by Betty Webb
By contrast, when girls’ genitals are amputated, their wounds are left untreated, which causes a reported 20% to 30% of them to die from shock, blood loss, and/or infection. Of the children who survive their initial amputations, a large number die later from septicemia because of inadequate passage of the menstrual flow. Many die years later from childbirth complications as their body attempts to pass a full term infant through a mutilated birth canal; fifty percent of their infants also die (see Appendix II).
Another complication arises when the now-genital-less girls’ wounds are sewn up with fishing line or upholstery thread, a standard procedure. The healing process eventually creates large areas of scar tissue which contort the upper thigh muscles, sometimes resulting in permanent lameness.
The horrors don’t end there. The genital amputations are often performed on multiple children at once with the same unsterilized cutting object, which ranges from a tin can lid to a butcher knife. These unsterilized conditions spread HIV and other communicable diseases.
Since the genital amputation of little girls has been proven to have such severe consequences, the obvious question is: why perform this procedure at all? The answer is that in many countries, a girl’s sexual purity is considered more important than her life.
In an article published by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Nashiru, a cutter among Kenya’s 400,000-strong Maasai tribe (where nearly 100% of that tribe’s girls undergo the procedure), defended her work. “When you cut a girl, you know she will remain pure until she gets married, and that after marriage, she will be faithful,” Nashiru said. “But when you leave a girl uncut, she sleeps with any man and brings disease into the community.”
Nashiru does have a point. The procedure, and the damage it inflicts on the vagina and surrounding areas, causes such excruciating pain that the girls experience sexual relations as torture, not pleasure.
Like many other cutters, Nashiru treats the wounds she inflicts with a paste made from cow dung and milk fat, so in addition to the usual complications, many of her patients die from tetanus. This is of little consequence to Nashiru. Like all other cutters, she receives her full cutting fee for services rendered, whether the children live or die.
As so often happens in human history, various myths have sprung up to explain the unexplainable. The Maasai, as in other highly populated Sub-Saharan African tribes (such as the Bantu and Somali) which practice genital amputation, believe that a woman’s clitoris will sever a man’s penis during intercourse. They also believe that if the clitoris is not amputated, it will pierce an infant’s skull during childbirth, killing it.
In light of these bizarre beliefs, it is tempting to think that genital amputation takes place only among the uneducated. However, this is not the case.
When asked by the Hartford Observer News on Dec. 10, 1996, about the medical ethics of carrying out genital amputations on little girls, Dr. Munir Mur, a physician and highly-respected professor of gynecology at Cairo’s Ain Shams University, answered, “Most of our parents, mothers, aunts, sisters and so on have been doing this for years, and no one was complaining.”
Physicians themselves can be responsible for much of the carnage. Egyptian newspapers reported that in one single day in 1996, Ezzat Shehat, M.D., performed three genital amputations in a Nile Valley village. One four-year-old girl died and one three-year-old girl died, which brought that day’s death rate to 66%. On the girls’ death certificates, Dr. Shehat listed the deaths as due to natural causes, the usual reported reason for these deaths.
In sheer numbers, most genital amputations are performed in Muslim countries such as Egypt and Somalia. With the rise of fundamentalist Islam, the practice appears to be growing, because some fundamentalist religious leaders have begun demanding it, even though the Koran does not advocate the practice.
In 1981, at Cairo’s University of The Great Sheikh of Al-Azhar, a religious ruling (fatwa) was issued by the Egyptian Fatwa Committee on FGM (Female Genital Mutilation, another common euphemism for genital amputation). The ruling stated, “Parents must follow the lessons of Mohammed and not listen to medical authorities because the latter often change their minds. Parents must do their duty and have their daughters circumcised.”
Mohammed never taught any such thing, a fact the fundamentalist imams (religious leaders) ignored.
In explaining his role in issuing the fatwa, Gad Haq Ali Gad Haq, a senior religious leader at Al-Azhar, said, “Girls who are not circumcised when young have a sharp temperament and bad habits” (Hartford Observer News, 1996).
In an article published by the British Medical Journal, August 3, 1996, Cairo shop owner Mahmood Hassan was enthusiastic about the fatwa. “A girl must be circumcised, or she will grow up like a man,” Hassan said. “Who will marry her if she is this way?”
So pervasive in Egypt is the belief that genital amputation is necessary for little girls a national survey conducted in 2000 revealed that from 75% to 97 %—from 30 to 40 million women between to ages of 15 and 49—had undergone the procedure. Although the procedure has been outlawed in Egypt, the law is not enforced.
