Stop Female Genital Mutilation in the UK

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Each year, tens of thousands of girls in the UK are forced to have their genitals cut, often with no anesthesia. But there has been never been a conviction for female genital mutilation here -- even though in London alone, police have received 166 complaints in the last four years.

Undercover reporters for the Sunday Times recently caught three medics on film offering to mutilate young girls, massively scaling up the pressure on law enforcement to act. Avaaz, the global civic organization, is urging all of us in the UK to use this moment to call on Home Secretary Theresa May for real accountability. She is in charge of every police chief in England and Wales -- if she takes the issue up personally, the entire police system could be shaken into action.

Avaaz member Ruth Burnett has created a petition calling on the Home Secretary to start prosecuting people involved with these assaults and already more than 2000 people have signed. If they reach 20,000 signatures, Avaaz will deliver it directly to Home Secretary May and the head of Metropolitan Police Force -- click here to sign and forward to everyone:

Female Genital Mutilation is a custom widespread in nearly 30 Middle Eastern and African countries. But FGM has been illegal in the UK since 1985 and in 2003 the law was tightened to stop girls being taken abroad for the operation -- on so-called “FGM holidays”.

Still, the practice is widespread here in the UK. When the undercover Sunday Times reporter explained to Mohammed Sahib, an alternative medicine practitioner in East London that he represented a Ghanaian couple who wanted to have their two daughters -- aged 10 and 13 -- circumcised, he said “I can do it here,” confirming that he would both remove the clitoris and sew up the vagina. “This is my work. I know what I’m doing. I’m going to do it. I will tell you how [much] to pay [for one]: £750.”

Home Secretary Theresa May -- who oversees women’s issues for David Cameron, and who has the power to hold police chiefs all across England and Wales accountable -- recently admitted people would be “shocked” by the number of young girls in Britain subjected to FGM. Now we can push her to take concrete action to end FGM in the UK -- please to sign Avaaz' petition now and share with everyone.

For more information, click here.

Child Marriages Blight Bangladesh

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Nargis who was forced to marry at 12

Bangladesh has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world, with 20% of girls becoming wives before their 15th birthday, even though 18 is the minimum age allowed by law for a girl to marry and 21 for a boy.

Many young girls are made to give up their education to marry and raise families when they reach puberty because they are seen as a financial burden with less potential to contribute to the household income than a son. Arranging for a daughter to marry an older man can seem like a good way to secure her future and a younger bride can mean lower dowry payments for her parents.

Child brides drop out of school and are rarely allowed to work.  Often they become victims of domestic violence.  They lose their childhood completely. And with their bodies too young for child bearing, pregnancy results in serous health risks for both mother and child.

“I was 12 when child marriage shattered all my dreams,” says Nargis who is now 19.  “On the day itself I was frightened: again and again I felt fear, fear, fear. Once my grandmother and sister had gone, I had to go and live with my husband. I didn’t know him. That night I felt strange, and very scared.

“I feel very bad, because instead of going to school I live at my father-in-law's house and do all the household work. When I was at home I could share my feelings and emotions. Now that I’m married I don’t have any say and I have to abide by what my husband and my father and mother-in-law decide.

“Two years after my marriage, when I was 14, I gave birth to a baby boy, but there were complications after the birth. He survived for 16 days but then he died," Nargis says.

"It is the new kind of slavery," says Mirna Ming Ming Evora, country director for the NGO Plan International, a global children’s charity, focusing among other issues on early and forced marriages. "Here girls are a burden, they don't earn income in this culture,”  she says.

“Behind our parents’ decisions to marry girls young is poverty – extreme poverty. If our parents get a good offer, sometimes it is very difficult to change their minds,” explains Oli.

Oli is an amazing 12-year old boy, who is a member of a Plan’s children’s group in northern Dhaka, raising awareness of the impact of early and forced marriages on girls and society in general. 

They perform street dramas and step in directly when they hear a marriage is planned. “We go to see the parents and try to get them to stop the marriage,” Oli says. “We have tried this on many occasions - sometimes with success and sometimes we are not able to stop the marriage.” Plan staff in Bangladesh know of four child marriages that Oli’s club has directly prevented in his small district of the Bashentak slum alone.

In this short video of Oli explaining how boys can make a difference.
 

There are 25 children in Oli’s organisation and Plan has 60 similar clubs across the country. Plan has reached an estimated one million people with its anti-child marriage work while Oli himself has reached about 50,000.

Oli is one of  three children affected by child marriage - Oli, Poppy and Jemi - whose experiences is featured on Angus Crawford's Crossing Continents on Radio 4 today, Thursday 26 April, at 11:00 BST and again on Monday 30 April at 20:30 BST. You can listen online, download the podcast and browse the archive.

A TV documentary on child marriage will also be featured on BBC World News GMT: Fri 27th April 13:30 and Sat 28th April 11:30 and 23:30; and on BBC News Channel BST:  Sat 28th April 05:30, 14:30, 21:30 and Sun 29th April 03:30, 10:30, 22:30.

BBC team filming with Plan's children's group in Bashantek slum, Dhaka

 Sign Plan's petition to stop child marriage here.

Child trafficking in India - Rubina's return

Rubina's emotional reunion with her beloved grandmother/Fjona Hill

India is the fourth most dangerous country in the world for women, right after Afghanistan, DRC and Pakistan, according to a newly released global survey by the Thompson Reuters Foundation (I wrote a blogpost about the report a couple of weeks ago).  This unexpected distinction for the world’s largest democracy is due largely to the high numbers of women and girls trafficked in the country every year.  

