Dispatch from Kenya: Enforcing Laws That Clash With Culture

There is an eight-year old girl who lives in Kibera, Kenya, a densely populated slum near Nairobi where almost one million people live in about 2.5 square kilometers of make-shift shacks. Her mother takes her to a dilapidated “medical clinic” located in Kibera, which consists of two rooms. The outer room serves as a reception area while the inner room is small, poorly lit, and has a bed made-up of an old piece of a mattress. In this second room, a woman orders the eight-year-old to remove her clothes, spread her legs, and without anesthetics, cuts her with a pair of scissors. She has become one of the many young girls who are victims of female genital mutilation (“FGM”). Her story is only one of the numerous cases that I was briefed on while visiting the office of the International Justice Mission in Nairobi this month.

What this girl experienced, unfortunately, is not unique. The FGM procedure–designed to transition young girls, mostly four to fourteen years old, into womanhood by cutting away all or part of their genitals–is still widely practiced in twenty-eight African countries. The World Health Organization estimates that between 100 and 140 million girls world-wide have undergone FGM and that another 2 million are at risk of being subjected to it.

Section 14 of Kenyan’s “Children’s Act 2001” forbids this practice: “No person shall subject a child to female circumcision, early marriage or other cultural rights, customs or traditional practices that are likely to negatively affect the child’s life, health, social welfare, dignity or physical or psychological development.” Despite this prohibition, it is proving difficult to fully stop FGM procedures in Kenya. In this case, for example, the woman who performed the FGM procedure on this young eight-year-old girl did not even know that the practice was illegal. This FGM case brings to light at least two issues that need to be considered as we think about ways to combat this practice.

First, FGM has deep cultural significance for some and is one symbolic way that tribes have responded to colonial rule. For example, FGM became even more common during the colonial rule in the 1950s “Mau Mau” uprising. In Swahili the name of the uprising has been loosely translated to mean, “Let the white man go back abroad so the African can get his independence.” During this uprising and still today, FGM may be one symbolic way to resist colonial rule and maintain a custom common among many of the tribes. FGM is often associated with ushering young girls into womanhood. Without this procedure then, some families may still think that they are disadvantaging their daughters from finding a suitable husband, and, thus, in effect, damaging the promulgation of their culture in a society that has been eradicated by colonial rule. To combat FGM, it must be explained to those who practice it that, while it may be a tribal custom, it is not a good one–not because of the historical colonial prohibition, but rather because a victim of FGM suffers terrible and irreversible physical and emotional harm.

Second, there is a desperate need for education, particularly in areas like Kibera where many are still leading a tribal way-of-life. Foremost, there needs to be an emphasis on legal education so that it is widely known that this practice is illegal. Perhaps if the woman who had cut the young eight-year-old girl, or even the mother of the girl, had known that this practice was illegal, it would not have occurred. This leads to a related point. This is not only a human rights issue, but also squarely a women’s issue. I was shocked to hear that in this case it was the women (the girl’s mother and another woman) who perpetrated the act. Along side the prosecution of FGM, women must be educated on the health and emotional problems associated with it. Women need to be empowered with information that helps them take a stand against FGM; or, at the very least, need to be convinced to stop encouraging FGM by taking their daughters to get the operation or actually performing the procedure. More education might help the societal perspectives to catch-up to the laws.

The lawyers at the IJM office in Kenya recognize both of these concerns and are taking steps to combat FGM. However, it takes much more than a small dedicated office to reach the thousands in Kibera and other remote parts of Kenya and Africa.