UK pledges to tackle FGM

David Cameron has engaged to help eradicate FGM within ‘a generation’.

The UK’s coalition political science brought young-bearing(prenominal) genital mutilation (FGM) to the arc of British politics last week as primitive pastor David Cameron pledged £35 gazillion towards a global aid programme to end the barbaric practice session of female circumcision.

It is the largest ever international investment to end FGM and it is hoped it leave behind be used to eradicate the procedure within a generation.

With the UN’s global ban on FGM last December, which two thirds of UN member states co-sponsored, this support from the British government is undoubtedly of rattling importance, as the numbers of women and children who flummox been subjected to FGM is staggering.

According to the World Health presidential term (WHO), between 100 and 140 million girls and women worldwide fetch been subjected to roughly type of female genital mutilation.

Their website says: ‘Estimates based on the most recent prevalence data indicate that 91,5 million girls and women above 9 years old in Africa argon currently living with the consequences of female genital mutilation.’

And ‘There atomic number 18 an estimated 3 million girls in Africa at danger of undergoing female genital mutilation every year.’

That is 8000 girls at risk every whiz day of being violated, mutilated, scarred … sc bed and at risk of unimaginable pain and even death.

The practice is as well prevalent not only in Somalia, Egypt and Mali, Senegal, but even among some communities who comport migrated to Europe and North America.

And FGM is not something that can just now be considered in the abstract, as a problem of evolution countries that affects the UK only in terms of providing foreign aid.

Headlines this week in any case revealed that girls in the UK are more(prenominal) at risk of FGM that in any other European commonwealth.

The practice of FGM was outlawed in Britain in 1995, and in 2003 the Female Genital Mutilation Act was introduced which also ‘makes it illegal to take girls who are British nationals or eonian residents of the UK abroad for FGM whether or not it is lawful in that country’.

However, the fear is that many families who stick settled in the UK are still sending their daughters back to their home countries to have FGM procedures carried out.

According to tender research by the European Institute for Gender Equality, more than 65,000 women and girls in the UK have been subjected to FGM and a further 30,000 are in controlection to be at risk in the future.

But although police have investigating 148 cases in the last three years, thither have been no successful prosecutions.

This is largely thought to be for heathen reasons, with taboos and fiercely upheld family traditions and controls firmly in place.

Speaking close to FGM and the government’s £35 million pledge, UK International Development Minister Lynne Featherstone said, ‘FGM has been considered too taboo and, frankly, too difficult to tackle.  It is time to fault the taboo.

‘Girls well-nigh the world have suffered a lifetime of damage, sometimes even death, as a result.’

Campaigners and charities groups say that education around human rights, challenging cultural norms and tackling gender violence are the key.

The Orchid Project and Tostan are two such groups, and Julia Lalla-Maharajh, pass of the Orchid Project, says that more than 6,000 communities around the world have already officially undertaken to end the barbaric mutilation of their women and girls.

So what of the UK’s multi-million pound pledge?

How does the government turn pound signs into significant and meaningful legal action?

Leyla Hussein, who runs the prevention charity Daughters of Eve, believes that the most crucial thing the government can do now is to make sure that there is no disconnect between legislative policy and the lived get wind of FGM.

She wants the government to work hand in hand with organisations and individuals who have frontline and first-hand experience of FGM.

‘Speak to women like me’, she says, ‘I know what I’ve gone through.’

‘Frequently victims of FGM are used just to tell the story, but not as part of the decision devising process’.

Given that most of us are fortunate decent to only ever experience FGM by reading about it, she has made perhaps the most valid point for the UK’s participation in eradicating this unimaginable violation.

 

Materials taken from Womens Views on News