Schoolgirls at Risk of FGM after Schools were Closed Due to Corvid-19

Local organizations in Somalia confirmed the resurgence of Female Genital Mutilation known as FGM after all schools were shut down. Somalia has made some progress on the fight against the FGM.  Schoolgirls face the danger of their most important organs being cut. The new rebirth of this precarious phenomenon is alarmed.

Some parents believe myths that the little girls would have high sexual drive if their private parts are not “circumcised”. The FGM would give them a relief, they believe.

A decade or so, following a massive awareness of the dangers of the FGM including the subsequent birth complications and the increase rate of the death by pregnant mothers in children deliveries, the FGM plummeted. Somaliland even passed a bill and issued a Fatwa, a verdict, to ban FGM the physical and psychological harm of the young girls. The plague was kept in check. The perpetrators would face a dire consequence if caught red handed, says the law.

However, due to the lockdown, the children went back to their parents and guardians leaving the schools behind. They become vulnerable to this health hazard at the mercy of their ignorant, irresponsible parents.

In chaotic Somalia. The situation is grim as there is no effective mechanism to monitor and prevent from practicing on the young girls. This harm robs these young girls of their sexual enjoyment when grow up and get married. Local doctors confirm. After the first birth, some women urged their husbands to marry another one because of the pain they experienced during the labor to avoid producing another baby. Husbands who have no means to get another wife forces his wife to keep giving birth children. Hapless wives continue to sleep with husbands despite the expected pain when child delivery comes.

No knowledgeable doctor can dare to recommend wives have the right to use long-term active contraceptive drugs if a group of certified professional doctors confirm that the wife will die in her next childbirth. The wives themselves know in Somali context, marriage isn’t a marriage without children. The husbands’ families would pressurize them to divorce and marry multiple-producing wife to overpopulate the world. In Somaliland or Somalia, there is no laws banning domestic rape and the society because of lack of knowledge don’t believe its existence. Women when married to men, the first became chattels and goods for the second. women’ exit is to file divorce lying about the real cause of their divorce. Vaginal pain after child birth can’t constitute “justifiable excuse” for the breakup of a family.