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#FrontlineEndingFGM Reveal Their First Whistleblowers' Map
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The FGM “whistleblowers map” supplies the authorities with live, constantly-updatable information on where in the country girls are most at risk. Frontline organisations update the map hour by hour in the FGM hotspots. The live information is then passed onto the police and local chiefs.
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Dear <<First Name>>,
#FrontlineEndingFGM, is a movement of frontline feminist organisations and activists fighting FGM across Africa, backed by the UNFPA, Wallace Global and the Global Media Campaign. The movement wants to see support for frontline activists- currently receiving only 2 per cent of donor funding ramped up.
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"We are the people who will stop FGM, not the outsiders or the big NGOs. We know our people and how to persuade," says Ifrah Ahmed of the Ifrah Foundation in Somalia.
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The picture above was taken in Kacheliba Constituency in West Pokot County on November 18th 2022, where FGM rates are over 74 per cent and among the highest in Kenya. Campaigners spent 90 minutes with this group of 15 girls and their parents, trying to stop them from being cut. The following day (November 19, 2022) two of the 15 were taken across the border to Uganda to be cut.
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Why now?
- The long school holiday over Christmas means that hundreds of thousands of girls are at risk across Africa. 4.2 million girls are still mutilated globally every year according to UNFPA.
- Girls are cut with a razor blade and without anaesthetic by older village women. The process that can take between 20 and 40 minutes, depending on how much a girl struggles.
- The healing process where a girl's legs are wrapped together to allow the genitals to heal can take between two and four weeks.
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Shops selling FGM initiation wraps and tinsel, a local sign that the "cutting season" has begun. Kuria, Migori - Kenya, November 2022
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At least 5000 girls are at risk of mutilation in Kenya over the holidays, say campaigners watching for the traditional signs of the cutting preparations in the shops. These include selling mattresses for the girls to lie on while they recover and umbrellas to shield them from the sun during the public parade afterwards. But, more scrutiny means that in some regions, such as Kuria, Kisii and West Pokot, the cutting has been delayed until December 23, when the police and local authorities will wind down for the holidays.
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The video was filmed on the third week of November 2022, showing young men chanting in preparation for the cutting season. Girls are often dressed up as boys and cut alongside them.
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In most of the 22 hotspot counties in Kenya, FGM is seen as the traditional rite of passage. Many girls go into the bush "voluntarily" to be mutilated because they understand it to be a passage to womanhood. They have no idea what is going to happen to them.
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“Last year in the same region 300 girls were cut in the first week of the school holidays before the police intervened and saved over 250. “We don’t want this happening again. We need to mobilise on local radio and tell people that FGM can kill a girl.”
~Vincent Mwita,
Activist, Migori, Kenya.
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There is still time to support #FrontlineEndingFGM directly to end this devastating practice this Christmas
DONATE NOW .
Last year in Kuria, #FrontlineEndingFGM saved over 250 girls from the cut with a social media campaign that shamed the government into action.
That campaign cost £800 - or £3.20 per girl saved.
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