The Gambia moves toward overturning landmark ban on female genital mutilation

Gambian lawmakers have voted to advance a measure revoking a ban on female genital mutilation by removing legal protections for millions of girls, raising fears that other countries could follow suit.

Of the 47 members of the Gambia National Assembly present on Monday, 42 voted to send a Bill to overturn the ban onward to a committee for consideration before a final vote. Human rights experts, lawyers and women’s and girls’ rights campaigners say that overturning the ban would undo decades of work to end female genital mutilation (FGM), a centuries-old ritual tied up in ideas of sexual purity, obedience and control.

If the Bill passes the final stages, the small west African nation of The Gambia will become the first nation globally to roll back protections against FGM.

Government committees will be able to propose amendments before it comes back to parliament for a final reading in about three months – but analysts say that it has now passed the key stage: its proponents will gain momentum and it will probably become law.

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The Gambia banned FGM in 2015 but did not enforce the ban until last year, when three practitioners were given hefty fines. An influential imam in the Muslim-majority country took up the cause and has been leading calls to repeal the ban, claiming that FGM – which in The Gambia usually involves removing the clitoris and labia minora of girls between ages 10 and 15 – is a religious obligation and is important culturally.

Anti-FGM campaigners gathered outside parliament in Banjul, The Gambia’s capital, on Monday morning, but police set up barricades and prevented many from getting inside – while allowing in the religious leaders who advocate FGM and their supporters, according to Fatou Baldeh, one of The Gambia’s leading opponents of FGM.

“It was very sad to witness the whole debate, and men trying to justify why this would continue,” Baldeh said after the vote. She said she feared that if the men leading the charge – who she described as extremists – succeeded, they would next try to roll back other laws, such as one banning child marriage.

Inside parliament, lawmakers – all of them men – traded arguments.

“If people are being arrested for practising FGM, then that means they are being deprived of their right to practise religion,” one member of parliament, Lamin Ceesay, said, according to Parliament Watch, a project that promotes parliamentary transparency and accountability.

“Let’s protect our women,” another, Gibbi Mballow, said. “I am a father, and I can’t support such a Bill.” He added: “Religion says we should not harm women.”

FGM takes different forms and is most common in Africa, although it is also widespread in parts of Asia and the Middle East. Internationally recognised as a gross violation of human rights, it frequently leads to serious health issues, including infections, haemorrhages and severe pain, and it is a leading cause of death in the countries where it is practised.

Worldwide, FGM is increasing despite campaigns to stop it – mainly because of population growth in the countries where it is common. More than 230 million women and girls have undergone it, according to Unicef – an increase of 30 million people since the last time the agency made an estimate in 2016.

Four lawmakers voted against advancing the Bill on Monday and one abstained. Only five of The Gambia’s 58 deputies are women, meaning men are spearheading a discussion on a practice that is forced on young girls.

“They have no say,” said Emmanuel Joof, head of The Gambia’s National Human Rights Commission.

Repealing the ban will pose “serious, life-threatening consequences for the health and wellbeing of Gambia’s women and girls,” said Geeta Rao Gupta, the US ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues.

From 1994 until 2016, The Gambia was led by one of the region’s most notorious dictators, Yahya Jammeh, who, a truth commission found in 2021, had people tortured and killed by a hit squad, raped women and threw many people in jail for no reason. He called those fighting to end FGM “enemies of Islam”.

So, it came as a shock to many Gambian opponents of FGM when, in 2015, Jammeh banned the practice – something many observers attributed to the influence of his Moroccan wife.

The new law was welcomed as a watershed moment in The Gambia, where three-quarters of women and girls are subjected to FGM. But the law was not enforced, and this emboldened imams who are “hell-bent on having a theocratic state” to try to repeal it, according to Joof.

Clerics in the Muslim world disagree on whether FGM is Islamic, but it is not in the Koran. The most vocal of the Gambian imams, Abdoulie Fatty, has argued that “circumcision makes you cleaner” and has said the husbands of women who have not been cut suffer because they cannot meet their wives’ sexual appetites. Many Gambians accused Fatty of being a hypocrite, pointing out that when Jammeh banned FGM, Fatty was the presidential imam but apparently said nothing.

At the Bill’s first reading two weeks ago, Fatty bussed in a group of young women to chant pro-mutilation slogans outside parliament. Their faces veiled – which is unusual in The Gambia – they sang and waved pink posters that read: “Female circumcision is our religious beliefs.”

Baldeh was eight years old when she was pinned down and subjected to genital mutilation. But when she first heard the term “female genital mutilation,” when she was studying for a master’s degree in sexual and reproductive health, she did not recognise it as something she had been through, because she saw it as part of her culture, not something violent that harmed women. Her own grandmother, a traditional birth attendant, was involved in mutilation.

After reading and speaking to other women, though, Baldeh realised what she had been subjected to and started speaking out against FGM – first by trying to change her own family members’ minds. She became one of the most prominent voices speaking out against it in The Gambia.

FGM could be ended within a generation, if there was the will to do it, Baldeh said.

“If you don’t cut a girl, she’s not going to cut her future daughters,” she said.

On March 4th, Baldeh was at the White House with US secretary of state Antony Blinken and first lady Jill Biden, receiving an International Women of Courage award for her work against mutilation. But that same day, Gambian lawmakers were listening to the first reading of the Bill to overturn the FGM ban – one that would unravel the legal gains Baldeh and other opponents of mutilation had made.

She and other observers said most Gambian lawmakers did not necessarily believe in FGM but were in favour of the Bill because they were afraid of losing their parliamentary seats.

“The saddest part is the silence from the government,” she said.

This silence extends even to the ministry charged with protecting women and children, which is headed by Fatou Kinteh, who previously was the United Nations Population Fund’s co-ordinator in The Gambia for gender-based violence and FGM. Reached by phone on Saturday, Kinteh refused to comment on a possible overturn of the ban, saying she would call back later. She never did.

Baldeh said the imams’ recent rhetoric in support of FGM had spread to many Gambian men, who have unleashed a torrent of online abuse on women who speak out against the practice, undermining what had been a flourishing movement to increase women’s and girls’ rights in The Gambia. But she said the online abuse would not derail their efforts.

“If this law gets repealed, we know they’re coming for more,” Baldeh said. “So, we will fight it to the end.” – This article originally appeared in the New York Times