By Amira El Ahl in Cairo

In Cairo, a small revolution has been launched: A conference of high-ranking Muslim theologians has agreed that the practice of female genital mutilation is irreconcilable with Islam. The painful and often deadly practice of female circumcision affects millions of women in Africa.

Fatima’s scream is as blood-curdling as it is heart-wrenching. The little girl, who looks to be about eight years old, screams in a panic, initially in fear and then because she is unable to bear the pain she is experiencing. She is lying on the floor of a dirty hut somewhere in the Ethiopian desert. Her body is contorted with pain as she screams, cries and finally lies there whimpering. Her new, green floral dress is soaked in blood.

A victim of genital mutilation in Somalia: How is she able to endure such pain?
Two men and her mother press the delicate child against the floor and pull apart her thin little legs. An old woman crouches in front of Fatima, holding a shiny razor blade and a thick, threaded darning needle. Today is the day Fatima will become a woman, a decent woman.

The purpose of the thick darning needle is to lift the lips of the vulva to facilitate cutting them off. The old woman moves the razor blade into position. First she slices off the small lips of the vulva and then the clitoris. There is blood everywhere. The girl arches her small, sweat-soaked body. The old woman repeatedly pours a milky liquid onto the wound to prevent infection. Then the grandmother comes into the hut, pokes at the wound and tells the old woman to make a deeper cut. The process starts all over again. Fatima’s screams become almost unbearable. If the sight of this girl under female circumcision is so difficult to bear, how can she possibly stand the pain?

Finally the deed is done. The wound is sewn shut with thorns, leaving only a tiny opening. A straw is inserted into the small opening to prevent it from closing. Then Fatima’s legs are tied together with a rope to allow the wound to heal. She will lie in bed, her legs tied together in this fashion, for several weeks.

The old woman completes her barbaric task with a slap on her subject’s behind. Fatima is now a woman.

Millions of victims
About 6,000 girls fall victim to genital mutilation every day, or about 2 million a year. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that between 100 and 140 million women worldwide are circumcised. Most circumcised women live in 28 African countries, as well as in Asia and the Middle East. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), at least 90 percent of all women are circumcised in developing countries like Ethiopia, Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia and Sierra Leone, while almost no women are circumcised in Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

WHO distinguishes among four types of genital mutilation:
Type I, or “clitorectomy”: Excision of the skin surrounding the clitoris with or without excision of part or all of the clitoris
Type II, or “excision”: Removal of the entire clitoris and part or all of the labia minora
Type III, or “infibulation”: Removal of part or all of the external genitalia and stitching together of the vaginal orifice, leaving only a small opening
Type IV: Various other practices, including pricking, piercing, incision and tearing of the clitoris.
One out of every three girls dies as a result of infibulation, also known as pharaonic mutilation.
http://www.global-sisterhood-network.org/content/view/1470/59/

Du’a Khalil Aswad was a 17 year old Iraqi Yazidi girl who was stoned to death in an honor killing.

Under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, women’s rights were completely stripped away. Women were not allowed to pursue their education, all girls’ schools were closed down, women were not allowed to work, and they were ordered to remain in their houses.
Raised in Afghanistan during the Taliban era, Farzana Wahidy was forced to go to school in secret in a small apartment in Kabul. At the age of 11, she helped teach mathematics to 60 other girls.
When the Taliban were defeated, Farzana Wahidy continued her education and enrolled in a program sponsored by AINA Photojournalism Institute, Afghanistan’s first photo agency. This placed her on the road to become a photojournalist for Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press.

In 2004, Wahidy received a scholarship to attend the photojournalism program at Loyalist College in Belleville, Ontario, where she now resides. She is 24.

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As the Dutch capital closes down a third of its brothels in an attempt to cut crime, Anushka Asthana spends a night in the city where the prostitutes are a tourist attraction.
By Anushka Asthana

