As many people have pointed out here, and far more have pointed out elsewhere, the report that ISIS had ordered all girls/women aged 11 to 46 to undergo female genital mutilation may be a hoax. (Some have said it simply is a hoax, but that’s not clear yet.)

But at least it’s not purely a Western media hoax. Al Arabiya is taking it seriously. Yesterday it reported the same story I got from the BBC:

Staff Writer, Al Arabiya News
Thursday, 24 July 2014
The al-Qaeda-Inspired Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has ordered all girls and women between the ages of 11 and 46 in and around Iraq’s northern city of Mosul to undergo female genital mutilation, the

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Dalia Farouk at The Cairo Post reports a bad trend in Egypt:

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is increasing in rural areas in Egypt according to Women and Development Association (WDA) Alexandria governorate head Aida Nour al-Din, Youm7 reported Friday.

Din said that FGM is also common in urban areas due to some religious beliefs that it is a “religious obligation and must be done.”

She also said a 2008 study indicated 86 percent of divorce cases were due to FGM and its negative impact on marital intercourse.

Weird, isn’t it. You’d think people would be able to figure it out eventually. “Let’s see, how to make sure women won’t slut around – I know, mangle their genitals so that … Read the rest

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The Guardian tells us there are FGM “parties” in the UK. No punch, no cheese straws, no gossip, just carving up of little girls’ genitals.

The cutting of girls at female genital mutilation “parties” is still going on in Britain and not just taking place abroad, healthcare experts have told MPs.

The Commons home affairs select committee has heard that “cutters” – often older women – are flown into Britain for the events, at which as many as a dozen girls may be operated on.

“Operated on”? Don’t be silly, Graun – the cutters are not surgeons, and what they do is not an operation. They carve up little girls’ genitals.… Read the rest

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FGM in Egypt.

Egypt has one of the highest rates of FGM in the world: a staggering 91 per cent of women between the ages of 15 and 49 have been cut, according to a 2013 report released by UNICEF (PDF). Genital mutilation is practiced in various forms across the African continent, from Nigeria to Somalia. In Egypt, it is most common—indeed, almost universal—in rural areas like Diyarb Buqtaris village where Soheir grew up. But it crosses all class boundaries.  The West often labels the excisions an Islamic practice, but cutting occurs in Egypt in both Muslim and Christian communities, and it goes on despite the fact that the Egyptian Coptic Church and Al Azhar, the country’s leading Islamic

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There’s a clinic in West London that undoes a small part of the damage done by Female Genital Mutilation, specifically infibulation. It makes the hole bigger.

Dr Naomi Low-Beer, Consultant Gynaecologist at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, and lead doctor for the FGM service at the West London clinic, performs the invaluable reversal surgery. She explained: “With the most severe type of FGM, the clitoris and labia have been totally removed, the vaginal opening closed, with a tiny passage left for urine and menstrual blood. This makes sex painful or impossible.

“Women with this type of FGM do benefit from surgery. It is often referred to as ‘reversal’, but rather than reversing the FGM the surgery opens the vagina so

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A slice of life in rural Tanzania…

Lozwi Longinai was preparing for her wedding day last month in northern Lingate village, but at the last minute her groom changed his mind after realising that his 18-year-old fiancée had not been circumcised.

“This is very bad.  We are being rejected by our own society because we have refused to be circumcised,” Longinai complained.

While female genital mutilation (FGM) is on the decline in Tanzania, the practice remains widespread in some rural areas, and in Maasai communities like Lingate in the northern Arusha region, dozens of women are being turned away in marriage because they have refused to be cut, according to an NGO working in the region.

That’s grim. I’m … Read the rest

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At Comment is Free, Leyla Hussain on FGM.

I was cut when I was seven years old. Four women held me down. I felt every single cut. I was screaming so much I just blacked out. I didn’t know what female genital mutilation (FGM) was until the day it happened to me. FGM is one of the worst physical and psychological scars a girl can be left with and I therefore completely endorse and welcome the new report on tackling FGM.

Shudder. It’s an atrocity, yet there are places where it’s both commonplace and mandatory.

A key point of the report, Tackling Female Genital Mutilation in the UK, launched on Monday in the House of Commons, is about

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Campaigning against FGM can be dangerous work, at least in the UK.

The Guardian has spoken to women who have received death threats, been publicly assaulted and who have had to move house after speaking out about FGM, which involves cutting away some or all of a girl’s external genitalia and can include sewing up the vagina. It is mostly carried out on girls some time between infancy and the age of 15.

