The second reason is expressed most touchingly by a woman who has undergone the procedure.
I implore you ll to consider her words:
Why we should stop using the phrase 'female genital mutilation'
A victim of female circumcision has spoken out against the western description of the traditional procedure, saying the use of the phrase 'female genital mutilation' is culturally insensitive. A young, respected member of the African community in Australia, Khadija Gbla told Waleed Aly that the use of harsh language only serves to alienate survivors of the procedure.
Last week I travelled to Parliament House to help facilitate the National Summit on Female Genital Mutilation.
It was a bipartisan, multi-government event: there were representatives from the government and the opposition as well as state government representatives. The idea was to create a forum for the full range of people, from community organisations to health service providers, to discuss the practice of female genital mutilation, its existence in Australia, and how we can go about eliminating it.
This is not an entirely new debate to people in Australia, but how often do you hear the voices of those who are victims of this process? I would say almost never.
Khadija Gbla is one such victim. She spoke powerfully at the summit, and took a moment to talk to us on RN Drive.
She began by explaining why she has a problem with the term ‘female genital mutilation’.
‘I think it’s quite harsh and it’s very western-centric,’ Ms Gbla told me. ‘In Africa mostly we call it “female circumcision”, which I think goes to show more respect to the victims, while “female genital mutilation” just conjures up horrible pictures in people’s minds... It doesn’t go to support or help our mental health.’ In brief, she objects to being described repeatedly as someone who is mutilated.
Ms Gbla is a former Young South Australian of the Year and has also been named the Young African Australian of the Year. Her story begins in a refugee camp in Gambia, where she and her mother fled to escape war in Sierra Leone. One day when she was nine years old her mother told her they were going to visit a family member in a nearby town.
‘[A]nd before I knew it I was being held down by my mum, and this old lady with some blunt knife that looked rusted was coming towards me,’ she said. ‘[T]his lady started cutting inch-by-inch-by-inch something very precious, which at the time I took for granted because I didn’t know what was happening.’
Although the experience was painful, in Gambia what had happened to her was considered normal and positive—a ‘natural process of life’ that was a rite of passage into womanhood.
‘It was celebrated. And we were told something beautiful had happened to us. We had come of age, you know? A woman shouldn’t have a clitoris; it’s stinky, it is smelly, it gets in the way of things, it’s going to make you want to jump every man you see, you’re not going to be able to stay as a virgin until you get married.’
Then she migrated to Australia and that soon changed. The pages of Dolly and Girlfriend magazines became her tormentors with the numerous articles she read that focused positively on the clitoris. Western culture made her feel like she wasn’t a real woman, that she was ‘incomplete’.
‘I felt like the western culture was treating me like some complete freak of nature and almost putting the blame on women like us for what had happened, when I had no choice in the matter—no consent was given for what happened to me,’ she said.
Suddenly the trauma of her FGM had become much sharper, and her anger began to affect her interaction with her family and her community. Although she doesn’t blame her mother, the incident has troubled their relationship.
‘I said to her, on the one hand I forgive her because she was ignorant of what she was doing; on the other hand, this stops at my generation,’ Ms Gbla said. ‘Whether she likes it or not, I am not going to continue the practice and have become very outspoken about the issue since I was 13.’
Now, Ms Gbla is trying to build solidarity and belonging amongst young women who have suffered FGM by running a local women’s group. She faces some community opposition, including occasionally from her mother, but her cause is too important to her to let that stop her.
‘[W]hat we the girls do is talk about being circumcised, talk about a world with no clitoris, and talk about how if we had a white man, he really won’t have to struggle to look for a clitoris, because there isn’t one,’ she joked. It’s amazing that she can laugh at this, but there’s no mistaking how seriously she takes the issue.
The aim of last week’s summit—which I was lucky enough to be able to observe and help facilitate a session—was to try to figure out a way that this practice can be eradicated from Australia, and then beyond that, the world. In the Australian context, we don’t know how widespread FGM is. It might be fairly small, but we know it exists. However, one of Ms Gbla’s most powerful points is that denouncing the communities where this is practice is unlikely to help; in fact, it will probably cause FGM to go even further underground.
‘We have to remember we shouldn’t come from a moral high ground, thinking that we’re better than them or we don’t have our own skeletons in our closet of things that we do in our culture, in the western setting, that some cultures would consider barbaric, just like we th
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