65,000 circumcised women in Germany Bonn woman fights against female genital mutilation

Bonn · Around 200 million women worldwide are circumcised, but there is also a marked increase in the number of circumcised women in Germany. In parts of Africa it is hard to imagine life without the thousands of years old ritual. Antje Thomas is doing educational work and talks about her visits to Eritrea.

The tent was provisionally erected in a small village in Eritrea. The cries from the inside penetrate almost unfiltered to the outside, but they are drowned out(. Of) by singing, dancing and animated conversations. All the inhabitants have gathered to eat and drink to celebrate a ritual that is thousands of years old: the circumcision of a young girl.

It is estimated that around 200 million girls and women worldwide are circumcised - more than five percent of the world's female population estimated at 3.85 billion in October 2018. As laws against female genital mutilation have been passed in many countries, circumcisions are often practised secretly.

According to experts, the number of unreported cases is many times higher. In Germany the topic is of little interest. "I, too, first became aware of it through the Archemed association," says Antje Thomas. The economist and staff member of the University Hospital Bonn has been working for this non-profit association for almost five years, which provides medical-humanitarian aid for sick children and mothers giving birth in Eritrea.

The state in the northeast of the African continent is one of the poorest countries in the world. Formally Eritrea has a democratic constitution, in fact it is a dictatorship. In the ranking of freedom of the press, Eritrea ranks second last in the world - ahead of North Korea - and a UN report certified in 2015 "systematic, widespread and serious violations of human rights".

In this delicate environment, the Archemed association tries to educate future generations about the ritual. Since 2015 Antje Thomas has been supervising projects against circumcision in small villages in various regions of Eritrea. Her commitment began with an application: "Wolfgang Holzgreve, chairman of the board of directors of the University Hospital Bonn and member of the board of Archemed, asked me to help with the preparation of a grant application to the EU".

The Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) awareness campaign is one of the few non-medical projects of the association. Therefore Antje Thomas was able to help and accompany the project without any medical knowledge. She visited Eritrea for the first time in 2015. Since then she has been there six more times, the next trip is planned for March. In the beginning she was shocked by the state of the public institutions: "In the hospitals, where nobody from outside helps with financial means, the conditions are breathtakingly bad. On the other hand: the warmth of the people and the "eternally laughing children“.

Without solar energy the reconnaissance film can’t be shown

"This strong contrast of brutal poverty on the one hand and sheer never-ending happiness on the other is indescribable," says Thomas. In the projects, she helped plan training courses that informed men and women about women's rights and especially about the consequences of FGM. It is important to involve the men: "Many don't even know what exactly is happening there".

A film showing the circumcision of young girls moved many men. "Most men know women only circumcised, but have never seen the procedure itself or the suffering," says Thomas. Archemed filmed the reactions of the men during the Enlightenment film: Shocked faces, tears in the eyes, some could not bear it and turned away.

Showing the 30-minute film in villages is the first hurdle in a country like Eritrea, where each inhabitant consumes only one ninetieth as much energy as the average German citizen: "We had a solar-powered beamer made especially to be able to show the film. Although circumcisions are forbidden since 2007 in Eritrea, the problem seems to have only shifted. Due to the law no more official numbers are seized.

Archemed's volunteers try to involve all those involved on site - the village administrator, the school principal, the head of the health centre, the representatives of the various religions. Contrary to what many assume, the ritual is by no means religious. "One half of the project village was Muslim, the other Christian," says Thomas.

The ritual is older than all other world religions

The ritual is several thousand years old and is therefore practiced longer than today's world religions exist. A mention of female genital circumcision is already found on a shred of papyrus, which was inscribed in Egypt in 163 BC. The age at which the girls or young women are circumcised depends on the ethnic group in which they grow up. Some girls are affected at an early age, others at puberty, some even at the age of a few weeks.

Depending on the extent of the operation, experts distinguish four different types of circumcision, ranging from partial to complete removal of the clitoris or from cutting the labia minora to labia majora. The educational level of the mothers and the type of circumcision are related, says Thomas: "The less enlightened they were or had access to school education, the harder the circumcision was and the more frequently the daughters were circumcised.

Archemed and other clubs therefore start from two sides: They inform about the risks of circumcision and try to work preventively through educational institutions. Thomas: "We have shown and explained what risks there are and reaffirmed the women in saying "no" to this painful circumcision.

Archemed's first FGM awareness-raising project was funded by the EU. A follow-up project in Dorok, near the provincial capital Keren, is currently supported by association funds. "But training is not enough. We will continue as long as the funds allow," says Thomas. A year with all training courses and flights of the coworkers causes costs of approximately 30,000 Euro.

65,000 circumcised women in Germany

Therefore Archemed depends on donations. Successes of the projects can only be estimated due to the high number of unreported cases. Thomas is in a positive mood: "We see that it has become a public topic in the villages, that alone is already a great step forward".

That is why young women and men are the main target groups of the projects. But the more rural the region, the higher the circumcision rate. The reasons for this are traditional ideas: That women should marry as virgins or look more "aesthetic" when circumcised. The reason that circumcised women "have fewer objections" is also given. Girls, on the other hand, believe that everything is tradition - "simply because it has always been so“.

Archemed and others, however, do not only enlighten in those states where the ritual is at home and continues to be practiced. The flight movements of recent years to Europe have also imported the ritual, its victims and future victims. Germany therefore amended its penal code in 2013. Studies on this point give different figures: The association "Terre des Femmes" estimates the number of genital mutilated women in Germany at 64,812 and the number of young women at risk at 15,540 - around 20 percent of those affected come from Eritrea, many others from Ethiopia, Egypt, Somalia and Iraq. A study sponsored by the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (BMFSF) names 47,359 affected persons and 1558 to 5684 potentially threatened by the ritual.

Threatened by "holiday mutilation“

According to the BMFSF investigation, the daughters of immigrants are often several years older than those in Africa at the time of the mutilation intervention. However, this is less the result of insight than one of (the) missing opportunities. Because the ritual is forbidden in Germany and the right to physical integrity and human dignity is rated higher than the parents' right of upbringing, the execution of the ritual in this country usually takes place secretly. Also a so-called circumcision tourism developed.

In return, girls are either sent to their home country for circumcision during the school holidays or a "circumciser" travels to Germany. The legislator calls it "holiday mutilation" and also deals with the extent to which the parents make themselves punishable - from incitement to complicity.

Charlotte Weil, a lecturer at Terre des Femmes, says: "In Germany the figures have risen sharply since 2015. That is not a small marginal problem.“ Since the association was founded in 1981, female genital mutilation has been an important issue. "Girls must be protected. The consequences accompany them throughout their lives and a trivialisation is fatal." Even today, the "prevalence rate" of practice in Somalia and Guinea is almost 100 percent, which means that it affects almost every woman.

In the meantime, the physical consequences of mutilation can be partially reversed by plastic surgery. The world's first centre to provide holistic, i.e. medical and psychosocial, care and treatment for FGM victims is the Desert Flower Center (DFC) of the Waldfriede Hospital in Berlin. Further DFCs were opened in Sweden and France.

Further information to the associations under www.archemed.org and www.frauenrechte.de. The help telephone against violence against women can be reached at 08000/116016.

(Original text: Elena Sebening, Translation: Mareike Graepel)

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