DAKAR, 4 Dec 2006 (IRIN) - About 150 communities in Guinea on
Sunday collectively abandoned the practice of female genital cutting - a
landmark declaration in a country where more than 97 percent of women undergo
the ritual, the event’s organisers said on Monday.
Delegations led by
women from each village converged on the central Guinean town of Lalya to speak
about genital excision and participate in the declaration. All of Guinea’s
ethnic groups practice genital cutting, despite a law that forbids it.
The Senegal-based NGO Tostan organised the Guinea declaration after
working with communities to show how traditional practices such as genital
cutting are harming individuals and communities.
Khady Bah Faye, Tostan’s
communications officer, told IRIN on Monday that the Guinea declaration shows
that momentum against the harmful practice is growing in Africa. She said Tostan
has also been getting requests for assistance from The Gambia, Burkina Faso and
Benin. The NGO has also worked in Mali and is about to begin in Mauritania.
More than 1,800 communities in Senegal, where excision is practiced
among 28 percent of the population, have publicly abandoned genital cutting in
the past nine years, Faye said. She said the continued rate of abandonment after
at least two years was 65-80 percent.
“This has been a practice that has
gone on for 2,000 years and yet it is going to take an understanding by people
who believe this is part of their culture to understand the dangers to women so
it can be eliminated,” Ann Veneman, executive director of the United Nations
children’s agency (UNICEF), recently told reporters in Dakar.
UNICEF and
the UN World Health Organisation (WHO) recommend Tostan’s program as a “best
practice” for social empowerment.
Changing norms
Various
forms of female genital cutting are practiced in about 28 countries across
Africa. A traditional way of keeping women chaste and eligible for marriage,
excision removes part or all of the external labia and clitoris. The most severe
form of the practice involves sewing the opening of the vagina to a hole about
the size of a matchstick for the passage of menstrual blood and urine.
Excision can lead to haemorrhage, infection, complications during
pregnancy and long-term psychological scarring, according to WHO.
Tostan
Executive Director Molly Melching said the group is not trying to eradicate
genital cutting, but to educate communities about democracy and human rights.
“It’s not in our objectives to tell people to change. It is within our
objectives to inform,” Melching said.
She compares the phasing out of
genital excision to the eradication of foot binding in China in the early 20th
Century. That practice, which aimed to reduce foot size to make girls more
attractive, disappeared in a generation.
Tostan uses theatre,
role-playing, and other hands-on methods in local languages to educate
communities and bring people together. The programme relies on community members
themselves reaching consensus about how they will deal with such issues as the
environment, domestic violence, childhood marriage and genital
excision.
“Human rights becomes a goal for people, for a community,”
Melching said. “There are different ways of achieving that goal. Once people
agree on this they have new norms. Before they thought [genital cutting] was
necessary to create cohesion. When they learn it doesn’t there’s a new
convention, new norms.”
Community approach
Communities
abandon excision collectively because they inter-marry. Melching likened the
process to a country deciding to switch which side of the road people drive on.
Everyone has to change the norm together or the few who try to change will be
forced to rejoin the common traffic.
Melching notes that although
African men steeped in tradition were reluctant to alter their views on genital
cutting, they began to change after they became aware of the dangers of genital
excision. Previously, men and women did not discuss such issues.
“It’s
really when they began to get the men, the leaders of the communities,
particularly the imams, together with women to hear about what this has really
meant in their lives and how it may have impacted their own daughters or nieces
or their grandchildren that they began to realise that this has harmful
effects,” Veneman
said.