Uncircumcised Girl Day

Female Genital Mutilation/ Cutting is barbaric. Few subjects can make my face contort in horror, nor make my blood boil with anger, than FGM/C. There is no reason for it. People who hide behind 'culture' (whatever that is) to justify it are cowards. Old women who continue to perform the operation perpetuate their own sex's subjugation. It reduces a woman's sexuality. It causes lifelong pain. It kills.

Organisations the world over have been advocating against it for years. I've read dozens of papers and reports on strategies to change attitudes and behaviour - some very successfully. But the last strategy I read about in Ethiopia made me smile.

Uncircumcised girl day. The strategy was to encourage whole villages to celebrate the marriages of uncircumcised girls. "See? Uncircumcised girls can get married too!" I get the point and apparently it peaked enough interest for communities to form action committees to abandon the practice. Brilliant.

But imagine those shy girls on their wedding day. They're blushing brides, but not for conventional reasons. They blush because in these conservative communities where sex-chat is taboo, their in-tact genitals are the focus of discussion. The world is talking about their private bits so that generations of girls to come will not have to put up with any uninvited party touching their private bits ever again. It rather seems to take the romance out of it... but perhaps it's a price worth paying.

So any lady who is reading this and is fortunate never to have felt the rough edge of a rusty razor blade or the sharp flint of a piece of broken glass, spare a thought for your sisters in Ethiopia, Sudan and other countries besides. And celebrate your own "uncircumcised girl" day.

http://www.stopfgmc.org/
http://www.unicef.org/protection/index_genitalmutilation.html