What does any of this have to do with the West, and specifically the U.S.?
Because with the increased migration to the West, female genital amputation is now being practiced here.
In a recent study, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimated that 168,000 girls in the U.S. have undergone the procedure or were at risk of being subjected to it in the future. The plight of one of those girls actually made its way into the nation’s newspapers.
In 2005, in Georgia, a man named Khalid Adem, an immigrant from Ethiopia during a U.S. government refugee resettlement program, was convicted of aggravated battery and cruelty to children because he amputated his two-year-old daughter’s genitals at his Atlanta apartment. The Adem case was touted by the media as the first documented case of female genital amputation in the U.S., but this is inaccurate. U.S. court cases referring to the practice date back to the early 1970s, but those cases were sanitized under the label of “child abuse” and handled in closed judges’ chambers. They received little to no media attention.
In Europe, the genital amputations of young girls has reached epidemic proportions. The practice has now been found in Australia, Canada, Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, and Switzerland. In Britain, 200,000 girls are reportedly at risk, and in Norway, three imams were recently prosecuted for demanding the genital amputation of all Norwegian Muslim girls.
France has been particularly hard hit by this scourge. In1977, the French Family Planning Association protested the problem to the World Health Organization with little result. In 2000, studies found that the number of endangered girls had risen to 25,000 in the Paris region alone. With a skyrocketing death rate among female immigrant children who were subjected to the procedure, the French media overcame its squeamishness and began writing about the problem. Lit by the glare of publicity, the first of a string of genital amputation cases arrived in the French courts.
In one of those cases, Hawa Greou, an immigrant from Mali living in Paris, was sentenced to eight years in prison for the genital amputations of forty-eight little girls, some as young as two years old.
She charged $30 to $80 per child.
Appendix I
WARNING—GRAPHIC
TYPES OF FEMALE GENITAL AMPUTATION:
Type I: Amputation of the clitoris (clitorectomy)
Type II: Amputation of the clitoris and labia minora
Type III: Amputation of the clitoris and all external genitalia, plus sewing up (narrowing) of the vagina, which is called infibulation
These procedures are commonly performed by kitchen knives, glass shards, can lids, razor blades, and sharpened stones; the amputations are also performed by the introduction of corrosive substances such as acids into the targeted areas. Anesthesia is not used.
DESCRIPTION:
The most severe form of ge
nital amputation, yet done on millions of girls ages 2 through 6, is Type III, also called “infibulation.” Infibulation cuts away the entire genital area and replaces the vulva with a wall of scar tissue stretching from the pubis to the anus. A pencil-sized opening, sometimes reinformed with a narrow tube such as a plastic drinking straw, is left to allow urine and menstrual blood to pass through. After the procedure, the stumps of the labia are sewn together. They eventually join into a solid mass via the scar-forming process, thus sealing the girl. To facilitate the sealing process, the child’s legs are tied together for approximately two to four weeks to prevent her from opening the wound.
Once the vagina is sealed, intercourse is impossible, which is the reason for performing the procedure in the first place. When the girl is married (usually between ages of 12 and 16), the scar tissue is so tough and pervasive that the husband must reopen the girl’s vagina with a knife. Some girls bleed to death at this point, but most live. Because of the vagina’s tendency to heal back into the sewn-shut state, the husband frequently must re-cut the vagina open in order for intercourse to take place.
Appendix II
PREVALENCE OF FEMALE GENITAL AMPUTATION:
The World Health Organization estimates that more than 140 million girls have undergone genital amputation, with an average of two million per year currently undergoing the procedure. The practice is common in 28 African countries, as well as Asia and the Middle East (see below). WHO’s study found that 83% of girls in the Sudan had undergone the procedure, 73% of women in Ethiopia, 40% in Ghana. In an area stretching from Senegal in West Africa, to Somalia on the East coast, as well as from Egypt in the north to Tanzania in the south, it is estimated that more than 95% of all women and girls have undergone genital amputation.
COUNTRIES INVOLVED:
African countries—Benin, Burkina, Chad, Camaroon, Central African Republic, Cote d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Liberia, Madeira, Mali, Mozambique, Mauritania, Nigeria, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Upper Volta, Senegal, Somalia, Sudan. In Sierra Leone, where the president’s wife personally sponsored the cutting of 1,500 young girls to win votes for her husband, amputations are on the rise. That country’s Minister of Social Welfare, Gender and Women’s Affairs—a woman—threatened “to sew up the mouths” of those who preached against the amputations.
