Seven-year-old Mariam was excited. Her mother had dressed her in her favorite dusty pink dress, her hair in two ponytails held back with butterfly clips, and told her she was going to a surprise birthday party for her cousin.
Instead, her aunt led Mariam, hand in hand, to a decrepit building with layers of peeling walls and a cold metal desk waiting inside.
There, an old woman with curly hair muttered quietly that Mariam did not understand, grabbed her and held her on the table. Then the pain began – it was sharp, burning, unforgettable. The next 20 minutes would divide her life into a “before” and an “after” – and destroy her faith in the person she trusted most: her mother.
Two decades later, the 27-year-old female genital mutilation (FGM) survivor still bears the scars of that day. “I feel like something is missing inside me. It’s like something has been taken away from me and it’s become a negative part of my body.”
“It is an emotional deficiency. You’re not able to describe your emotions when you talk about sexual needs,” she says. “When you’re looking for a mate,” she adds, “you have a deficiency in (your) emotional and sexual response.”
Mariam belongs to the Dawoodi Bohras of Pakistan, a sect of Shia Muslims mainly from the Gujarat region, among whom FGM is a common practice. Estimates suggest that between 75 percent and 85 percent of Dawoodi Bohra women in Pakistan undergo FGM either in private residences by elderly women—without any anesthesia and with unsterilized tools—or by medical professionals in urban centers such as Karachi. Pakistan has a Dawoodi Bohra population of about 100,000 people.
However, many Pakistanis remain unaware that this practice is common in their country. Although FGM in parts of Africa garners global headlines, a culture of silence in Pakistan means the practice has largely continued, unchecked by public scrutiny or legal intervention.
A shroud of secrecy protects the ritual, and Pakistan has no comprehensive national data on how widespread FGM is. Girls undergo FGM at an age when they find it difficult to process it themselves. And the Dawoodi Bohra community doesn’t even refer to clitoral hooding as mutilation – they call it circumcision, a rite of passage to go through – not to be questioned.
Women who choose to speak out against this practice are sometimes threatened with excommunication from the community. “When you question authority, you are shown the way out,” says Mariam.
“Where are you going? You were born here.”
Resistance to a sustainable practice
“Your parents want what’s best for you.” It’s a belief that children hold fast – until it’s broken. Just like he did for Aaliya.
The 26-year-old remembers fragments of a process so painful that for years, it felt like a bad dream, too cruel to be true.
But the truth lingers: the cold, unyielding table, the whispered promises that this was “necessary,” the sharp sting, physical and emotional. “It felt like a bad dream, like it couldn’t have happened,” she says, her voice shaking with the shock of a trauma she didn’t understand at the time.
Fear was the emotion he felt as he lay on the metal table. Betrayal is what she felt next, along with excruciating pain. “What blows my mind is that there is a whole generation of people who are willing to do this to a child without even knowing why,” says Aaliya.
Globally, the push to end FGM has grown in recent years. Earlier this year, Gambia’s parliament rejected a controversial bill to repeal a 2015 ban on FGM.
But the Dawoodi Bohra community has so far adhered to the practice. In April 2016, Syedna Mufaddal Saifuddin, the current global leader of the Bohras reaffirmed the need for female circumcision, or khatna, in his sermon at Mumbai’s Saifee Masjid, despite growing opposition from within the community and around the world.
“It should be done… if it’s a woman, it should be moderate,” Saifuddin said, insisting it was good for the body and soul.
However, doctors say FGM can lead to reproductive complications in women.
“Young girls can have abscess, urinary complaints; they may face a host of issues in their married life as their sexual health is greatly affected, they may even have dyspareunia,” says Asifa Malhan, a consultant gynecologist and assistant professor at the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center in Karachi. Dyspareunia is persistent or recurring genital pain that occurs shortly before, during, or after sex.
“As a health professional and gynecologist, I do not recommend this to anyone. It is very harmful.”
The real reason girls are forced to undergo FGM is not health, critics of the practice say.
