NOVA"s "Calling The Shots" On Autism And Vaccines

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“There is so significantly proof, none of which demonstrates any hyperlink among vaccines and autism, that you have to say, “Sufficient!”

NOVA"s "Calling The Shots" On Autism And Vaccines

Calling future leaders: meet the head of the UN Population Fund

Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Babatunde Osotimehin is interviewed at the UN’s news centre. Photograph: Paulo Filgueiras/UN Photo

Babatunde Osotimehin’s job is to guarantee that “each and every pregnancy is wished, every birth is secure, and every single young person’s prospective is fulfilled”. A experienced medical medical professional, Osotimehin was formerly minister of wellness in Nigeria and the director-general of the Nigerian National Company for the Management of Aids.

At the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), in which he is executive director, he has made maternal overall health, gender-based mostly violence and youthful folks central to his mandate. It is since of this curiosity in tomorrow’s advancement leaders that the Worldwide Growth Professionals Network is doing work with UNFPA to give you an possibility to meet him.

Speaking about his early daily life and having neglected his studies at college, Osotimehin says: “younger people may consider a long time to uncover their way and attain their likely. The work of grownups is to offer them choices.”

So as this “champion for reproductive wellness” approaches the finish of his 4-12 months term at the UNFPA, join the Network understand a lot more about his career, his vision and to place your tips and questions to him.

This invitation is open solely to members of the Network so if you are presently studying a subject that will stand you in good stead for a advancement job, and would like to attend the lunch at Kings Spot in London, here’s what you require to do:

Join the network send an e mail to globaldevpros@theguardian.com with the executive director’s title in the subject line. Contain a query for Osotimehin, and an illustration of when you have demonstrated leadership, as nicely as your university and contact particulars. Spots are restricted.

Calling future leaders: meet the head of the UN Population Fund

The GOP is calling girls "sluts" once more. Now Democrats better do anything | Jessica Valenti

It hasn’t even been two weeks given that the US supreme court’s Hobby Lobby choice – a depressing reminder of how regressive America stays on troubles of gender and sexuality – and previously Democrats are firing the first shots in what is certain to be a new front in 2014′s definitive battle for women’s votes.

This week, Senators Mark Udall (D-CO) and Patty Murray (D-WA) have outlined legislation that would bar employers from banning coverage for contraception – in essence overturning the Pastime Lobby ruling. After a Senate vote as early as subsequent week, any this kind of bill is sure to fail in the Republican-managed Residence. Then comes the genuine test: Are Democrats ready to function on women’s well being with the identical vigor with which they’ve so quickly revived it as a political problem?

The GOP is digging an even deeper hole with ladies than they did in 2012: denying girls accessibility to birth management is nearly definitely going to be the Republicans’ legacy of idiocy heading into 2016, specifically given that, at any given time, about 25% of reproductive-age women are utilizing hormonal contraceptives or intrauterine products, the two strategies at issue in the situation. (Scientific studies show that 88% of girls will use 1 of people approaches of birth manage in their lifetimes.)

Democrats are not wasting any time creating positive that the GOP’s anti-contraception reputation sticks. Udall – whose Colorado seat is noticed as vulnerable – stated in a statement that “ladies should by no means have to ask their bosses for a permission slip to accessibility common varieties of birth management or other critical well being solutions”. Murray mentioned, “I hope Republicans will join us to revoke this court-issued license to discriminate and return the proper of Americans to make their own decisions, about their very own health care and their very own bodies.” Sure she does.

The intent of their bill – because it clearly won’t pass – is to shine an extremely unflattering spotlight on the GOP’s difficulty with females and intercourse, and good for Democrats on that score. The conservative narrative that paints women who use birth handle as “sluts” – 1st widely posited by Rush Limbaugh in 2012 , but which has gained wider currency given that – will be just about as well-known with female voters as then-Representative Todd Akin’s “respectable rape” comments. (The now-memoirist has given that doubled down on his statements.)

And Emily’s List president Stephanie Schriock (rumoured to be a pick for a leading campaign position should Hillary Clinton run for president) advised me, “Females voters are not interested in obtaining their boss or their government decide just what type of wellness care they deserve accessibility to”.

“This is just one assault in a extended line of many from Republicans who are obsessed with legislating women’s lives, and it’s going to backfire,” Shriock additional.

She’s appropriate – and not just in the short-term. Need to Clinton run for president, the continued Republican obsession with women’s sexuality (and Democrats calling them on it) can only be net optimistic for her campaign. The cultural response to sexism has shifted substantially given that Clinton’s final run, and the misogyny that dogged her final time close to will do absolutely nothing if not encourage females at the polls.

Individuals who consider otherwise are underestimating just how sick and exhausted American ladies are of fighting the very same battle for decades only to be known as whores.

But as the GOP goes down in misogyny-kindled flames in 2014 and women flock to help Democrats, we want to make certain that the focus of Democrats and feminists on women’s issues isn’t just about votes, but about alter. Due to the fact even though the “war on women” worked wonders at the polls in 2012, it did not have the very same influence on policy – there were a lot more abortion restrictions enacted in excess of the last 3 many years, for instance, than in the complete preceding decade.

