Senegal Curbs a Bloody Rite for Girls and Women

Source: NYT

When Aissatou Kande was a little girl, her family followed a tradition considered essential to her suitability to marry. Her clitoris was sliced off with nothing to dull the pain.

But on her wedding day, Ms. Kande, her head modestly covered in a plain white shawl, vowed to protect her own daughters from the same ancient custom. Days later, her village declared it would abandon female genital cutting for good.

Across the continent, an estimated 92 million girls and women have undergone it. But like more than 5,000 other Senegalese villages, Sare Harouna has joined a growing movement to end the practice.

The change has not yet reached Ms. Kande’s new home in her husband’s village, but if elders there pressured her to cut the baby girl she is taking into the marriage, she said, “I would resist them.” Her parents back her up.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/world/africa/movement-to-end-genital-cutting-spreads-in-senegal.html?pagewanted=all

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to be on the front page of Monday's Times

but people are finally turning away from mutilating their daughters by removing necessary reproductive tissue.

Slicing off the clitoris is only part of it. Slicing off the outer labia and stitching the remaining tissue together with only a tiny hole for urine and menses is the other part of it. And then women are supposed to be recut and restitched after childbirth.