Campaigns in Egypt demand that young females no longer get circumcised. The 28 million women who have previously undergone genital mutilation have just one private clinic to turn to for assistance, even if the state wishes to safeguard future generations.
Nourhane, in her thirties, took the plunge at the end of 2021. This resident of Alexandria, in the coastal north, who speaks under a pseudonym, turned to surgeon Reham Awwad to “become once again the one who decides for (her) body”.
Eight months after a reconstruction operation, her chronic pain has been replaced by “completely new sensations” and “a clear physical and psychological improvement,” she explained.
It has only been possible to carry out this type of operation in Egypt since 2020.
By founding Restore FGM, Dr Awwad and her colleague Amr Seifeldin have offered victims a rare space in a country where disclosing excision is still taboo.
Surrounded by psychologists, they offer therapies, plasma injections to regenerate damaged tissue and clitoral reconstruction.
“Surgery is the last resort”, insists Dr Awwad, adding that plasma injections combined with psychological support “can reduce the need for surgery by 50%” and avoid another traumatic procedure.
This is the option being considered by Intisar, who is also speaking under a pseudonym. “Something in me has been broken, and I want to repair it”, told the forty-year-old.
When she was 10, “my grandmother took me to a doctor who excised me”, and she kept saying “it’s for your own good, you’re better off like that”. Despite being a doctor and the headmistress of her school, her parents had agreed to the operation during the summer the peak of girl circumcisions, according to campaigner Lobna Darwish.
An old tradition now medicalized
To combat this practice, “we need to run prevention campaigns in schools before the summer holidays”, argues Ms. Darwish, who oversees gender issues at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR).
The figures are staggering according to the authorities, 86% of married Egyptian women aged between 15 and 49 had been circumcised by 2021. UNICEF estimates that 200 million women in the world have been circumcised. More than one in ten is Egyptian.
In the most populous of Arab countries, excision involves the removal of the clitoris and labia minora. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), it causes pain, hemorrhage, infections, painful sexual relations and complications during childbirth.
Although illegal since 2008 and regularly denounced by the Muslim and Christian authorities, this age-old practice remains widespread in the patriarchal and conservative country, where many clinics offer it.
After years of campaigning against traditional excisers, three quarters of Egyptian women have been circumcised by a doctor, according to official figures.
“Excision cuts across all social classes,” says Intissar, now a journalist.
Promoted as a “cosmetic” operation, she continues, it is in fact aimed at “disconnecting women from their bodies and their pleasure”.
“We were told that it was religious, that it was better, cleaner”, agrees Nourhane, who was mutilated at the age of 11 with her eight-year-old sister under the gaze of the women in her family.
Egypt isn’t the only country that practices this ritual in Africa.