And even though feminist- and left-led campaigns to beat back Republican attacks on women’s overall health garnered a great deal of media consideration, that didn’t quit conservative activists from rolling back women’s accessibility to reproductive overall health care. The common campaign to stop a Virginia bill mandating transvaginal ultrasounds ahead of abortions, for example, trended on Twitter and made it into a Saturday Night Reside sketch – and then the law was amended, but only to change the sort of ultrasound required. Viral campaign aside, some women in Virginia now won’t be able to afford an abortion simply because the price of the state-mandated ultrasound.

And, in the wake of the Hobby Lobby ruling, some of the same ladies will not be able to afford entry to the birth control that could prevent undesirable pregnancies in the 1st area – which the GOP is cheering. But generating Republicans the villains on election days has not been enough to reverse their policies.

In her Hobby Lobby dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg – who has reached critical meme status in recent weeks – wrote that, with its choice, the supreme court had “ventured into a minefield”, and now they’ve dragged Republican politicians with them. What actually matters, even though, is what Democrats and feminists can do for ladies in their wake in addition to currently being content with the carnage.

The GOP is calling girls "sluts" once more. Now Democrats better do anything | Jessica Valenti

Calling for an end to female genital mutilation

The video opens with a single red rose in complete bloom. It is stunning, excellent, bursting with existence. All of a sudden, a pair of scissors opens broad the deep V-shape of the steel blades surrounds the crimson petals. In 1 swift slice, the rose is destroyed.

It is a searing picture to launch Plan UK’s Simply because I am a Lady campaign against female genital mutilation (FGM). It’s also 1 the charity agonised above, simply because the situation of FGM and how it is depicted and addressed is fraught with trouble for all those battling to end the practice. But a determination to challenge this hidden and brutal abuse of girls and women is developing a momentum that now can not be stopped.

Opening the roundtable discussion, Program Uk chief executive Tanya Barron welcomed the tenacious perform becoming carried out by many companies. “We encounter a wonderful chance,” she stated. “FGM is on the agenda as in no way ahead of.”

The starting level, she continued, is to define FGM squarely as a fundamental violation of girls’ and women’s human rights. To end FGM, she mentioned, “we feel we have to foster a common frame of mind of ending violence towards girls and women”.

Lynne Featherstone MP from the Division for Global Improvement (DfID) agreed, saying that she noticed FGM as “one of the most excessive manifestations of gender inequality”. Occasions this kind of as the Woman Summit in July, she explained, will assistance an Africa-led motion to abolish FGM. “It will be a enormous occasion and it’s going to bring together neighborhood leaders, faith groups, the public sector and the private sector. There will be actual commitments that folks will have to consider forwards.”

Chair Alexandra Topping asked if there was a danger that the large-profile of FGM in the Uk and other European countries could be noticed as oppressive by African governments – and, without a doubt, regional communities.

It’s an attitude that Madina Bocoum Daff, FGM programme manager for Strategy Mali, says she has previously encountered in villages. “But it is essential to us that individuals realize this is a global movement, like vaccination of youngsters is a worldwide movement,” she explained. “It truly is really crucial for us to realise that if we can not get rid of FGM in Mali, then you can not in Europe. We also want men and women right here [in the Uk] to know it is not just a battle that you’re fighting – we’re fighting it in Mali, as well.”

Making certain that African governments legislate towards FGM is vital, explained Kenyan former MP Dr Linah Jebii Kilimo, chair of her country’s Anti-FGM Board: “I desired a legal device so that NGOs could go and say: ‘You are breaking the laws of your land and we will train you in how not to.’”

Social persecution

Driven by her own misery as a teenager, when Kilimo was stigmatised for not possessing been “lower” in a neighborhood the place FGM was rife, she championed the introduction of an anti-FGM law by Kenya’s parliament in 2011. To attain delicate targets, she advised, campaigners have to operate to recognize the priorities of the people whose influence they seek.

“We worked by co-opting male members of parliament,” she recalled. “We took them out of Nairobi, which they liked, for workshops. We showed them films [of FGM becoming performed], because I wanted them to see the monster that FGM is. The minister for young children collapsed. By the end, the guys have been saying: ‘Bring the bill, we need to criminalise it.’”

Do men want to be far more vocal in help of anti-FGM messages?

“Yes” came the resounding response from campaigner Khalid Roy, who is married to a Sudanese lady and has “heard the screams of nieces”. Given that Muslim scholars stay “the only international caucus calling for its perpetuation”, he mentioned it stays extraordinarily difficult to adjust the orthodoxy within Islam. This, in flip, influences Muslim communities which, encouraged by their religious leaders, struggle to grasp why FGM should cease.

Criminalisation might clarify the secular frame of mind in direction of FGM, but it was pointed out that it has been unlawful in the United kingdom for almost 3 decades and but only this 12 months has there been a single – extremely controversial – prosecution.

Waiting for women to disclose, in hindsight, was never ever going to perform, said former director of public prosecutions Sir Keir Starmer QC. “Proactive policing, employing techniques employed to investigate other crimes” is far a lot more very likely to be productive than waiting for a terrified girl to store her loved ones and get herself taken into care.

More situations are now being passed to the Crown Prosecution Support – 4 in 2013, and eleven so far this 12 months. But while trials are symbolically powerful, he warned, they can only ever be “portion of the response”.

