Number of FGM victims found to be 70 million higher than thought

[MowCowWhoHow III]

Source: The Guardian

The huge global scale of female genital mutilation has been revealed in disturbing new statistics, which show at least 200 million girls and women alive today have undergone ritual cutting, half of them living in just three countries.

The latest worldwide figures, compiled by Unicef, include nearly 70 million more girls and women than estimated in 2014 because of a raft of new data collected in Indonesia, one of the countries where FGM is most prevalent despite the practice being banned since 2006.

In the analysis of 30 countries, published to mark the International Day of Zero Tolerance for FGM, statistics showed women in Indonesia, Egypt and Ethiopia account for half of all FGM victims worldwide. Somalia has the highest prevalence of women and girls who have been cut – 98% of the female population between the ages of 15 and 49.

Claudia Cappa, the report’s lead author, said data from Indonesia shows FGM was practised more widely than researchers thought. “In countries where data was not available, we had previously only had anecdotal evidence. We knew Indonesia has a growing population of women and girls, but I would say (these figures) are higher than expected,” she said. “It shows it is a global issue, when the focus has previously been on Africa.”

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/05/research-finds-200m-victims-female-genital-mutilation-alive-today

[chowder66]

1. This should be front and center of all papers N.O.W.

This is brutally serious.

[JDPriestly]

4. Yes. This is a brutal custom. Just brutal.

[alittlelark]

2. .......

[trillion]

3. I had no idea this was still going on so much, wow.

We tried to stop this in the 80's. It was a huge campaign.

[7962]

8. It ran into the fear of not respecting "culture"

There have been people claiming "Islamophobia" or "cultural sensitivity" whenever a forceful pushback would begin to stop this horror

[byronius]

5. This should be history.

It must be made history. Shameful, ancient history.

[Feeling the Bern]

6. So should what ISIS, Boko Haram and the Kims in North Korea do, but people are stupid

and never learn.

[byronius]

9. Well, we burn fewer witches these days, at least.

OTOH, Ted would probably want to get back to that basic.

Sometimes I feel like I was born a few hundred years too early. Flash forward, or course, to the horrible AI or alien war where I'm dreaming of the Good Old Days of the Twenty Teens.

Hard to be human. I'm reading Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague, the chapter about Africa's misery in the seventies and eighties -- good god, Idi Amin. The pain of that region.

[Recursion]

7. Type IV is pretty much universal in Indonesia (over 98% IIRC)

Though the actual practice (the clitoris is pricked with a needle) is not what most people think of when they say "FGM".