Female Genital Mutilation, or FGM, is a thoroughly unpleasant practice. It is painful, dangerous, unnecessary, damaging to young girls and women in later life and a violation of their human rights.
FGM has been high on the news media agenda for several months now, in large part because government ministers, led by Lib Dem international minister Lynne Featherstone, put it there.
I have seen countless newspaper features and TV reports on the subject, and I’m glad that some progress is being made in changing attitudes.
When I was news editor of The Voice in the early 2000’s we published a hard-hitting spread on FGM long before it became a hot topic.
The focus has been on sub-Saharan Africa yet a large proportion of female circumcision is actually practiced in Egypt.
It is also prevalent among Bohra populations in parts of India and Pakistan, Muslims in Malaysia and Indonesia, in parts of the Middle East – including Yemen, Oman, Iraqi Kurdistan – some Bedouin women in Israel, and Ethiopian Jews.
In short it is a global issue. You wouldn’t necessarily know this from TV and newspaper reports. The only victims I have seen interviewed are Nubian black. The UK government’s attention also appears focussed on sub-Sahara.
Nowhere, in the acres of newsprint and hours of newsreel have I seen, has there been any mention of the race dynamic in terms of perceptions of black Africa when phrases like “barbaric”, “barbaric ritual”, and “savagery” are used.
These are loaded words and phrases which edges dangerously into pernicious stereotypes of old. Even “the cutting season” carries with it unfortunate associations.
As one MP said recently, in reference to the immigration debate in Britain: language matters. It frames our innermost feelings and can provoke outrage or anger in particular directions.
There has also been variation in the figures quoted in the British media over the number of girls in Britain who could be at risk of FGM, especially on ‘holiday’ trips back to their parents’ homelands.
It was reported that 30,000 girls in Britain were at risk, but 24,000 is also commonly quoted. However there are suggestions that the figures most used in the British media are ten years out of date.
Allafrica.com was one of the few media outlets to cover a report by the United Nations children’s arm UNICEF which suggested that FGM is actually declining, not least because of the efforts of governments to stop the practice.
The Huffington Post reported:
The agency’s data shows a decline in the practice in the past 30 years in more than half of the countries surveyed, particularly for younger girls. In a number of countries, including Kenya, Tanzania and the Central African Republic, the organization even calls the decline “dramatic.”
This is no reason for complacency, of course. But it is revealing that this good news has gone largely unreported in the ‘mainstream’ press, presumably because it doesn’t quite fit the agenda.
While UNICEF dealt with actual instances of FGM much of the debate in Britain has revolved around girl’s being ‘at risk’. The difficulty with estimating those at risk is that the calculation will inevitably be based on a series of assumptions which are not immune to value judgements or a desire to arrive at a high figure.
The London Evening Standard once ran a front page claiming 100,000 African children were at risk of abduction in the wake of the ‘Adam’ torso-in-the-Thames case. It turned out to be nothing more than a rumor within African communities which ended up in a report written by a man who was a French-English interpreter for the parents of Victoria Climbie and who went on to run a foundation in honor of the murdered child. ‘Missing’ children were simply African children arriving late from school holidays abroad.
While I am not equating the largely false alarm over child abductions with FGM we nevertheless must be careful when it comes to the validity of statistics.
I would like to see FGM eliminated but, as a former enslaving and colonial power in Africa, Britain needs to guard against the perception that the extent of its concern over FGM is not a modern day manifestation of past missionary zeal to civilize the natives, especially when language used has echoes of a terrible history.
FGM should also not detract from attention on the privatisation of British overseas aid. The campaign against the practice is important but remains a small part of the entire aid budget, which is increasingly being turned into a slush fund for British businesses to invest in developing countries, as I blogged about last November.
As far as the British public are concerned, the FGM campaign gives overseas aid a reason for being, after all who could argue against it? I certainly wouldn’t, yet it is important we also see the bigger picture on international development.
Stories of the impact of genital mutilation are distressing and efforts must continue to tackle this problem. However Britain must also get the figures and the language right, otherwise we risk stereotyping sub-Saharan Africans and could appear as 21st Century missionaries carrying before them a sack-full of prejudices about ‘savage’ and ‘barbaric’ peoples.
By Lester Holloway @brolezholloway