Prosecution holds its own troubles, observed Dr Ash Chand, the NSPCC’s head of approach and advancement, minority ethnic kids. “We know that females can be the victims and be the perpetrators as well, in terms of becoming coerced into undertaking what they do.” He questioned how sophisticated any legislation will be in defending mothers who are unable to resist the demands of their culture to mutilate their daughters. “There is a chance that we end up prosecuting victims.”

Starmer’s response was robust. Even though there is no defence of coercion in United kingdom law, varying the severity of fees is a achievable resolution “when you have a real victim caught within the crime”, he stated.

Could media coverage of FGM and the catastrophic damage it triggers lead to the conversation currently being overtaken by western voices? Trish Halpin, editor-in-chief at Marie Claire, which ran its very first FGM characteristic in 1990, mentioned it was essential to get in diverse perspectives. “It really is now a lot far more of a widespread dialogue across all media,” she said. “Which is also to do with social media and the fourth wave of feminism, with young women engaging with feminism and wanting to eradicate inequality.”

Some progress has been made on prevention but far more is left to do. It’s nonetheless a unusual event for a lady to stroll into a police station, but disclosures in the Metropolitan location have risen from 26 in 2012 to a projection of far more than 100 this yr. Given that FGM is irreversible, Detective Superintendent Jason Ashwood, head of the Met’s FGM crew, explained he noticed his officers’ main role as safeguarding.

Safeguarding vulnerable women requires powerful partnership doing work, he emphasised. “We need to get the complete of the public sector technique really mindful, so that they report, and make certain they’re steady in the way that danger assessments are made so that police are conscious,” he explained. The authorities are then in a position, for illustration, to avert a household from travelling to have their daughter minimize abroad.

Schools are also currently being asked to get on greater duty for safeguarding. But school leaders, explained Nicola Walters, headteacher at Handsworth Wood Girls’ Academy in Birmingham, need to have support “from essential individuals who can entry these communities”. This is the only way schools can play their component in teaching women about their sexual health and human rights. Without having influential neighborhood support, parents can – and do – withdraw their daughters from class.

Effective safeguarding also demands knowing of why FGM occurs, said Efua Dorkenoo, programme director for the Finish FGM/C Social Alter Campaign at Alternatives Consultancy Providers.

“The act itself is at the core of the control of female sexuality – and it’s because of the handle dimension there is usually going to be resistance,” she said. That resistance implies, she believes, that only a whole-program strategy to prevention driven by government companies will operate.

“What are we undertaking with daughters delivered in hospital? These girls want particular pathways,” she insisted. “They require to be followed and monitored till they are out of danger. We want early identification, and to get social care to the table, due to the fact they are not at the table.”

The criticism of social care and overall health specialists was underscored by a variety of participants. FGM public health specialist Dr Comfort Momoh, who has established the African Effectively Female clinic at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital in south London, is also annoyed that she has not observed more urgency from government departments in the Uk. “I have been fighting and operating with the Division of Well being to have a roundtable for health and social services, and this has not took place – if we’re saying it really is kid abuse, we need to have a great technique, so everyone will know what to do.”

In spite of substantial latest publicity, ignorance of FGM remains across the social operate, police and overall health professions, mentioned ACCM United kingdom director Sarah McCulloch, “which fear that if they inquire inquiries they will be labelled as racist”. Teachers as well, the only pros who have everyday speak to with vulnerable girls, could have no comprehending of FGM, observed university student Muna Hassan from charity Integrate Bristol. “Last 12 months a teacher in my school who was educating A-degree overall health and social care didn’t know what FGM is. That’s somebody accountable for potential social workers and nurses. There requirements to be statutory training for frontline employees.”

No matter the enduring difficulty of tackling FGM, nevertheless, the room resonated with optimism. “Inside of our lifetime” was a phrase heard repeatedly during the morning. “Our generation has been sacrificed, but we can change this,” concluded Prepare Mali’s Daff.

Check out program-united kingdom.org/since-i-am-a-girl/fgm-rose to uncover out much more

FGM: the facts

• Female genital mutilation (FGM)is the practice of partially or entirely removing the clitoris and labia of girls and youthful women for non-health care factors. In the most severe situations, the vagina is also closed.

• FGM is practised in a selection of countries by a quantity of ethnic and religious groups.

• FGM might be carried out from infancy up right up until close to 15. In some settings the practice is carried out by physicians, but it is also practiced by standard cutters with no health-related training.

• FGM causes severe soreness and typically prospects to serious infection. Fatal haemorragging can result. A female who has been ‘cut’ is doubly probably to die in labour. It also increases the danger of a infant becoming stillborn.

• Ladies and females knowledge soreness for several many years after they’ve undergone FGM, during intercourse and in childbirth.

• three million women living in Africa are at chance of FGM each and every yr.

• twenty,000 women residing in the United kingdom are at threat of FGM each and every yr.

