Nine women in the northern Côte d’Ivoire town of Katiola have been convicted for carrying out female genital mutilation – the first time that a 1998 law banning FGM has been applied.

The women were found guilty of excising thirty girls aged between 10 and 15 in February. They were each sentenced to a year in prison and ordered to pay a fine equivalent to roughly 100 dollars.

“We have been waiting a long time for a boost in the fight against this scourge,” said Rachel Gogoua in the Ivorian economic capital, Abidjan, where she heads the National Organisation for Children, Women and the Family (ONEF), a non-governmental organisation that campaigns against FGM.

“The time for awareness-raising is over: now we need to sanction perpetrators.”

The Katiola court handed down the sentences on Jul 18, but in view of the women’s ages – ranging between 46 and 91 years old – decided none will actually have to spend time in prison. Gogoua told IPS she feels the convicted women should serve at least a token amount of jail time to drive home the message to others still practicing excision in many parts of the country.

“The law forbidding these practices was passed in 1998 and we have carried out extensive public education about it. In the end, we have to realise that these women are making fools of us. They are well aware of the law, but they defied it under the pretext of customary practice and tradition,” said Gogoua.

Despite the 1998 law, genital mutilation is still widespread in Côte d’Ivoire, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Based on surveys carried out in 2006, UNICEF estimates that 36 percent of Ivorian women have undergone excision, making it one of the worst affected countries in Africa.

Female genital mutilation is the complete or partial removal of the external genitals of a woman, according to the World Health Organization. This can involve the vulva, the major and minor labia, the clitoris, as well as the urinary and vaginal tracts.

The practice is most common in the northern and northwestern parts of the country, where nearly 88 percent of women are affected, and in the west, where the prevalence rate is 73 percent, according to UNICEF.

Massandjé Timité, 33, is originally from Marandallah, in the north.

“I still feel the pain from my excision today, 15 years later,” she told IPS. “It was a terrible trauma. The wounds healed very slowly, and with each day that passed, I feared the worst.”

Timité said that to evoke tradition to justify the continuation of FGM is to make a superficial argument. “When an excision is clumsily executed, as it was in my case, no one comes to help you. Does tradition accept that a woman should lose the very thing that allows her to give life?”

Despite numerous awareness campaigns and repeated promises by excisors, FGM continues to be practiced.

“Amongst us, the Wobé (an ethnic group in the west), it’s a shameful thing to be called ‘zoégbé’ (an un-excised woman),” explained Cécile Gnowahou, 26, who went through the procedure when she was 11.

“You don’t have the right to marry and you are often ridiculed in the village. In this context, our parents hear the message, but the cultural reality overrides it. This is a custom that has existed since before our parents’ grandparents’ time,” she said.

“Excision causes much more harm than one thinks,” said Gnowahou. “Sometimes it even leads to the victim dying, yet even when these things happen, it is amicably resolved between families.”

Gnowahou’s own experience illustrates the social dilemma that FGM presents many Ivorian women with. “Not only was I unable to get married following the prolonged bleeding that I suffered, but now times have changed and any man who knows about my status as an excised woman automatically rejects me,” she said.

But she believes that if the law against female genital mutilation is applied, it would begin to reduce the prevalence of FGM.

Her sentiments were echoed by Raymonde Goudou Coffie, Côte d’Ivoire’s Minister for the Family, Women and Children, who said that the successful prosecution in Katiola is only a beginning. The minister said the law would be applied in full against practices which affront human dignity, particularly that of women.

When Jack Sabadgou left Ghana for Switzerland 10 years ago, he left his infant daughter behind to be raised by her mother. Now he wants his child back, and he is running out of time in a bid to save her from the banned traditional practice of female genital mutilation.

Florence Ali, the president of the Ghana Association for Women’s Welfare, has dedicated her life to the fight against female genital mutilation. Credit: Jonathan Migneault/IPS

Sabadgou’s daughter, Yuma, is now 13 years old and she lives in the village of Bawku, in northern Ghana, where people still adhere to traditional practices, including FGM. After Yuma’s grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer, she blamed her illness on evil spirits, which, she claims, punished her because her granddaughter has not yet been cut.

“The issue is a sickness,” says Sabadgou from his home in Switzerland. He says his mother does not understand that her cancer has nothing to do with evil spirits or her granddaughter.

“I don’t want to lose two people,” he says, fighting back tears. “I love them both.”

Female genital mutilation was criminalised in Ghana in 1994. The United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO) have condemned the procedure, which involves the removal of a woman’s external genitalia, including the clitoris and inner labia.

The WHO says the practice has no health benefits and causes only harm. It can result in recurrent bladder and urinary tract infections, cysts and infertility.

But in villages like Bawku, the practice continues in secret.

And Sabadgou’s desperation to save his daughter from this is palpable even a continent away.

Sabadgou returned to Ghana in early February to gain legal custody of his daughter so that he could take her to safety in Switzerland. He filled out paperwork and spoke with Bawku’s leaders about his concerns with FGM, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. He has since returned to Switzerland.

In Ghana’s northern regions FGM is generally practiced between December and February. Sabadgou believes his daughter has until December before her life will irreversibly be changed for the worse.

Florence Ali, the president of the NGO the Ghana Association for Women’s Welfare, has been Sabadgou’s only ally in Ghana.

Before dedicating her life to the fight against FGM, Ali was a midwife. Women and their unborn babies died in her care due to complications from female genital mutilation.

One woman was not able to deliver her baby due to the scarring of her vagina. Ali was not equipped to do a Cesarean section and the mother and child died.

Mariama Yayah, the director of Ghana’s Department of Children, says FGM is practiced in Ghana to strip women of sexual pleasure and ensure they stay faithful to their husbands.

Many in Ghana’s northern regions see the practice as a normal part of womanhood, she says.

Sabadgou plans to return to Bawku in December to let the girls there know that the practice is not acceptable.

“It’s going to be a fight,” he says. “It’s not going to be easy.” He says no one in his village supports his stance against FGM. But it is a belief, he says, that he is prepared to die for.

In Ghana, people who practice the banned procedure can serve five to 10 years in prison if they are prosecuted. But authorities are not doing enough to curb the practice, says Sabadgou.

The WHO estimates that 92 million girls in Africa over the age of 10 have undergone FGM and there are only 22 countries on the continent that have laws against the practice. Mali, for example, has no law banning female genital mutilation.

In 2008, the World Health Assembly passed a resolution to eliminate female genital mutilation.

Ali says that in 2011 an assembly of African leaders in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, supported a draft resolution from the U.N.’s 66th ordinary Session of the General Assembly to ban FGM worldwide. “We are hoping that at the next General Assembly meeting, we (will) have a worldwide ban on FGM,” she says.

For Sabadgou the fight against FGM in Ghana starts with awareness. “We need to talk about the issue,” he says. “It needs to start now.”

He says the country’s media has not done enough to denounce the custom and he wants ministers from Ghana’s northern regions to discuss the issue in parliament.

Ghana’s Department of Children has done advocacy on the issue but its resources are limited.

Ali’s organisation is even more strapped for cash. She has a cramped office next to a schoolyard in Accra. Hundreds of children play in a football field outside while she raises her voice to discuss her fight against FGM over the surrounding noise.

“It is not easy to combat FGM but we are still fighting to flush it out of the system,” Ali says. “We have a long way to go to fight against FGM. Everybody has a role to play.”

(END)