: http://www.figo.org/news/men-can-play-big-part-tackling-fgm-0012093