At the table

Alexandra Topping (Chair) Journalist, the Guardian

Jason Ashwood Detective Superintendent, sexual offences, exploitation and child abuse command, Met police

Tanya Barron CEO, Prepare Uk

Madina Bocoum Daff Programme manager, FGM, Strategy Mali

Dr Ash Chand Head of technique and development, minority ethnic young children, NSPCC

Efua Dorkenoo, OBE Programme director, End FGM/C Social Change Campaign, Choices Consultancy Providers

Lynne Featherstone, MP Parliamentary under secretary of state, Hornsey and Wood Green (Liberal)/DFID

Trish Halpin Editor-in-chief, Marie Claire

Muna Hassan Youth campaigner, Integrate Bristol

Hon Dr Linah Jebii Kilimo Chair, Anti Female Genital Mutilation Board

Sarah McCulloch Director, ACCM Uk

Dr Comfort Momoh, MBE FGM public well being specialist, Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital, African Effectively Girl Clinic

Khalid Roy Advocacy and policy manager, Islamic Relief Throughout the world

Sir Keir Starmer QC Barrister and former DPP, Doughty Street Chambers

Nicola Walters Headteacher, Handsworth Wood Girls’ Academy

Credits

This content has been sponsored by Plan UK. All content is editorially independent. Make contact with Rachel Joy on 020 3353 2688 (rachel.joy@theguardian.com). For information on roundtables visit: theguardian.com/sponsored-articles

Calling for an end to female genital mutilation

Calling for an finish to female genital mutilation

The video opens with a single red rose in full bloom. It’s beautiful, perfect, bursting with life. Suddenly, a pair of scissors opens wide; the deep V-shape of the steel blades surrounds the crimson petals. In one swift slice, the rose is destroyed.

It’s a searing image to launch Plan UK’s Because I am a Girl campaign against female genital mutilation (FGM). It’s also one the charity agonised over, because the issue of FGM and how it is depicted and addressed is fraught with difficulty for all those battling to end the practice. But a determination to challenge this hidden and brutal abuse of girls and women is building a momentum that now cannot be stopped.

Opening the roundtable discussion, Plan UK chief executive Tanya Barron welcomed the tenacious work being carried out by many agencies. “We face a great opportunity,” she said. “FGM is on the agenda as never before.”

The starting point, she continued, is to define FGM squarely as a fundamental violation of girls’ and women’s human rights. To end FGM, she said, “we believe we have to foster a general attitude of ending violence against women and girls”.

Lynne Featherstone MP from the Department for International Development (DfID) agreed, saying that she saw FGM as “one of the most extreme manifestations of gender inequality”. Events such as the Girl Summit in July, she said, will support an Africa-led movement to abolish FGM. “It will be a massive event and it’s going to bring together community leaders, faith groups, the public sector and the private sector. There will be actual commitments that people will have to take forwards.”

Chair Alexandra Topping asked if there was a danger that the high-profile of FGM in the UK and other European countries could be seen as oppressive by African governments – and, indeed, local communities.

It’s an attitude that Madina Bocoum Daff, FGM programme manager for Plan Mali, says she has already encountered in villages. “But it’s important to us that people understand this is a global movement, like vaccination of children is a global movement,” she explained. “It’s really important for us to realise that if we can’t get rid of FGM in Mali, then you can’t in Europe. We also want people here [in the UK] to know it’s not just a fight that you’re fighting – we’re fighting it in Mali, too.”

Ensuring that African governments legislate against FGM is vital, explained Kenyan former MP Dr Linah Jebii Kilimo, chair of her country’s Anti-FGM Board: “I wanted a legal tool so that NGOs could go and say: ‘You are breaking the laws of your land and we will train you in how not to.’”

Social persecution

Driven by her own misery as a teenager, when Kilimo was stigmatised for not having been “cut” in a community where FGM was rife, she championed the introduction of an anti-FGM law by Kenya’s parliament in 2011. To achieve delicate goals, she suggested, campaigners must work to understand the priorities of the individuals whose influence they seek.

“We worked by co-opting male members of parliament,” she recalled. “We took them out of Nairobi, which they liked, for workshops. We showed them films [of FGM being performed], because I wanted them to see the monster that FGM is. The minister for children collapsed. By the end, the men were saying: ‘Bring the bill, we must criminalise it.’”

Do men need to be more vocal in support of anti-FGM messages?

“Yes” came the resounding answer from campaigner Khalid Roy, who is married to a Sudanese woman and has “heard the screams of nieces”. Given that Muslim scholars remain “the only international caucus calling for its perpetuation”, he said it remains extraordinarily difficult to change the orthodoxy within Islam. This, in turn, influences Muslim communities which, encouraged by their religious leaders, struggle to grasp why FGM should cease.

Criminalisation may clarify the secular attitude towards FGM, but it was pointed out that it has been illegal in the UK for nearly three decades and yet only this year has there been a single – highly controversial – prosecution.

Waiting for girls to disclose, in hindsight, was never going to work, said former director of public prosecutions Sir Keir Starmer QC. “Proactive policing, using techniques employed to investigate other crimes” is far more likely to be successful than waiting for a terrified girl to shop her family and get herself taken into care.

More cases are now being passed to the Crown Prosecution Service – four in 2013, and 11 so far this year. But while trials are symbolically powerful, he warned, they can only ever be “part of the response”.

