Fighting genital mutilation in Sierra Leone.

Abstract

Rugiatu Turay still remembers the pain she felt the day she and four of her sisters were sent to Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital, on the pretext of visiting their aunt. "They reed a crude penknife, it was so painful I bled excessively for two days and fainted when I wanted to walk," Turay said, describing how at the age of 11 she was subjected to female genital mutilation. Afterwards the scar itched and got infected. As a result she developed severe menstrual pains, blood clots and a cyst, she said. When Turay heard her younger sisters were due to undergo genital mutilation too she tried, in vain, to intervene. The death of a cousin, who bled to death after being subjected to the practice, triggered her activism. Today Turay leads the Amazonian Initiative Movement (AIM), one of several nongovernmental organizations that campaign in West Africa against the harmful traditional practice of female genital mutilation. She formed the group in 2002 with other women she met in refugee camps in Guinea during Sierra Leones 1991-2001 civil war. Turay is one of an estimated 100-140 million girls and women worldwide who have undergone female genital mutilation--the removal of all or par t of the female external genitalia as part of traditional initiation rituals or marriage preparation customs. According to WHO, every year two million girls are at risk of being subjected to the practice which is sometimes referred to as female genital cutting or female circumcision. Sierra Leone is one of 28 African countries where female genital mutilation is practised. It is also a custom in parts of the Middle East and Asia. The procedure is usually performed by an elderly woman of the village who has been specially designated this ink, by a village barber or by a traditional birth attendant. But in some countries more affluent families seek the services of medical personnel to avoid the dangers of unskilled operations in unsanitary conditions. WHO has consistently condemned this medicalization of the harmful traditional practice as "wilful damage to healthy organs for non-therapeutic reasons." In the past, studies have suggested that the practice of female genital mutilation can result in infertility, pregnancy and childbirth complications, and psychological problems through inability to experience sexual pleasure. But in a study published in August this year in the Lancet, researchers made the strongest link yet between extreme forms of female genital mutilation and female infertility. Their findings provide the most compelling evidence to date that girls who have undergone genital mutilation in childhood could be at risk of infertility later in life. …