When beliefs turn into violence
When talking about civilization, some of the principles on which it is built are cooperation, compromise and tolerance. Living in a society brings some duties, such as respect of others and ourselves, of their and our freedom. When this duty is not respected, zero tolerance is given: this happens when dealing with female genital mutilations.
History teaches us more than one occasion in which women were punished for being masters of their bodies, especially when talking about sex. Girls that do not want to marry the man their family chose for them are killed, women who choose who to sleep with must fear that they are not “fit” for a “proper” wedding anymore. The Bible itself choses lapidation as the right punishment for femenine adultery: if a woman decides to cheat on her husband (or if she’s raped, for what it’s worth), instead of talking about it and maybe divorce, she must be punished with death. And, let’s be clear, not a good one. An act that is shared by the whole community, who keeps on throwing stones, leading more women to punish the sinner and instilling the idea that cheating on your husband is proportional to death. Generally, the fact that girls may have sex just to feel pleasure is stigmatized. Most of the dispregiative terms in the sexual field - especially in latin languages - are, up to date, feminine. While men having sex, having fun, are seen as normal, are framed in the common view as something normal, faultless.
If history is the teacher, we should be the students.
However, at least 200 million women alive today have been subjected to Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). This practice is described by the UN as “all procedures that involve altering or injuring the female genitalia for non-medical reasons”. Right now, this activity is still very diffused in Africa, part of Asia, Europe and America: in Somalia, 98% of women between 15 and 49 was subjected to FGM, while in Indonesia it happened to half of the girls below age 11. Despite how absurd this may sound, most of the women that receive this surgery are girls below age 15. The main reason behind the young age is to avoid for girls to have time to understand what their body is for, and for them to have no concrete reason to oppose, seeing it as something that is “done for them”. It is not hard to understand that, when so young, it is not up to the child to decide: it is often imposed by the parents. The father who grew up with the idea of the man who must be the master of the obedient women; and the mother, who lived the same struggle at the time, brainwashed with the fact that maybe this is for the best. In this kind of environment, women are lacking the right external stimuli to understand that what they are living is wrong, that this is not the life they deserve just because they were born female. In these cases, the absence of globalization can be crucial: the correct type of information could make the mothers understand that their daughters don’t have to undergo what they had to, that life can be different and better.
In addition to the fact that this practice is discriminatory and barbaric and should not exist in the third millennium, this kind of “surgery” causes serious problems to the patient receveing it. Besides short term consequences like bleeding, localized pain and difficulties in urinating, FGM can cause infertility and increase the risk of child’s death during birth. Once she already lost the right to her body, the life of the girl is put at stake because of infections, and it could be completely compromised by the incapacity of having children after the procedure. However, this tradition born from inequality still lives, and does not seem to be stopping any time soon.
Always the UN define the FGM as a violation of the person’s dignitiy, of their right to life, freedom, integrity, non discrimination and health, both physical and mental, both long and short term. For many cultures they are seen as constitutive part of the passage from being a baby to the adult age, granting the woman that she fully belongs to society. Nevertheless, this practice easily becomes a tool to subdue women and put the future of the youths at stake, incentivizing school leave and child weddings. There are no real benefits, just risks and harms.
The UN’s 2030 agenda one of the goals is to completely abolish FGM. Overall, the condition of women in the world has worsened during the Covid pandemic: domestic violence has increased, gender gap has become broader… and the incidence of female genital mutilations is growing again. In coordination with UNICEF it was decided to include measures against this kind of practice in the response to the post-pandemic humanitarian crisis. The funding given by the agency are mainly devoted to sensibilization campaigns, especially to offer a more correct sexual education in communities at high risk.
Education is the only true way to eradicate this problem. It is not an easy goal to change the mentality of entire communities, and surely it is not something that can happen overnight. However, it is the only way to guarantee that millions of girls every year will not have to suffer such cruelty.