Prosecution holds its own problems, observed Dr Ash Chand, the NSPCC’s head of strategy and development, minority ethnic children. “We know that women can be the victims and be the perpetrators too, in terms of being coerced into doing what they do.” He questioned how sophisticated any legislation will be in protecting mothers who are unable to resist the demands of their culture to mutilate their daughters. “There is a risk that we end up prosecuting victims.”

Starmer’s response was robust. Although there is no defence of coercion in UK law, varying the severity of charges is a possible solution “when you have a genuine victim caught within the crime”, he said.

Could media coverage of FGM and the catastrophic damage it causes lead to the conversation being overtaken by western voices? Trish Halpin, editor-in-chief at Marie Claire, which ran its first FGM feature in 1990, said it was vital to take in diverse perspectives. “It’s now much more of a widespread dialogue across all media,” she said. “That’s also to do with social media and the fourth wave of feminism, with young women engaging with feminism and wanting to eradicate inequality.”

Some progress has been made on prevention but more is left to do. It’s still a rare event for a girl to walk into a police station, but disclosures in the Metropolitan area have risen from 26 in 2012 to a projection of more than 100 this year. Given that FGM is irreversible, Detective Superintendent Jason Ashwood, head of the Met’s FGM team, said he saw his officers’ primary role as safeguarding.

Protecting vulnerable girls requires effective partnership working, he emphasised. “We need to get the whole of the public sector system very aware, so that they report, and make sure they’re consistent in the way that risk assessments are made so that police are aware,” he said. The authorities are then able, for example, to prevent a family from travelling to have their daughter cut abroad.

Schools are also being asked to take on greater responsibility for safeguarding. But school leaders, said Nicola Walters, headteacher at Handsworth Wood Girls’ Academy in Birmingham, need support “from key people who can access those communities”. This is the only way schools can play their part in teaching girls about their sexual health and human rights. Without influential community support, parents can – and do – withdraw their daughters from class.

Effective safeguarding also requires understanding of why FGM happens, said Efua Dorkenoo, programme director for the End FGM/C Social Change Campaign at Options Consultancy Services.

“The act itself is at the core of the control of female sexuality – and it’s because of the control dimension there’s always going to be resistance,” she said. That resistance means, she believes, that only a whole-system approach to prevention driven by government agencies will work.

“What are we doing with daughters delivered in hospital? These girls need special pathways,” she insisted. “They need to be followed and monitored until they are out of risk. We need early identification, and to get social care to the table, because they are not at the table.”

The criticism of social care and health professionals was underscored by a number of participants. FGM public health specialist Dr Comfort Momoh, who has established the African Well Woman clinic at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital in south London, is also frustrated that she has not seen more urgency from government departments in the UK. “I’ve been fighting and working with the Department of Health to have a roundtable for health and social services, and this has not happened – if we’re saying it’s child abuse, we need to have a good system, so everybody will know what to do.”

Despite considerable recent publicity, ignorance of FGM remains across the social work, police and health professions, said ACCM UK director Sarah McCulloch, “which fear that if they ask questions they will be labelled as racist”. Teachers too, the only professionals who have daily contact with vulnerable girls, may have no understanding of FGM, observed university student Muna Hassan from charity Integrate Bristol. “Last year a teacher in my school who was teaching A-level health and social care didn’t know what FGM is. That’s someone responsible for future social workers and nurses. There needs to be statutory training for frontline staff.”

No matter the enduring difficulty of tackling FGM, however, the room resonated with optimism. “Within our lifetime” was a phrase heard repeatedly throughout the morning. “Our generation has been sacrificed, but we can change this,” concluded Plan Mali’s Daff.

Visit plan-uk.org/because-i-am-a-girl/fgm-rose to find out more

FGM: the facts

• Female genital mutilation (FGM)is the practice of partially or totally removing the clitoris and labia of girls and young women for non-medical reasons. In the most extreme cases, the vagina is also closed.

• FGM is practised in a range of countries by a number of ethnic and religious groups.

• FGM may be carried out from infancy up until around 15. In some settings the practice is carried out by doctors, but it is also practiced by traditional cutters with no medical training.

• FGM causes severe pain and often leads to serious infection. Fatal haemorragging can result. A woman who has been ‘cut’ is doubly likely to die in labour. It also increases the danger of a baby being stillborn.

• Girls and women experience pain for many years after they’ve undergone FGM, during sex and in childbirth.

• 3 million girls living in Africa are at risk of FGM every year.

• 20,000 girls living in the UK are at risk of FGM every year.

