Female Genital Circumcising

Female genital circumcising:

 

Every eleventh second a young girl between the age of four to fourteen is circumcised. This is a number of 6000 girls every day, who have to suffer from this cruel tradition. There are three different types of circumcising:    

o   Type 1: remove of the clitoris

o   Type 2: remove of the clitoris, the labia minora

o   Type 3: remove of the clitoris and the whole labia

After the genitals are cut away, the gypsy woman uses thorns from an acacia tree to puncture holes in the girl`s scar, to sew the them up. The circumcising is done with old razor blades or stones by a gypsy woman. The reasons why this tradition is still in act are different. Some say it is a religious reason, but this is not true because it is not a rule in the Koran. The most important reasons is, that African women get a lot of children, but they only have a lack of money and they mostly can`t afford to feed all their children, so they have to exchange their daughters to the man, who pays them the most camels. The man wants to be sure that the girl is a virgin until he marries her, so if the girl is circumcised she is somehow closed to other men, and she won`t be able to have sex with another man, because having sex means a lot of pain for the women. Some girls die the first time they have sex, because she will bleed too much. If the young girl is not cut she is considered as a whore and the shame of the family. This tradition also contains a lot of health risks, because of the unclean razor blade some girls get HIV, or the wound becomes infected. Most of the girls die because of the shock and the lost of too much blood. If they survive they have to live with a huge pain while their menstruation and a shorter life. A tremendously high risk for them is to die while the birth of a child because they will lose too much blood. With Waris Dirie this topic came up in Western countries for the first time. With her many organisations began to defend this tradition. She also owns an organisation called “Waris Dirie foundations!”.  

WARIS DIRIE:

Waris was born in 1965 in Somalia and grew up as the daughter of nomands with 12 brothers and sisters. After running away from home with 13, because her she had to marry a 60 year old man, she came to her uncle in London. There she was discovered as a model. What Waris told no one was that she is cut, since she is five years old. When she gave an interview in 1994 for the fashion magazine “Marie Clair” she attacked all the attention of the people. From 1997 to 2003 she worked as an UNO- ambassador and set up the “Waris Dirie Funduation” in 2002.She is still fighting against FGM/FGC. She wrote the book “Desert Flower” which came out as a movie in 2008. She has two sons.

Other books form Waris:

·         Desert Flower (1997), the book about her life

·         Desert Dawn (2008) about her journey to Somalia 20 years after she ran away

·         Desert Children (2006) about FGM in Western countries

·         A letter to my mother (2007)