Flee your country to avoid the horror of your daughter …

Hawa was ten years old when a woman from her village came to her home to perform genital mutilation on her three younger sisters. “It was a trauma that I could never forget”says this Mauritanian who now advises women who arrive as immigrants, many with their daughters, from the Canary Island of Fuerteventura, precisely to avoid cutting them. This Saturday February 6, International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation, a practice that continues in 30 countries in Africa and the Middle East despite being banned in most of them.

The metal blade making the cut, the gynecological problems caused by the ablation and the trauma of seeing her four-year-old sister on the verge of dying from a hemorrhage, accompany Hawa Toure since the day he was subjected to this practice, almost always involves partial or total removal of the female external genitalia without medical justification. Hawa has spent a month preparing the campaign and actions with which this Saturday will once again raise her voice to ensure that the nearly four million girls around the world who are at risk of mutilation each year are heard.

In an interview with Efe, she says that when she was mutilated, she realized that “everything, not only the cut hurts but also to see the person doing it”. “She’s like a witch. Her image was recorded on me and I couldn’t get it out of my head, all the girls in my town couldn’t forget her face, ”she adds.

All the girls in town

In Kaédi, her hometown, all young women are mutilated “because it did not seem normal that some were mutilated and others not”, says this woman who arrived in Fuerteventura in 2004 from Mauritania, a country which banned removal for more than one of each. “The imams signed a fatwa in Mauritania, even if it is still practiced in secret”, explains this survivor of the ablation while wondering why “it continues to be done if internationally it is prohibited and it is is a harmful practice that hurts women and women. . girls. “

According to Unicef, at least 200 million girls and women in 31 countries, aged 15 to 49, have been subjected to this practice which carries severe pain to prolonged bleeding, infection, infertility, and even death, in addition to increasing the risk of HIV transmission.

In 2017, Hawa created the Sociocultural Association of Mauritanian Women Dimbe in Fuerteventura, which aims to integrate African women and prevent this type of practice from continuing. “It took me a long time to start, but I wanted to prevent anyone from suffering from what I went through when I was ten,” he admits. If he didn’t, no one could save the nearly four million girls at risk worldwide each year, around 18,400 in Spain.

A risk that extends to Europe

In the Canary Islands, where thousands of emigrants arrive – over 2,000 last January – around 4,500 girls are estimated to be at risk of genital mutilation. “This is the figure we have, although it is difficult to confirm because there are a lot of girls who are not registered and many mothers do not want to say whether they are going to mutilate them or not,” Hawa explains.

According to the president of Dimbe, there are mothers in the archipelago who assure that they will not mutilate their daughters, but then they take them to their country of origin during the holidays “to do the practice”. Hawa recognizes that there are African women living in Europe who do not want to mutilate their daughters, but “faced with family pressure, they prefer to go to prison”. In Spain, genital mutilation is punishable by six to twelve years in prison.

Chronic sequelae

The pandemic is not a good ally in the fight against ablation. Hawa recalls that the World Health Organization (WHO) has already warned against increasing the practice because “families cannot support girls and the only way is to marry them and, for that, we must go through genital mutilation ”.

Since July, Hawa has met the women who arrive in small boats (boats) in Fuerteventura, listens to them and tries to advise them and clarify their doubts, because “some come with problems and do not know that they are linked to mutilations. “, he says. The spokesperson for the Dimbe association assures us that many women who arrive in the Canary Islands with their daughters in patera flee so that “the girls do not undergo genital mutilation”.

Immigrant women who arrive in this type of boat, in many cases, flee from mutilation, forced marriage and gender-based violence. During the migratory journey, this violence continues and many end up being raped at the border. Hawa makes no secret of her concern when she comments that of all the women she has spoken to in recent months, “only one” told her that no one had raped her. “Everyone else was all raped.”

Another objective of the association is to try to make these girls undergo vaginal reconstruction, for which they must be transferred to the city of Barcelona, ​​where a foundation does it.