At the table

Alexandra Topping (Chair) Journalist, the Guardian

Jason Ashwood Detective Superintendent, sexual offences, exploitation and child abuse command, Met police

Tanya Barron CEO, Plan UK

Madina Bocoum Daff Programme manager, FGM, Plan Mali

Dr Ash Chand Head of strategy and development, minority ethnic children, NSPCC

Efua Dorkenoo, OBE Programme director, End FGM/C Social Change Campaign, Options Consultancy Services

Lynne Featherstone, MP Parliamentary under secretary of state, Hornsey and Wood Green (Liberal)/DFID

Trish Halpin Editor-in-chief, Marie Claire

Muna Hassan Youth campaigner, Integrate Bristol

Hon Dr Linah Jebii Kilimo Chair, Anti Female Genital Mutilation Board

Sarah McCulloch Director, ACCM UK

Dr Comfort Momoh, MBE FGM public health specialist, Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital, African Well Woman Clinic

Khalid Roy Advocacy and policy manager, Islamic Relief Worldwide

Sir Keir Starmer QC Barrister and former DPP, Doughty Street Chambers

Nicola Walters Headteacher, Handsworth Wood Girls’ Academy

Credits

This content has been sponsored by Plan UK. All content is editorially independent. Contact Rachel Joy on 020 3353 2688 (rachel.joy@theguardian.com). For information on roundtables visit: theguardian.com/sponsored-content

Calling for an finish to female genital mutilation

Calling for an end to female genital mutilation

The video opens with a single red rose in full bloom. It’s beautiful, perfect, bursting with life. Suddenly, a pair of scissors opens wide; the deep V-shape of the steel blades surrounds the crimson petals. In one swift slice, the rose is destroyed.

It’s a searing image to launch Plan UK’s Because I am a Girl campaign against female genital mutilation (FGM). It’s also one the charity agonised over, because the issue of FGM and how it is depicted and addressed is fraught with difficulty for all those battling to end the practice. But a determination to challenge this hidden and brutal abuse of girls and women is building a momentum that now cannot be stopped.

Opening the roundtable discussion, Plan UK chief executive Tanya Barron welcomed the tenacious work being carried out by many agencies. “We face a great opportunity,” she said. “FGM is on the agenda as never before.”

The starting point, she continued, is to define FGM squarely as a fundamental violation of girls’ and women’s human rights. To end FGM, she said, “we believe we have to foster a general attitude of ending violence against women and girls”.

Lynne Featherstone MP from the Department for International Development (DfID) agreed, saying that she saw FGM as “one of the most extreme manifestations of gender inequality”. Events such as the Girl Summit in July, she said, will support an Africa-led movement to abolish FGM. “It will be a massive event and it’s going to bring together community leaders, faith groups, the public sector and the private sector. There will be actual commitments that people will have to take forwards.”

Chair Alexandra Topping asked if there was a danger that the high-profile of FGM in the UK and other European countries could be seen as oppressive by African governments – and, indeed, local communities.

It’s an attitude that Madina Bocoum Daff, FGM programme manager for Plan Mali, says she has already encountered in villages. “But it’s important to us that people understand this is a global movement, like vaccination of children is a global movement,” she explained. “It’s really important for us to realise that if we can’t get rid of FGM in Mali, then you can’t in Europe. We also want people here [in the UK] to know it’s not just a fight that you’re fighting – we’re fighting it in Mali, too.”

Ensuring that African governments legislate against FGM is vital, explained Kenyan former MP Dr Linah Jebii Kilimo, chair of her country’s Anti-FGM Board: “I wanted a legal tool so that NGOs could go and say: ‘You are breaking the laws of your land and we will train you in how not to.’”

Social persecution

Driven by her own misery as a teenager, when Kilimo was stigmatised for not having been “cut” in a community where FGM was rife, she championed the introduction of an anti-FGM law by Kenya’s parliament in 2011. To achieve delicate goals, she suggested, campaigners must work to understand the priorities of the individuals whose influence they seek.

“We worked by co-opting male members of parliament,” she recalled. “We took them out of Nairobi, which they liked, for workshops. We showed them films [of FGM being performed], because I wanted them to see the monster that FGM is. The minister for children collapsed. By the end, the men were saying: ‘Bring the bill, we must criminalise it.’”

Do men need to be more vocal in support of anti-FGM messages?

“Yes” came the resounding answer from campaigner Khalid Roy, who is married to a Sudanese woman and has “heard the screams of nieces”. Given that Muslim scholars remain “the only international caucus calling for its perpetuation”, he said it remains extraordinarily difficult to change the orthodoxy within Islam. This, in turn, influences Muslim communities which, encouraged by their religious leaders, struggle to grasp why FGM should cease.

Criminalisation may clarify the secular attitude towards FGM, but it was pointed out that it has been illegal in the UK for nearly three decades and yet only this year has there been a single – highly controversial – prosecution.

Waiting for girls to disclose, in hindsight, was never going to work, said former director of public prosecutions Sir Keir Starmer QC. “Proactive policing, using techniques employed to investigate other crimes” is far more likely to be successful than waiting for a terrified girl to shop her family and get herself taken into care.

More cases are now being passed to the Crown Prosecution Service – four in 2013, and 11 so far this year. But while trials are symbolically powerful, he warned, they can only ever be “part of the response”.

Prosecution holds its own problems, observed Dr Ash Chand, the NSPCC’s head of strategy and development, minority ethnic children. “We know that women can be the victims and be the perpetrators too, in terms of being coerced into doing what they do.” He questioned how sophisticated any legislation will be in protecting mothers who are unable to resist the demands of their culture to mutilate their daughters. “There is a risk that we end up prosecuting victims.”

Starmer’s response was robust. Although there is no defence of coercion in UK law, varying the severity of charges is a possible solution “when you have a genuine victim caught within the crime”, he said.

