FGM: ‘How Can We Achieve Zero Tolerance With Zero Coverage?’

It’s one of the single biggest killers of girls: this week marks the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation.

The violent act of severing off, often a child’s, external clitoris or labia is documented in 92 countries and likely kills more women and girls in Africa than all armed conflict across the continent each year.

Yet, not only did the one official day dedicated to fighting FGM elude all mainstream media on Thursday, the crisis barely graces our headlines on any of the other 364 days a year it tragically occurs. How can we achieve zero tolerance with zero coverage?

“ What myself and 230 million women have experienced is mutilation,” Dr Leyla Hussein — psychotherapist, advocacy director for the Girl Generation, and three-time Media Storm guest — told the podcast in no uncertain terms.

These many, many million women count only a smattering of media mentions each year. The Guardian often delivers the most in the UK, with 17 reports this past year. The BBC website lists 10 articles across all world news, The Telegraph five, and The Times and Sunday Times — just one.  Given how massive a global crisis this is, why is there such little media attention?

“It’s really about race,” Hussein said, giving the short answer.

The most vulnerable human being that’s left behind is the African girl child, and FGM affects that girl. That’s why no one talks about it

Dr Leyla Hussein, director for the Girl Generation

Aggravating this is the common misconception that FGM does not exist outside Africa. In Europe and the US, over half a million women are living with or at risk of FGM. Yet ‘otherness’ muddies our conversation, with euphemisms like “cultural practice” commonly used to refer to the abuse.

“People saying it’s a ‘cultural practice’ is really damaging and harmful,” said Ifrah Ahmed, a Somali-Irish humanitarian worker, founder of the anti-FGM Ifrah Foundation, and Media Storm podcast’s second survivor guest. “Culture is something you’re proud of. Sambusa [a variety of samosa] is a Somali culture. FGM is a human rights violation.”

Language may strike many as a small battle in the grand scheme, but Hussein sees it as a real barrier to action. “Because of colonisation and everything else Britain has taken part in in the world, there’s this fear that they’re going to be seen as harming other cultures.

But if this was happening to white girls, there’d be outrage. So by putting it into the ‘cultural traditional practice framework’, then you are actually being racist.” 

Ifrah Ahmed, founder of the anti-FGM Ifrah Foundation

Perhaps this cultural distancing goes some way to explaining abysmal FGM prosecution efforts. Despite having been criminalised in the UK in 1985, there have only ever been three court convictions. By contrast, at least 137,000 British women and girls have been mutilated, and 60,000 are deemed at risk. FGM carries an even more miserable conviction rate than rape.

Of course, there are those who argue it wouldn’t be a problem at all in the West at all if only we ‘controlled’ our borders. One of the few major media appearances FGM had this week was on a wildly controversial Channel 4 show titled ‘Go Back to Where you Came From’ — a show in which both Ahmed and Media Storm co-host Mathilda appeared.

Predictably, several X users used Ahmed’s explanation of FGM on the show as proof the UK should not accept Somali refugees.

We invited her to respond to them directly.

“When they see it with their own eyes, maybe they can appreciate why people want to go to the UK,” said Ahmed, who fled to Ireland as a refugee herself. “Every mother wants to protect her daughter. My daughter was born from a mother who believes that she has a right to live, she has a right to be educated, she has a right to her body, she has a right to say no.”

Indeed, many women, girls and their parents flee home due to fears of FGM, with some 20,000 survivors arriving in the EU each year. Ahmed was among them, and has since used her newfound rights not just to campaign against FGM in her country of birth, but to successfully lobby for Irish legislation.

At Media Storm, we do not make the case for refugee rights on the basis of ‘the good immigrant’. But do not fail to notice this woman who smuggled herself to sanctuary and then changed her new country’s law for the better.

Hussein offered her own response to those blaming FGM on Muslim migration. “I am so sick  and tired of hearing this framing that FGM is a Muslim issue. FGM is practiced by all faiths, from Muslims, to non-believers, to Christians, to Ethiopian Jews. This is about patriarchy — tell me where in the world patriarchy is not an issue?” (Seriously, please tell us, because we’d like to go there). 

“FGM fundamentally happens to control the female sexuality, we put it on migration so we don’t address patriarchal issues in the West,” Hussein added. But in truth, we are no strangers. Labiaplasty — a cosmetic surgery most commonly found in Europe, North America and Australia — is the West’s legal version of FGM, a ‘practice’ derived from a ‘culture’ that tells women they aren’t sexy enough without neatly tucked-in labias. Labiaplasty is available on the NHS for girls under the age of 16, and marketed by cosmetic clinics as a “Barbie Procedure for genital beautification”.

Most remarkably, among those in the Media Storm studio, Hussein, Ahmed and co-host Helena would likely not be approved for labioplasty under UK FGM laws due to their skin colour. See if you can spot, then, the difference between barbaric and ‘beautifying’ FGM?

The cultural weaponisation of FGM, which pits survivor-activists against their own communities, is one reason, revealed Ahmed, so few women speak out. “Even those women who want to speak out see how we’ve been described by the media: being called a ‘victim’ not a ‘survivor’, not being given the voice we want to give to the community”. These women have told her, “I don’t want to go through what you have been through”. 

Thankfully, in the face of death threats, censorship, deeply intimate exposure, re-traumatisation and patronisation, we have a tiny handful of courageous, outspoken FGM survivors to thank for keeping the issue on the agenda. Even more rarely reported than the horrors of FGM, are reports about the victories of campaigners who fight to shine a light on the gender-based violence. The most remarkable figures come from East Africa, where studies show a drop in FGM prevalence from 71% in 1995, to 8% in 2016.

Ahmed allows herself a rare moment of self-praise: “Do you know how brave we are to speak out?!”

Media Storm’s latest episode, ‘Female Genital Mutilation: Can we achieve zero tolerance with zero coverage?’ is out now.