Women’s genital mutilation Spain: When the final day will arrive
A mother will always try to do your best for your daughter. The inconvenience is that, according to communities and on which principles and beliefs, this translates into making infants’ ablation as a kind of initiation rite. Spain is currently almost twenty thousand female infants at risk of being soon subjected to the MGF, better known as female genital mutilation, this because they come from some African, Asian or the Middle East nation where this is still practiced.
The renowned Wassu UAB Foundation already has a career of years working to prevent them from research, formations and much respect. This is because the laws do not seem to be enough, and it has been observed that, although everything is carried out with the best intentions, imposing ideas and giving punishment to these families is not a good solution.
Initiation and mutilation
Every year the female genital mutilation threatens more than four million female infants throughout the planet, a large majority from Somalia, where almost ninety percent of women are mutilated, Mali, Gambia and Egypt. Inside the Spanish context, most of them are in Catalonia, Andalusia and Madrid, although it is essential to emphasize that ablation is not produced in Spain but when these families return to visit their nations. It is there when the grandmothers, usually in charge of this ritual of initiation of the girls, take the opportunity to carry out the rite. ‘We are complicated to understand it, but from a strange empathy observed that moms do it for pure love,’ the anthropologist and coordinated of the Wassu UAB tells us, Neus.
In strict terms, the MGF translates into modifying or spoiling the genital organs of girls for reasons not to be linked to medicine, and are universally known as a violation of female human rights throughout its splendor. In addition to containing harmful consequences for the mental and physical health of girls, who would go from chronic pain and infections to inconveniences in mental births and traumas.
The main reasons are a ‘hygiene, beauty and purity’, and that is that a woman who is mutilated will be more accepted in her community in which she is practiced. If she is not, she may not even let her perceive the same water as everyone else, or share her food.
The fact is that in multiple Muslim communities that have been established in Spain, the MGF is practiced, according to these families, for religious reasons and because they consider them a total teaching of Muhammad or Sunna. But from the Wassu they tend to explain that it is not just linked to Islam, by thousands and millions of Muslims do not even practice the MGF, and instead if they perform it in some Falasha and Christian Jewish communities Copstas. Moreover, the harsh reality of all this is that it is a tradition with a history prior to that of Islam.
So much illegality and is still present
At present, the legislation has shown how terrify. In addition to being illegal both in the Spanish territory and throughout the European continent and thanks to the scientific samples and field investigations of the Wassu UAB Foundation, the prohibition of such acts was promoted in changes since 2015. Other nations such as Senegal, Tanzania and Nigeria have also opted for their prohibition and, in fact, the Parliament of the African Union, with an advisory function for the attached nations, support in 2016 the abolition of this practice. But although multiple governments recognize that this is a problem, statistics indicate that laws have not been enough.
"They allow them a certain framework for action, but this is still done," Neus tells us, and complements that, ‘the simplest comparison we could do would be with the law of alcohol and management in Spanish territory. It is forbidden, but people keep drunk ’.
For there to be a real change, a sensitization at community scale must demand, and that would be the main work of Wassu UAB. This foundation uses an anthropological and medical methodology that does not opt for the imposition of knowledge, but spreads it.
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