The clitoris, the region where a woman derives the most sexual pleasure, is referred to as Haram ki boti (a sinful piece of flesh) by many in the community. “When our clitoris is called haram ki boti, it becomes very clear that this practice is not done for hygiene or cleanliness purposes,” says Aaliya. “This is done to suppress a woman’s sexuality.”
The clitoris has the most nerve endings of any part of the human body and is the most sensitive part of the female body. When mutilated, nerve endings are cut, leading to loss of sensation.
“Those girls who have their clitoris removed cannot feel a certain sexual satisfaction,” says Sana Yasir, a Karachi-based life coach with a medical background in psychology.
Even medically, FGM is dangerous. Without a clitoris, injuries during intercourse are more likely, says Yasir.
Breaking cultural barriers
According to the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey 2017-18, 28 percent of the country’s women aged 15-49 have experienced physical violence and 6 percent have faced sexual violence. Additionally, 34 percent of women who have ever been married have experienced physical, sexual, or emotional violence from a spouse.
In a country with such widespread gender-based violence, the practice of FGM complicates the struggle for female victims.
“It is an extremely severe form of gender-based violence, the effects of which may not be experienced immediately, but they are experienced over a prolonged period,” says Aaliya.
Pakistan has no specific law criminalizing this practice. Although under the Pakistan Penal Code, broader provisions such as Sections 328A (cruelty to children), 333 (amputation or dismemberment) and 337F (deterioration of flesh) could theoretically apply, no such prosecution has been documented to date .
Provincial domestic violence and child protection laws broadly cover physical harm but do not mention FGM. In a 2006 National Action Plan, the government acknowledged the issue, but no action has been taken to end it.
According to a 2017 survey by Sahiyo, a non-profit organization based in Mumbai, India that works to end FGM in South Asian communities, 80 percent of respondents had undergone FGM. The survey focused on women from the Dawoodi Bohra community. Sahiyo is a transnational organization with operations and campaigns spanning countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and other regions where FGM is practiced.
Health care professionals say they face major challenges in trying to eradicate the practice. They can counsel a patient, but it doesn’t stop there. What’s needed, they say, is community engagement to explain, medically, the practice’s many disadvantages — and the fact that it has no scientifically proven benefits.
“The government should cooperate with the doctors and visit the community where this practice is being carried out,” says Malhan. “Without it, there will be no solution to this problem and we will face similar challenges in the future.”
This communication, emphasizes Yasir, should be done with sensitivity, respecting the cultural traditions of the community.
Huda Syyed, who published research in the Journal of International Women’s Studies from Bridgewater State University on the lack of data and dialogue on FGM in Pakistan in 2022, said the practice is sometimes tied to a girl’s identity within the community. Among the Dawoodi Bohras, it is seen to have religious and spiritual significance. It is usually passed down as a practice between generations.
“While doing my research, my approach was compassionate, contextual, and community-centered, because communities are often excluded, persecuted, and punished in various ways for customs and practices that are the social norm, and sometimes they are also vilified and painted in a negative light. negative. ”, says Syed.
“Change is not possible by attacking communities and avoiding them, because then we risk that the practice or habit of FGM is practiced underground; what we need to focus on is engaging the community, working with them and bringing change from within.”
Syyed says solutions must come out of a conversation with the community, and imposing ideas from the outside won’t work.
“There are two sides when we talk about this practice: some people who are open to dialogue and engagement about it, but in a safe way where their community is not attacked because no community wants to be humiliated, and then there are others who want to save. the community and their customs,” says Syyed.
Al Jazeera contacted community leaders for their perspectives, but has not received a response.
For Aaliya, how the community itself responds to the concerns of women like her is critical: “It’s important to promote the idea that I can belong to this community and still say no to FGM,” she says.
But if the community is responsive, for survivors like Mariam, the time for silence is over.
“This practice took something out of me,” she says, “and it ends with me taking it back.”
*Survivors’ names have been changed to protect their identities.
