The Agony of Female Circumcision
Paul Vallely
The New Zealand Herald
Jan 9, 2010
Hanna Abera is seven. Her mother and grandmother wanted to slice off part of her genitals. But she was saved by an extraordinarily brave intervention from her aunt after a British charity launched a programme of education on the consequences of female circumcision - which is still widely practised throughout parts of Africa and the Middle East.
No one knows how many women are subjected to the procedure but it is thought that over two million procedures are performed every year. Amnesty International estimates that over 130 million women worldwide have been affected by some form of what it calls female genital mutilation.
In Ethiopia, which is where Hanna lives, 70 to 80 per cent of women are circumcised, as are almost all men. But this is not a bad news story. It is about change n for in the region around the town of Woliso in the central part of the country a remarkable project has brought a revolution in social attitudes.
And it has come about through the empowerment of a local community, thanks to a project run by the British development agency ActionAid, which is one of the three charities being supported in this year's Independent Christmas Appeal, which closes today n though staff will remain available to receive donations by post, telephone or via the internet until the end of next month.
Tijitu Obsu is a young woman who was, until quite recently, an enthusiast for the traditional practice. "I arranged the ceremony when my two elder nieces were circumcised, at the ages of seven and five," says the 22-year-old. "And I organised the party afterwards. But by the date that Hanna was due to be circumcised at the age of four, three years ago, my eyes had been opened. I knew that with the other two I had committed a terrible crime. So I saved Hanna from that fate."
Change began in Woliso in 1998 when ActionAid began a project to get local communities to focus on how traditional cultural practices were assisting the spread of HIV/Aids. But it took seven years before that work began to bear fruit and Hanna - and many young girls like her - began to be saved from the circumciser's blade.
The rate of HIV infection in Ethiopia is around 4.4 per cent n which is below the 6 per cent average for the continent or the astronomical rates in some southern African countries, where one in five of the entire population is infected. Still, 1.4 million Ethiopians carry the virus, and one of the key strategies in containing the spread has been to try to curb what became known as harmful traditional practices, including widow inheritance, wife sharing, abduction and circumcision.
Campaigners who had studied the eradication of the 1,000-year-long practice of foot-binding in China in the early 20th century knew that changing social attitudes, rather than passing laws against the practice, was key. ActionAid, which specialises in community-level development projects, sponsored training for 96 young people as facilitators of attitude change. To provide them with a living it also gave them training in crop farming or animal rearing.