It is estimated that 100 million people, mostly women and girls, were involved in trafficking in India in 2009 alone, according to the report.  Across the world, some of 1.2 million children are trafficked every year into prostitution, forced labour, child marriage, begging and other slavery-like conditions.

Rubina is one of them.  She was just ten when her father took her away from their small rural village in India’s Andhra Pradesh and sold her as a domestic slave in nearby Bangalore.

Photographer Fjona Hill followed her return home, after the little girl ran away and was taken to a Government’s Girls Home. There, Oasis, an NGO working with trafficked children, gave her counselling, traced her parents and brought her home. 

Although Rubina was luckier than most trafficked children, her story is fairly typical.

She lived with her parents, two young sisters and an elder bother in Chinampalle, a small Muslim village of 500 mud huts, where people eke out a meagre living off farming and stone mining.

Her father, a stone miner, could only find work two or three days a week, while her mother worked as a coolie (carrier) and toiled in the fields.  The family often went without food, and was in debt.  Rubina frequently bunked school and her father was convinced she was mentally unstable.  

Rubina arrives at her village and looks for her family/ Fjona Hill

  

Like most trafficked victims, Rubina had no idea what awaited her in Bangalore. Her father had told her he was taking her to an Islamic school, but sold her to a lady as a domestic servant instead.

In her case, the “dalal”, as recruiters are known in India, was her father – and that is not uncommon. Many children from poor families are sold by parents and relatives, who might not grasp the full implication of their actions.   Dalals can also be friends, neighbours, people who have been trafficked themselves, as well as corrupt police officers, passport officials and taxi/rickshaw drivers.  They haunt bus stops, railway stations and streets of deprived areas looking for potential victims, and use drugs, abduction, kidnapping, persuasion and deception to catch them.

Rubina kneels at her mother's feet as she explains where she had been taken by her father. A woman from the village looks on/Fjona Hill

 Rubina managed to escape, something few achieve, and was welcomed back into her village. The village elders disciplined the father. If she had been trafficked as a sex worker instead of a domestic servant, she might have been rejected by her family or her family would have been forced to leave their village because of the stigma and shame brought onto the household.

Oasis workers have been visiting Rubina recently. “She is now doing well and going to school, and the whole village are keeping an eye on her,” says Anita Kanaiya, Oasis executive director. 

For more information on Oasis, click here and to donate to the charity, click here.

Children of prisoners have rights

I’ve read a very interesting story in the Guardian recently on Albie Sachs, the South African judge who ruled not to send a woman to jail because it would infringe the human rights of her three children.

The woman was facing four years in jail for up to 40 counts of credit card fraud that she had committed while under a suspended sentence for similar offences. At first, Sachs wanted to jail the mother, but a female colleague urged him to consider the rights of the woman’s children separately. Here is how the 74-year-old judge explained his decision to an international audience of human rights lawyers in Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago:

"She said: 'There is something you are missing. What about the children? Mrs M has three teenage children. She lives in an area that we politely call fragile, an area of gangs, drug-peddling and a fair amount of violence. The indications are that she is a good mother, and the magistrate gave no attention to the children's interests.'

"The minute my colleague spoke to me about the importance of the three teenage children of Mrs M, I started to see them not as three small citizens who had the right to grow up into big citizens but as three threatened, worrying, precarious, conflicted young boys who had a claim on the court, a claim on our society as individuals, as children, and a claim not to be treated solely as extensions of the rights of the mother, but in their own terms."

As a result, Sachs created a legal precedent in 2007: now in South Africa at least in borderline cases, primary caregivers of children should not be sent to jail. And if the court decided to jail a primary caregiver, it had to take some responsibility for what happens to the children. "The court can't simply say that she should have thought of that before she committed the offence, or that she can't hide behind her children."

Judge Sachs did not know it at the time, but similar ideas were being framed in Scotland in a report by the then children's commissioner, Kathleen Marshall.

The report, Not Seen, Not Heard, Not Guilty, argues that the rights of offenders' children to family life under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child are systematically ignored by the court system. The report found that almost two-thirds of prisoners in the Cornton Vale women's prison in Stirling had children under 18, but there was no provision to take their rights into account during sentencing.

This is fascinating. A new way of thinking is emerging within the criminal justice system. Children have rights on their own, which the court system should take into account. And children don’t forfeit their rights because their parents have committed a crime. Of course, it is not a one-fit-all answer: some convicted mothers and fathers are terrible parents and being a parent shouldn’t be a license to commit a crime with impunity. But the principle is important and, if we think about it, rather basic: children shouldn’t be punished for their parents’ crimes. Both the children and society would benefit.

I wonder if the same argument could be made about unborn children – the children of pregnant women in prison. Many years ago, fellow journalist Loren Stein and I worked for the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco on a year-long investigation (published in the Progressive and Boston Herald magazine) into the alarming number of miscarriages among pregnant women in US prisons. Packed into routinely overcrowded, understaffed and ill-equipped facilities, pregnant inmates were often denied essential pre-natal and emergency care, although their health needs were both greater and more specialized. As a result, more than 30 percent of pregnancies in prison ended up in miscarriage (often during the third semester, which is very rare among the general population) or the loss of the baby during or after birth.

For many of these inmates’ unborn children, a prison sentence actually meant a death sentence.