Could media coverage of FGM and the catastrophic damage it causes lead to the conversation being overtaken by western voices? Trish Halpin, editor-in-chief at Marie Claire, which ran its first FGM feature in 1990, said it was vital to take in diverse perspectives. “It’s now much more of a widespread dialogue across all media,” she said. “That’s also to do with social media and the fourth wave of feminism, with young women engaging with feminism and wanting to eradicate inequality.”

Some progress has been made on prevention but more is left to do. It’s still a rare event for a girl to walk into a police station, but disclosures in the Metropolitan area have risen from 26 in 2012 to a projection of more than 100 this year. Given that FGM is irreversible, Detective Superintendent Jason Ashwood, head of the Met’s FGM team, said he saw his officers’ primary role as safeguarding.

Protecting vulnerable girls requires effective partnership working, he emphasised. “We need to get the whole of the public sector system very aware, so that they report, and make sure they’re consistent in the way that risk assessments are made so that police are aware,” he said. The authorities are then able, for example, to prevent a family from travelling to have their daughter cut abroad.

Schools are also being asked to take on greater responsibility for safeguarding. But school leaders, said Nicola Walters, headteacher at Handsworth Wood Girls’ Academy in Birmingham, need support “from key people who can access those communities”. This is the only way schools can play their part in teaching girls about their sexual health and human rights. Without influential community support, parents can – and do – withdraw their daughters from class.

Effective safeguarding also requires understanding of why FGM happens, said Efua Dorkenoo, programme director for the End FGM/C Social Change Campaign at Options Consultancy Services.

“The act itself is at the core of the control of female sexuality – and it’s because of the control dimension there’s always going to be resistance,” she said. That resistance means, she believes, that only a whole-system approach to prevention driven by government agencies will work.

“What are we doing with daughters delivered in hospital? These girls need special pathways,” she insisted. “They need to be followed and monitored until they are out of risk. We need early identification, and to get social care to the table, because they are not at the table.”

The criticism of social care and health professionals was underscored by a number of participants. FGM public health specialist Dr Comfort Momoh, who has established the African Well Woman clinic at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital in south London, is also frustrated that she has not seen more urgency from government departments in the UK. “I’ve been fighting and working with the Department of Health to have a roundtable for health and social services, and this has not happened – if we’re saying it’s child abuse, we need to have a good system, so everybody will know what to do.”

Despite considerable recent publicity, ignorance of FGM remains across the social work, police and health professions, said ACCM UK director Sarah McCulloch, “which fear that if they ask questions they will be labelled as racist”. Teachers too, the only professionals who have daily contact with vulnerable girls, may have no understanding of FGM, observed university student Muna Hassan from charity Integrate Bristol. “Last year a teacher in my school who was teaching A-level health and social care didn’t know what FGM is. That’s someone responsible for future social workers and nurses. There needs to be statutory training for frontline staff.”

No matter the enduring difficulty of tackling FGM, however, the room resonated with optimism. “Within our lifetime” was a phrase heard repeatedly throughout the morning. “Our generation has been sacrificed, but we can change this,” concluded Plan Mali’s Daff.

Visit plan-uk.org/because-i-am-a-girl/fgm-rose to find out more

FGM: the facts

• Female genital mutilation (FGM)is the practice of partially or totally removing the clitoris and labia of girls and young women for non-medical reasons. In the most extreme cases, the vagina is also closed.

• FGM is practised in a range of countries by a number of ethnic and religious groups.

• FGM may be carried out from infancy up until around 15. In some settings the practice is carried out by doctors, but it is also practiced by traditional cutters with no medical training.

• FGM causes severe pain and often leads to serious infection. Fatal haemorragging can result. A woman who has been ‘cut’ is doubly likely to die in labour. It also increases the danger of a baby being stillborn.

• Girls and women experience pain for many years after they’ve undergone FGM, during sex and in childbirth.

• 3 million girls living in Africa are at risk of FGM every year.

• 20,000 girls living in the UK are at risk of FGM every year.

At the table

Alexandra Topping (Chair) Journalist, the Guardian

Jason Ashwood Detective Superintendent, sexual offences, exploitation and child abuse command, Met police

Tanya Barron CEO, Plan UK

Madina Bocoum Daff Programme manager, FGM, Plan Mali

Dr Ash Chand Head of strategy and development, minority ethnic children, NSPCC

Efua Dorkenoo, OBE Programme director, End FGM/C Social Change Campaign, Options Consultancy Services

Lynne Featherstone, MP Parliamentary under secretary of state, Hornsey and Wood Green (Liberal)/DFID

Trish Halpin Editor-in-chief, Marie Claire

Muna Hassan Youth campaigner, Integrate Bristol

Hon Dr Linah Jebii Kilimo Chair, Anti Female Genital Mutilation Board

Sarah McCulloch Director, ACCM UK

Dr Comfort Momoh, MBE FGM public health specialist, Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital, African Well Woman Clinic

Khalid Roy Advocacy and policy manager, Islamic Relief Worldwide

Sir Keir Starmer QC Barrister and former DPP, Doughty Street Chambers

Nicola Walters Headteacher, Handsworth Wood Girls’ Academy

Credits

This content has been sponsored by Plan UK. All content is editorially independent. Contact Rachel Joy on 020 3353 2688 (rachel.joy@theguardian.com). For information on roundtables visit: theguardian.com/sponsored-content

Calling for an end to female genital mutilation

US Congress members join campaign calling for end to FGM

More than 50 members of Congress have joined a campaign calling on the White Residence to carry out a research into the risks of female genital mutilation for American girls and introduce emergency hotlines and airport checks to avert them becoming taken out of the nation for the practice to be carried out abroad.

