Skip to main content

Home/ CULF 3331: "Middle Eastern Revolutions"/ Group items tagged horn

Rss Feed Group items tagged

diamond03

Efua Dorkenoo fought against female genital cutting - The Globe and Mail - 0 views

  • Efua Dorkenoo fought against female genital cutting
  • successful 30-year campaign against the tradition of genital cutting of girls and women,
  • Efua Dorkeno
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • ied Oct. 18 in London. She was 65.
  • Equality Now, a London-based women’s rights organizatio
  • Dorkenoo started organizations to battle genital cutting and co-ordinated the effort more broadly as acting director of women’s health at the World Health Organization in the late 1990s.
  • She wrote articles and an influential book – Cutting the Rose: Female Genital Mutilation (1996) –
  • “warrior in chief
  • “She inspired a generation of feminists across the world to take up the cause of banning the procedure,
  • Last year, the UN General Assembly voted unanimously to recognize female genital cutting as a human-rights violation.
  • British government prosecuted it as a crime for the first time,
  • African-led organization she helped found, The Girl Generation: Together to End FGM, began work this month.
  • practice is declining in many countries
  • teenage girls were less likely to have been cut than older women in half of the 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East where the practice is concentrated.
  • In Egypt, where more women have been cut than in any other country, surveys showed that 81 per cent of 15- to 19-year-olds had undergone the practice, compared with 96 per cent of women in their late 40s.
  • Female genital cutting involves pricking, piercing or amputating some or all of the external genitalia
  • vulva is closed, leaving a small hole for the passage of urine and menstrual blood.
  • The practice is believed to have originated about 4,000 years ago in Egypt or the Horn of Africa.
  • 27 countries in Africa
  • Adherents come from a spectrum of faiths, including Christianity, Islam and African religion
  • often ages 4 to 8
  • pathway to womanhood
  • The World Health Organization says female genital cutting has no health benefits and can cause severe bleeding, problems urinating and, later in life, cysts, infections and infertility.
  • intended to reduce women’s sexual pleasure
  • preserve a woman’s virginity until marriage.
  • 125 million women living today in the countries where it is concentrated have experienced such cutting.
  • The mother was so badly scarred, she said, that she could not deliver her baby through natural childbirth.
  • Ms. Dorkenoo began campaigning against the practice in the early 1980s
  • Foundation for Women’s Health and Development to promote the health of African women and girls, with a focus on abolishing female genital cutting
  • co-ordinated national action plans against female genital cutting in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Cameroon, Kenya, Somalia and Sudan.
  • In 1994, Queen Elizabeth II named Ms. Dorkenoo an honorary officer in the Order of the British Empire.
  •  
    Efua Dorkenoo recently passed away. She was a women who fought for women's rights and the ban of FGM. She was an inspiration to feminists to take action. 
jherna2a

Seeking Refuge in Djibouti: Escape From Yemen - 0 views

  •  
    The war in Yemen has forced nearly 100,000 people to flee across the Gulf of Aden to Djibouti, a small country in the Horn of Africa. Many live in refugee camps, like Markazi refugee camp, but are unwanted due to "Yemen's reputation for terrorism."
1 - 3 of 3
Showing 20 items per page