Nimko Ali, a 29-year-old British-Somalian, was taken to Somalia for the procedure when she was seven. “I never told anyone I had FGM, not even my best friend, because I saw what happened to women in the UK who did speak out and saw it as

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Edna Adan is one of the heroic women I learned about courtesy of the Half the Sky series. She built and runs a hospital in Somalia. A Safe World for Women gives us her statement on Female Genital Mutilation.

As a midwife, I have been delivering babies for 50 years, many of whom were being born to women who had undergone FGM. Witnessing the FGM-associated complications that many were suffering caused me to speak out against it in public in 1976 which at that time shocked my family and my people.

37 years later, and after so many resolutions have been passed to eradicate the practice, we sadly found that 97% of our women still suffered FGM as

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There’s the Hastings Center report itself, which was the source of Lisa Wade’s article. Zinnia Jones has a great, detailed post on it. I’ll just mention some things that jump out at me.

Starting with the title.

Seven Things to Know about

Female Genital Surgeries

in Africa

They’re not surgeries. If you’re walking down the street and someone tears your arm off for the fun of it, that’s not surgery.

Calling FGM “surgeries” makes it sound health-related, beneficial, useful, good for the girl it happens to. It loads the deck. It’s a creepy, sly, underhanded way of trying to manipulate us into thinking oh well it’s not so bad then.

Then the first part of the … Read the rest

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Now that the first steam has dissipated a little, a closer look at one part of Lisa Wade’s “Balanced Look” at cutting off parts of the genitalia of very young girls.

The third item in her list of useful things for people to know so that they can take a more “balanced” approach to Female Genital Mutilation.

Research has shown that women with cutting are sexually responsive.

Women who have undergone genital surgeries report “rich sexual lives, including desire, arousal, orgasm, and satisfaction…”  This is true among women who have experienced clitoral reductions and undergone infibulation, as well as women who’ve undergone lesser forms of cutting.

Look at the way she puts that. There are no qualifications – no “many” … Read the rest

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Nick Cohen notes that it’s progress when violence against women and girls is treated as such.

Odd though it may seem to older readers, the Crown Prosecution Service now regards itself as a liberal organ of the state. This week it is making a great play of its success in deterring violence against women. Its lawyers brought 91,000 domestic violence prosecutions last year and secured 67,000 convictions. As I have mentioned in this space before, many criminologists believe that the willingness, not just of prosecutors and the police but of wider society, to take violence against women and children seriously explains the welcome fall in homicide rate.

Well it would, wouldn’t it. If fewer women are killed then the … Read the rest

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Via Deeyah, via Mona Eltahawy: Azza El Garf of the Freedom and Justice Party – the Muslim Brotherhood party – disapproves of the ban on FGM.

She condemns the notorious “virginity tests”  that military officers and doctors are accused of perpetrating on a group of female  protesters in March 2011.

But she disagrees with Egypt’s 2008 ban on female cutting,  which opponents call genital mutilation. The World Health Organization defines it  as the partial or complete removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury  to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.

“It is a personal decision and each woman can decide based on her needs. If she needs it, she can go to a doctor,” El Garf

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I saw a powerful BBC report on FGM in Egypt the other day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bObvzSHRKT8

The most chilling part is at the very end (11:00) when Sue Lloyd Roberts asks a Salafist honcho if he’s on board with the campaign to end FGM and he said it’s not a priority. She pressed him by saying, “So you wouldn’t deter a mother who wants to get her underage daughter mutilated.”

He stared for a second and then said, with a tiny smirk, “I have nothing further to say on this matter.”

Sue Lloyd Roberts in voiceover: “The will of mothers like Olla will therefore be respected, and 11-year-old Raja will be mutilated.” Freeze-frame on young Raja.… Read the rest

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One small bit of good news, for a change.

The movement to end genital cutting is spreading in Senegal at a quickening pace through the very ties of family and ethnicity that used to entrench it. And a practice once seen as an immutable part of a girl’s life in many ethnic groups and African nations is ebbing, though rarely at the pace or with the organized drive found in Senegal.

But good news of that kind is of course always too late for some…for many.

Bassi Boiro, the elderly woman who was Sare Harouna’s so-called cutter, said she always performed the rite before dawn under the spreading arms of a sacred tree, away from the settlement.

“Men couldn’t

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