In a signal the expanding political momentum in Washington behind a Guardian-backed campaign, American FGM survivor and campaigner leader Jaha Dukureh also met this week with officials at the departments of justice and education to discuss their response to a petition with more than 202,000 signatures demanding a extensive US action program.

Senior Democrats think President Obama, who signed a law banning travel for the purposes of carrying out FGM in 2013, is sympathetic to calls for further US action on the issue but fear a wider lack of information of the hazards to American girls and women is holding back a much more co-ordinated official response.

“It’s so essential for the Obama administration to join us and to break the silence so we can educate folks all around the nation,” said Texan congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee, one particular of 58 signatories to the White Property letter, in the course of a briefing in Capitol Hill this week.

“We hear from women usually who were born right here in the US and have been by means of FGM. These younger females are your average American youngsters: some of them you know, some of them are residing in your neighbourhood.”

New York congressman Joe Crowley, who aided launch the FGM campaign and petition at the US headquarters of the Guardian final month, mentioned raising awareness was especially essential at the begin of the so-known as “cutting season” when girls from immigrant families are returned to nations in Africa throughout the summer season holiday.

“It is crucial that as we enter these summertime months and we know families will be taking their kids overseas to reconnect them with their homelands, that they recognize that it is against the law to transport their youngster overseas for the purposes of getting FGM,” mentioned Crowley.

“We want to alert educators and counsellors on how to look for women at chance,” he extra, calling for a “national hotline so people who know girls at threat can get in touch with in and found out how they can strategy this sensitive situation.”

The last complete research in 1997 estimated 70,000 women and youthful women living in America were at risk of getting subjected to the practice, but campaigners argue much more up-to-date study is required into the scale of the difficulty in light of new census data on immigrant communities.

“People usually assume that FGM is an African issue, not an American difficulty,” mentioned Dukureh, who is also becoming supported by the campaign group, Equality Now and whose petition is hosted on the campaign platform, Adjust.org.“There are a lot of women during the nation – in Altanta, in Minnesota, in New York – that have been via FGM and we do not have a single government programme in area for survivors, or to avert it taking place.”

She also joined representatives Crowley and Jackson-Lee in urging the US to lead and support fund a co-ordinated worldwide response.

“We have to begin from house,” explained Dukureh. “We have to do something in our own nation before we can inform other nations what to do. Politicians need to comprehend that this is an American dilemma as well.”

Jackson-Lee stated worldwide figures suggested 30 million ladies and women stay at chance about the planet of what the United Nations defines as the “partial or complete elimination of the female genitalia for non-health-related factors.”

“We are an enormously diverse nation and we welcome the diversity of traditions, but we do not welcome oppression or the denial of human rights,” she said.

“Too a lot of American women encounter the oppression of FGM … just believe of a youthful woman going via this, unknowingly or without her permission to, in essence, alter her existence permanently. It is said that FGM is to preserve the virginity of the women and to maintain them pure till marriage but it is genuinely taking their spirit away.”

US Congress members join campaign calling for end to FGM

FGM petition calling on Michael Gove to act reaches 200,000 signatures

Fahma Mohamed, 17, who is major the campaign backed by the Guardian towards FGM. Photograph: Patrick Hoeschler

The campaign to persuade the training secretary, Michael Gove, to support finish female genital mutilation by telling headteachers in England to educate mothers and fathers and kids about the practice has gathered more than 200,000 signatures in eight days.

The Modify.org website says a petition on the situation, backed by the Guardian, is one particular of the quickest developing it has seen in Britain. Thirty-3 MPs have so far supported the campaign by way of an early-day movement in the Property of Commons. The Scottish government has already promised to create to heads.

Gove has agreed to meet the campaign leader, the 17-year-old student Fahma Mohamed, a Bristol teenager from a Muslim Somali loved ones, who would like the concern to be flagged up in schools just before this summer’s “cutting season”. Though many girls are currently being taken abroad to be lower, others are becoming mutilated in Britain, according to campaigners.

Teachers and former teachers are presently urging Gove to stick to suit. Heather Sidery Clarke, from Hastings, explained: “Apart from being such needless and primitively barbaric behaviour, genital mutilation is, in this day, a violent crime.

“I have witnessed the results of this assault on children, as they would return to school in the Uk soon after a ‘trip home’ throughout summer season break.

“The minor women had been transformed from currently being satisfied, confident individuals to sullen and uncomfortable with themselves … A kind of ‘shame’ overhanging them. Not conducive to learning and downright unhealthy.”

Kate, who described herself as a headteacher in London, wrote: “I truly feel genuinely strongly about supporting this campaign to keep girls safe. I am in the method of beginning that discussion with workers and households that I work with and agree that this requirements to be addressed and schools can be instrumental in this.”

FGM petition calling on Michael Gove to act reaches 200,000 signatures