Middle Eastern countries—Egypt, western Iran (Kurdistan), northern Iraq, Israel (where Bedouins practice it), Jordan, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; Southern Algeria, Syria, Yemen.
Asian countries—Malaysia, Indonesia, India.
HEALTH CONSEQUENCES:
Shock; blood loss leading to death; septicemia (blood poisoning), gangrene; tetanus; cysts and abscesses; urinary incontinence; necrosis of the vaginal wall; chronic pelvic disease; the complete closure of the vagina during the healing process; infertility; painful intercourse; serious childbirth difficulties; HIV transmission from unsterilized instruments. Mental health issues are also common because the child loses all ability to trust. After giving birth, young woman who have been “cut” have trouble bonding with their children—especially the girls.
Bibliography
Books:
Cutting the Rose: Female Genital Mutilation—The Practice and the Prevention, Efua Dorkenoo
Desert Flower, a novel by Wawris Dirie, cut at the age of 5
Do They Hear You When You Cry, Fauziya Kassindja
[The] Excised, Evelyn Accad
[The] Female Circumcision Controversy, Ellen Gruenbaum
Female ‘Circumcision’ in Africa: Culture, Controversy, and Change, Shell-Duncan and Hernlund
Female Genital Cutting: Cultural Conflict in the Global Community, Elizabeth H. Boyle
Female Genital Mutilation: A Call to Global Action, Nahid Toubia
[The] Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World, Dr. Nawal El Saadawi, cut as a young girl.
Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali
No Laughter Here, Rita Williams-Garcia (novel)
Possessing the Secret of Joy, Alice Walker (novel)
Prisoners of Ritual, Hanny Lightfoot-Klein
[The] Rape of Innocence—One Woman’s Story of Female Genital Mutilation in the USA, Patricia Robinett
The River Between, Ngugi wa Thiong’o (novel)
Taking a Bath, Lynda B. Ukemenam
[The] Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson (novel)
Films:
“Female Circumcision: Beliefs and Misbeliefs,” a documentary showing the procedure being performed in a city street
“Fire Eyes,” a documentary directed by Soraya Mire
“Moolaade’,” a critically-acclaimed fictionalized account by Fatoumata Coulibaly
“Rites,” a documentary by the American Anthropological Association
An episode of “Law and Order” also spotlighted the practice
Articles and papers:
American Academy of Pediatrics, “Female Genital Mutilation —Committee on Bioethics”
Badawi, Mohamed, “Epidemiology of Female Sexual Castration in Cairo, Egypt,” presented at the First International Symposium on Circumcision, Anaheim, California, March 1-2, 1989
Baughman, Christopher, “Doctors Testify Surgeon Secretly Circumcised Woman,” The Advocate, Baton Rouge, LA, Oct. 30, 1996
Burstyn, Linda, “Female Circumcision Comes to America,” The Atlantic Monthly, 1996
Crossette, Barbara, “Mutilation Seen as Risk for the Girls of Immigrants,” The New York Times, March 23, 1998
UNICEF Department of Information, “Position of UNICEF on Female Excision”
World Health Organization “Fact Sheet on Female Genital Mutilation,” June 2000
For more information, write to:
Atlanta Circumcision Information Center, 2 Putnam Dr., NW, Atlanta, GA 30342
Equality Now, P.O. Box 20646, Columbus Circle Station, New York, NY 10023
FGM Awareness and Education Project, PO Box 6597 Albany, CA 94706
[The] Female Genital Cutting Education and Networking Project, PO Box 46715, Tampa, Fl. 33647-6715
RAINBO (Research, Actions & Information Network for Bodily Integrity of Women), 915 Broadway, Suite 1109, New York, NY 10010-7108
Women’s International Network News, 187 Grant St, Lexington, MA 02173
Recommended websites:
The Female Genital Cutting Education and Networking Project www.fgmnetwork.org
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs www.irinnews.org/webspecials/FGM/45986.asp
American Society of Pediatrics: Committee on Bioethics http://aappolicy.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/pediatrics%3b102/1/153
More from this Author
For other books, upcoming author events, or more information please go to:
www.poisonedpenpress.com/betty-webb
Contact Us
To receive a free catalog of Poisoned Pen Press titles, please contact us in one of the following ways:
Phone: 1-800-421-3976
Facsimile: 1-480-949-1707
Email: [email protected]
Website: www.poisonedpenpress.com
Poisoned Pen Press
6962 E. First Ave. Ste. 103
Scottsdale, AZ 85251
