INVESTIGATION. The international day of Zero Tolerance for genital mutilation takes place this Saturday. France has established itself as a model to fight against the practice, but 53,000 excised women still live in France.
They are 53,000 to live on French soil. They are between 5 and 70 years old and come from various countries, mainly from the African continent or the Middle East. They have a job and are well integrated into society, or on the contrary are in precarious situations. Their personal stories are very different, but all have one thing in common: they have been subjected, often before the age of 10, to genital mutilation.
Excision involves removing part of the outer genitals of young girls or adolescents, with disastrous physical health consequences, both short and long term. It persists, however, because it constitutes a social norm that many families feel obligated to respect (see box at the end).
Martha’s story
The sparkling Martha Diomandé is one of those women who lives in France. Seated in a Parisian cafe, a few days before the International Day of Zero Tolerance to Excisions, she tells her story in a calm voice.
Martha came to settle in France more than ten years ago, when a civil war drove her from her native Ivory Coast, in 2004. Professional dancer, she already knew France well. being produced on stages nationwide throughout her teenage years.
Martha has few memories of her excision: she remembers having felt great pain, but also having been very surrounded and pampered by the women of her family. She was only seven years old.
It was her grandmother, herself an exciser, who decided that the time had come. “My grandmother was clairvoyant, and she predicted that dancing would take me far from my village. So I was cut particularly early, ”says Martha.
In her village of Kabakouma, in the west of the country, the vast majority of women are circumcised during a major celebration, a ritual that marks the transition to adulthood. After excision, women never bring up the subject again.
A double-edged click
It was during a conference organized by GAMS, one of the most committed French associations on the subject, that everything changed. “With me, intimacy is taboo, we don’t talk about what happened to us, we don’t discuss our pain. It allowed me to put my experience into words, ”says Martha.
Yet this meeting also, paradoxically, left him with a bitter taste, realizing that the practice was perceived as a crime. “In France, we see excision as a crime. The activists told me about mutilation and that shocked me, because it was so normal in my village. I had the impression that my culture was being attacked and that we were not trying to understand, ”she laments.
In France, the action of associations like GAMS has enabled many women like Martha to speak out. She also pushed men to get involved against the practice.
“There really was a before and an after. In the years 1980-1990, it was difficult to access women, and fathers were absent. From the 2000s, women began to dare to talk about their sexuality and address their suffering. Fathers began to fear for the health of their daughters, ”recalls Isabelle Gillette-Faye, president of GAMS.
This awareness has been achieved gradually, thanks to the strengthening of the law against excision. France is thus the first country in Europe to have brought excisors to justice, during highly publicized trials, in the 1980s.
These cases set a precedent, and the penal code now punishes these practices, even if it does not expressly mention sexual mutilation. Prison sentences of up to 15 years, as well as heavy fines can be imposed on any person “having caused mutilation or a permanent disability” or “having caused death, without intention to give it”.
The law also allows repression of sexual mutilation committed abroad on French children, or living in France. Finally, in 2013 and 2015, new measures were taken to criminalize all attempts to incite minors to undergo excision, and to better protect those who seek asylum.
Begin the road to recovery
Martha’s shock when she learned that excision was criminal in France shows that the model is not necessarily transposable to all countries. In Côte d’Ivoire, for example, excision has been illegal since 1998, but it is so deeply rooted in ancestral traditions that it does not go back.
Once this shock has passed, however, the vast majority of victims of excision welcome the changes in the law with relief. The work of associations such as GAMS, which increasingly dare to talk about excision, has led some women to become indignant and to completely reject the practice.
Some, injured in their identity, will then begin a long process of reflection which sometimes leads them to reconstructive surgery, in order to resolve what they experience as a real injustice (see paper 2). Satisfaction rates following surgery are more than 90%. For these women, leaving behind their victim status is a liberation.
Emancipate women
Whether in France or in countries where the practice is widespread, the fight must in all cases involve this work with women. The practice recedes when they are emancipated and able to provide for their own needs.
“I have often been accused of not denouncing excision with sufficient force, because I do not condemn the women who practice it. I am opposed to excision and I want it to stop, but for that, we cannot treat circumcisers as criminals. Throwing old women in prison is not a solution. We have to train them, to change their practices, ”insists Martha.
She herself decided to create a “women’s house” in her native village, where excisors can be trained as midwives, and thus retain their social status. Meetings are also organized there to discuss topics related to health and sexuality.
In France, similar awareness-raising initiatives, at the local level and among the different communities, are working very well. In the 93, the department most affected by the practice, Women in Solidarity Association take advantage of the international day to conduct mini training sessions targeting the inhabitants of the department. Discussion areas reserved for women are offered every week in Bobigny.
“We still have pockets of resistance that remain, especially among Ivorians and Guineans, while in other communities, it is disappearing. It is by continuing to raise awareness among women, their husbands, and health professionals, who are their first contacts, that we will stem the practice, ”concludes Isabelle Gillette-Faye.
An ancestral practice
The latest figures from Unicef show more than 200 million women circumcised around the world, 25% of them before the age of 14. Most of them live on the African continent, but excision is also practiced in South East Asia, and in a few cases, in South America.
It is most often an ancestral practice that finds its origins in popular culture and traditions. In the communities which practice it, it constitutes a social norm from which it is very difficult to derogate. In some cases, women cannot be married without having been cut.
Many researchers believe that the beginnings of the practice would predate the beginnings of Christianity and Islam, and that it was highly developed in the Egypt of the Pharaohs.
Contrary to what is often reported, female genital mutilation is not a religious practice, no religious text mentions it. It is practiced as well among Muslims, as among Christians or animists. Most societies see female genital cutting rather as a rite of passage into adulthood.
However, some movements justify excision by their beliefs, because they misread their religious dogmas. These movements often advocate a more general repression of women, with a desire to control their sexuality and perpetuate inequalities between the sexes. Sexual mutilation fits perfectly into this framework.
Isabelle Gillette-Faye is also worried about the rise of extremism and communitarianism in France, fearing that this will lead to a resurgence of the practice, in certain groups where it had disappeared.
Read the rest of our survey
Fight against excision: the French model
#Excision: Women break the taboo bit.ly/1Kxh62A
Posted by Why actor on Saturday 6 February 2016
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