The Egyptian Nisreen was eleven years old, when her female relatives threw her to the ground and forcibly opened her legs, exposing her genitals, so that a stranger intervened before she felt terrible pain.
Although Nisreen, who is not her real name, is now 34 years old, she remembers everything about the practice of female genital mutilation or what activists call “mutilation” or “mutilation”, noting that the repercussions of her psychological and physical trauma from this scene haunted her until the stage puberty.
“I had the feeling that I was incomplete and that I would never be happy because of this. It’s an awful feeling,” she said.
Globally he set the deeply ingrained goal of eliminating the practice by 2030 to protect girls and future generations, though campaigners acknowledge that this will be difficult to achieve.
The United Nations has designated an International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation, which is February 6 every year.
Living with the consequences, some women have embarked on deeply personal journeys of healing. They search for answers, sometimes trawling the Internet, amid many countries’ “treatment gaps,” or even the shame and possible sexual related complications.
This practice is spread among different societies, cultures and religions, in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, and is linked to beliefs about chastity or femininity and cleanliness, and is fueled by custom and societal pressure based on misconceptions from generation to generation.
It is estimated that at least 200 million women and girls live with the repercussions of this practice, which can include partial or total removal of their external genitalia, and can cause heavy bleeding that sometimes leads to death.
In the long term, this practice can lead to urinary tract infection, menstrual problems, pain, decreased sexual satisfaction and childbirth complications, as well as depression, low self-esteem and post-traumatic stress disorder.
While some religious leaders condemn the practice and engage in awareness campaigns to eradicate it, others condone it.
The practice of “female circumcision” has been widespread in Egypt for a long time, and it has become illegal since 2008.
Islamic bodies reject this practice, describing it as a “habit” and not as an act of worship that has no basis in Islam.
On the other hand, there are some who oppose banning “female genital mutilation” and consider that stopping it reflects “an agenda led by the West.”
Meanwhile, some women suffering from the repercussions of the practice are anonymously posting their feelings online, expressing their discomfort, embarrassment and fears that their circumcision could prevent them from marrying or doom their marriages to failure, and some are looking for surgery to address their pain. in their infancy.
While some women seek medical procedures to address the effects of the practice on them, “there are many treatment gaps in many countries where FGM is widely practiced, where many health care providers receive no training at all.” According to the expert in this field at the World Health Organization, Christina Palito.
And in a clinic that opened in Egypt in 2020, surgeons perform a “reconstruction” operation to remove scar tissue and make the uncut parts of the clitoris visible.
While supporters of this surgery argue that it can improve genital function and appearance and reduce pain, others, including the World Health Organization, call for more research and say there is insufficient evidence to assess the benefits, potential complications, or long-term outcomes of this surgery.
“We don’t have a recommendation in favor of this at this time due to a lack of evidence on safety and efficacy,” Palito said, emphasizing that any woman who has had this surgery should be offered sexual health counseling along with it.
But Ballito points out that “neither this surgery nor access to sexual health counseling is widely available in countries where FGM is common”.
In her quest for treatment, Nisreen learned about this operation, and she actually underwent it a year ago. She said that after treating her postoperative bruising, she felt better.
She added, “I no longer feel pain, and my feeling in this area has also improved a lot.”
But she says her journey is far from over. “I still need to work on accepting myself, accepting that this has happened to me and that it has been fixed,” she says. “Operation alone is not enough. I don’t feel completely over the trauma.”
Nasreen wants to pursue psychotherapy but says she cannot afford it and is afraid to find someone she can trust with such intimate detail.