Outstanding Diversity Benefit for British Women: Female Circumcision

[Mike Ellis]

Since we have gone to great lengths to import Somalians to the USA, it is a certainty that this practice is going on here here as well.


The unspeakable practice of female circumcision that's destroying young women's lives in Britain | the Daily Mail

The unspeakable practice of female circumcision that's destroying young women's lives in Britain
By JO-ANN GOODWIN and DAVID JONES
Last updated at 11:57am on 3rd January 2008

The girl is 15 years old but looks much younger. Her face has the fine-boned elegance typical of her native Somalia, but her accent belongs to the streets of East London. She is plainly terrified. That much is clear from the way she avoids eye contact and constantly fidgets in her chair.

"Promise you won't print my name or anything?" she implores repeatedly. "Promise no one will ever know that I've spoken to you? If people in my community find out, they'll say that I've betrayed them and I'll have to run away. And anyway, I don't want my parents to be sent to jail."

(snip)

Most people will be unfamiliar with this practice, which involves removing part or all of the clitoris, the surrounding labia (the outer part of the vagina) and sometimes the sewing up of the vagina, leaving only a small opening for urine and menstrual blood.

It is carried out for a variety of cultural reasons. Such is the secrecy that surrounds the practice that even those aware that it occurs in large swathes of Africa and Asia will be shocked to learn that it is prevalent in Britain.

(snip)

Everything changed for Lali when she was 11 years old. One morning, her mother told her, quite casually, that they were to visit another Somali girl, whom she liked.

"I thought I was just going to play with my friend, so I was happy," Lali says quietly, avoiding eye contact.

Soon after she arrived at the friend's anonymous council house, however, cold reality dawned. In fact, Lali's mother had secretly joined together with several other women to pay for a "cutter" to travel to London from Mogadishu to circumcise their daughters.

"They believed it had to be done, otherwise we would never get a husband,' Lali shrugs.

What happened next was like a scene from medieval times. Her mother, other female relatives and family friends suddenly grabbed Lali and grappled her to the floor. Then, on cue, the strange woman came in, like a torturer with her bag of implements.

"They held me down, and when the woman began cutting I screamed, so my friend's sister put her hand tightly over my mouth," she says. "I had known her and these other women all my life, and now they were doing ... this."

(snip)

This alienation between mothers and daughters, of course, is another subtle way in which the practice subjects African women to male authority. Among the many otherwise educated and reasonable British-African men we spoke to, however, few were willing to call a halt.

With breathtaking sadism, their attitude was summed up by one man during an internet chat forum for Somalis living in Britain. "They should get their kintirs [Somalian for clitoris] cut off if they can't control their passions," was his message to liberated female compatriots.

(snip)