Stopping the Abuse of FGM: tearing down the barriers

For much of last week I was in the city of Berlin attending the 6^th European Conference on Mental Health. I have been to all of the conferences since they started, and the conference has grown in terms of quality and popularity year on year. With my long term collaborator and writer Sue, I presented 2 papers on research that we had undertaken into Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and into service user anomie and the role they take on as they come volunteers and or mentors to others. Both papers were well received but now comes the task to get them published - a much harder task!

There was an opportunity to see some of Berlin during the conference, and what a lovely city it is too. The autumn colours were vibrant and apart from one day where a near tropical storm tore through the city, the sky remained blue, and warm sunshine made being outside a wonderful experience. One afternoon after the conference had finished I took the 100 bus that runs from one side of Berlin to the other. It’s a cheap way to see the major attractions. I then retraced the route on foot to see all the famous and historical sights. It was a 17k walk.

The most poignant sight visited was the memorial of the Berlin Wall. Lengths of the former wall could be found in different parts of the city, and sometimes these were covered with hugely creative and political graffiti and images. However I went to the official memorial and museum. In the quietness of the afternoon I spent some time reading the fragments of history, and soaking in what was a very sad place to be. One section, now hidden unless you climb the 200 steps to an observation platform, had been kept in its original state, complete with watch tower. It was a bleak and frightening sight.

The pain, hurt and segregation could be seen in the various narratives of people who had been caught up in the building of the wall, and its continued barrier to free travel, families and opportunity. Given it was a mental health conference I was attending, the Berlin wall, and its impact on people’s lives, seemed symbolic of the self and social stigma many people living with a mental health problem experience. That one group of human beings can inflict such cruelty, pain and discrimination to another group and believe this to be OK, defies all sense of humanity and compassion.

This was an issue that the conference audience struggled with in listening to the paper we presented on FGM. Like the Berlin Wall did, FGM violates a number of human rights and principles. It reinforces notions of women having a political, economic, social and cultural subordinate role in society. FGM is often carried out on girls up to the age of 15. Adult women can also be subjected to FGM, for example re-infibulation following childbirth. FGM is commonly performed by traditional practitioners, including grandparents, who have no formal medical training, and often the procedures are carried out without anaesthetics.  The girl is often pinned down by a number of adults complicit in the FGM being performed. It is a form of child abuse.

Terre des Femmes (which translates from the French as Women’s Earth), is a non-profit women’s rights organisation. Founded in 1981, its head office is based in Berlin. According to Terre des Femmes there are at least 58,000 victims of FGM living in Germany, with a further 13,000 girls vulnerable to becoming mutilated. In England and Wales it’s estimated that 137,000 women and girls aged 15-49 are affected by FGM. 

In the UK some 79 FGM Protection Orders have been made since 2015, and although some 9000 FGM cases were treated by the NHS last year, there has so far not been a single conviction of anyone for carrying out, or allowing this practice to be carried out. Unfortunately there is no reliable data on the overall prevalence of FGM across Europe, but it thought there are many hundreds of thousands of women living in Europe who have been subjected to FGM. The largest groups of these women and girls originating from countries in which the practice of FGM is widespread live in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Spain, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Portugal Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK. 

There are no easy solutions to stopping this abuse. Education is important and of course support for women affected by FGM is crucial in terms of restoring good mental health and wellbeing – our paper looked at how this could be done through peer mentorship and breaking down long established cultural and social barriers. It took 28 years before the Berlin Wall came down. This barrier was removed because of a thaw in the so called 'Cold War' and a cultural shift in relationships between the East and the West. I’m hoping we don’t have to wait for nearly 30 years before the barriers that prevent us from stopping the abuse of FGM can be torn down.