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By Deborah Dupre (Reporter)
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Female Child Agony: 'Father told me I had to get married... that's what women do after... cut.'

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Christina, from Tanzania, did what children are suppose to do after suffering female genital mutilation (FGM). She married an older man when she was 13. Most FGMs are conducted between infancy and 15 years of age, with most cases between 5 and 8 years of age.

 

“My father told me I had to get married because that is what women do after they have been cut. I don’t know how old John is. When I ask him he won’t tell me, he says, ‘why do you need to know my age?’ My mother says that he is 26. He works as a day labourer and loads stones.”

 

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is also known as female circumcision or female genital cutting, and in practising communities by local terms such as ‘tahor’ or ‘sunna’.

 

FGM is a form of child abuse that can have devastating physical and psychological consequences for girls and women.

 

The World Health Organization describes it: “procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons” (WHO, 2013).

 

Since 1985, it’s been a serious criminal offence under the Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act to perform FGM or to assist a girl to perform FGM on herself.

 

In 2003, the Female Genital Mutilation Act tightened this law to criminalise FGM being carried out on UK citizens overseas. Anyone found guilty of the offence faces a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison.

 


“John leaves very early around 4 am and then I get up to clean the house, fetch water from the river, about one kilometre downhill, then I work in our corn farm. I also graze our two goats which John got as a wedding gift. Then I start to prepare dinner.

 

 

“Sometimes I go visit my friend or she comes here. When I do have my children, I want my son to become a policeman and my daughter a nurse.”

 

Watch FGM agony:

 

 

 

 

UNICEF says, “We can make a brighter future for girls now. Take a stand to end child marriage and FGM: http://uni.cf/GS14

 

UNICEF promotes the rights and wellbeing of every child.



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    Total 4 comments
    • Hefty P

      I’m skeptical that girls of any culture (and especially one that lives in huts) have absolutely no idea of local marriage customs by the age of reproductive maturity.

      Have they really never seen each other, where there are holes in the walls, and a bed sheet is used for a door?

      Or, have they never gossiped, as all women do?

      We’re expected to believe that they are surrounded by an entire community of people, doing the same thing, and don’t know their own way of life. ‘You want me to do what?’

      • Deborah Dupre

        These are children, my friend. And – yes, even at an early age – they leave with fear and then agony of being cut and forced to marry.

      • paul brown

        I don’t understand what you’re saying. Girls certainly do know what’s in store for them. They have no power to prevent it. Of course they have seen each other and gossiped (as men do as well). They also have no control over who marries them, and most marry just barely into puberty, some before puberty.

    • James G. Mason

      Thank you for this reminder Deborah. Keep it up. :!:

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