{"id":355,"date":"2013-10-29T09:52:45","date_gmt":"2013-10-29T09:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/?p=355"},"modified":"2013-10-26T15:58:59","modified_gmt":"2013-10-26T15:58:59","slug":"fgm-its-like-neutering-animals-the-film-that-is-changing-kurdistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/fgm-its-like-neutering-animals-the-film-that-is-changing-kurdistan\/","title":{"rendered":"FGM: ‘It’s like neutering animals’ \u2013 the film that is changing Kurdistan"},"content":{"rendered":"

A young girl is given a plastic bag of sweets and a bottle of lemonade after being genitally mutilated \u2026 the story of the 10-year fight against female genital mutilation by two film-makers has been made into a hour long documentary by the Guardian and BBC Arabic and will go out across the Arab world from Friday, reaching a combined global audience of 30 million viewers. This is the Guardian’s shorter web version of that film<\/em><\/p>\n

It started out as a film about a practice that has afflicted tens of millions of women worldwide. It culminated in a change in the law.<\/p>\n

Ten years after they embarked on a documentary to investigate the extent of female genital mutilation in Kurdistan, two film-makers have found their work changing more than just opinions in a fiercely conservative part of the world. Partly as a result of the film, the numbers of girls being genitally mutilated in the villages and towns of Iraqi Kurdistan has fallen by more than half in the last five years.<\/p>\n

Shara Amin and Nabaz Ahmed spent 10 years on the roads of Kurdistan speaking to women and men about the impact of\u00a0female genital mutilation (FGM)<\/a>\u00a0on their lives, their children and their marriages. “It took a lot of time to convince them to speak to us. This was a very taboo subject. Speaking about it on camera was a very brave thing to do.<\/p>\n

“It took us weeks, sometimes months to get them to talk and in the end it was the women that spoke out \u2013 despite the men,” said Ahmed.\u00a0The result was a 50-minute film, A Handful of Ash. When it was shown in the Kurdish parliament, it had a profound effect on the lawmakers.\u00a0The film-makers’ work began in 2003, shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The stories they were told had a numbing consistency. In one scene in the documentary a young mother with her children sitting beside her tells Shara that in their village: “They would just\u00a0grab the little girls, take them and cut them<\/a>, and the girls came back home. I can still remember I was sick, infected for three months. I could barely walk after I was cut.”<\/p>\n

Read More:\u00a0http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/society\/2013\/oct\/24\/female-genital-mutilation-film-changing-kurdistan-law<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A young girl is given a plastic bag of sweets and a bottle of lemonade after being genitally mutilated \u2026 the story of the 10-year fight against female genital mutilation by two film-makers has been made into a hour long documentary by the Guardian and BBC Arabic and will go out across the Arab world […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[34,28,45,7,4,31],"class_list":["post-355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-abusive","tag-child-exploitation","tag-female-genital-mutilation","tag-forced-marriage","tag-halo-project","tag-victims"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=355"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":356,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355\/revisions\/356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}