On the edge of a cobbled path that runs along a canal in the heart of Amsterdam, a pretty woman lit her cigarette, struck a pose and smiled at the tourists pouring past. Dressed in white lingerie, her bleached blonde hair bathed in red light, the prostitute beckoned men towards her and the unmade bed behind.
‘They say we give Amsterdam a bad reputation,’ she said, pushing her window open slightly. ‘Rubbish. This is the only reputation we have.’
Last week, the city announced that it would be closing down a third of its famed brothels. Within a matter of months, 52 of the iconic window displays that line the streets of the busy red-light district will disappear.
Come January, the blinds will be drawn down on the window that frames the blonde prostitute, looking down over the canal, and the sign above her that reads ‘raam verhuur’ (windows for rent) will also be gone.
The 22-year-old was fed up. ‘I was thinking of quitting anyway,’ she said. ‘So this will make the final decision for me.’
As she spoke, a young, drunken man hollered, ’30 euros’. Looking slightly offended, she pointed across the canal and quietly said: ‘I think you should try that part of the district.’
Her building is one of those where the rent is highest and the sex most expensive. It is owned, like so many of the brothels, by property magnate Charlie Geerts, who gave up a year-long battle with the authorities last week and finally sold up.
In a deal worth £18m, officials will buy 18 buildings from Geerts – known as Amsterdam’s Emperor of Sex – and close down the ‘windows’. The final decision came from the city’s mayor, Job Cohen, who argued that the brothels were attracting crime and money-laundering to the area. ‘We want to get rid of the underlying criminality,’ he told a TV station last week.
Those who live above and beside the windows have been fairly supportive of the move. One man, who refused to be named, said that prostitution was a core part of the area and he did not want it to disappear completely.

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KATHMANDU, Feb. 15 (Xinhua) — Over 200,000 Nepali girls have been trafficked to red light areas of India, Nepali state-run newspaper The Rising Nepal on Sunday quoted a high-rank official from the Ministry of Home Affairs as saying.
Dr. Govinda Prasad Kusum, Secretary for Ministry of Home Affairs, said that approximately 7,000 to 10,000 girls are being trafficked to India every month.
“We have a large number of Nepalese girls in India’s red light areas and controlling traffickers is proving troublesome because we share open borders with India and traffickers have a dozen ways to cross borders without being noticed,” said Kusum at the launch of “the Global Report on Trafficking in Persons” on Friday.
According to United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), “the Global Report on Trafficking in Persons” offers the first global assessment on the scope of human trafficking and what is being done to fight it. It includes an overview of trafficking patterns, legal steps taken in response and country specific information on reported cases of trafficking in persons, victims and prosecutions.
According to the report, the most common form of human trafficking is sexual exploitation which makes up 79 percent of the victim population, and the victims of sexual exploitation are predominantly women and girls. The second most common form of human trafficking is indicated to be forced labour at 18 percent which is less frequently detected and reported than trafficking for sexual exploitation.
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Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Women in Germany face a tough battle in getting the same pay as men.

A new European Union study shows women in Germany earn 22 percent less than men — a number that puts the country among Europe’s worst gender wage gaps.

EU Commissioner for Employment and Social Affairs Vladimir Spidla pointed out that in Europe, only Estonia, Cyprus and Slovakia had wage gaps that were as large or larger.
In an interview with German newspaper Die Welt, Spidla noted that the average wage gap across the EU shows women earning 15 percent less than men. The fewer the women in the work force, the lower the average wage, he noted.
The commissioner called for more compatibility between work and family, and for more women in leadership positions. He also called on business to pay equal wages for equal work.

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Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Women only make up eight percent of managerial posts in Europe.

A recent high-powered summit in Berlin to improve women’s economic opportunities amid intense global competition underlined the dearth of female representatives in boardrooms across Europe.

Women in European countries to date still constitute only eight percent of managerial positions, according to the European Women’s Network.

Speaking at the 17th Global Summit of Women that took place in Berlin last week, Mirrella Visser, a president of the European Women’s Network said she is the first women to be on a company board in The Netherlands.

However, other male members of the board sometimes intimidate her, she said. “Maybe these men do this to me because they do not believe in women making decisions.”

According to research revealed at the summit, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom are the two countries that have the highest percentage of women in decision-making positions.

Visser said it remains hard for women to climb the career ladder since unlike other countries, “The Netherlands does not have a legislator that could back women up and to get to the top, you have to be on your own.”

“Davos for Women”

The challenges facing women in the business world was one of the core themes of the summit which is also known as the “Davos for Women.”

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga took part in the summit
An annual occurrence, the three-day meeting this time drew over 1,000 female government and business leaders — most of them top corporate executives — from 95 countries. Participants included Latvian President, Vaira Vike-Freiberga and vice president of Microsoft USA, Gerri Elliot.

Irene Natividad, president of the summit said the meet allows women across borders, disciplines and cultures to learn from each other in their ongoing work towards economic equity.

“Sustainability and growth in our global economy would be unthinkable without women” Natividad said.

She admitted that there weren’t enough women in top managerial positions and emphasized the need to change the mind-set of both men and women.

“Many corporate leaders still view the inclusion of women board directors as a matter of political correctness or as a form of affirmative action to address past inequities.” She said both views are misguided approaches that merely entrench opposition to diversifying corporate boardrooms.

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By Denise Grady
(Source: New York Times)

Lying side by side on a narrow bed, talking and giggling and poking each other with skinny elbows, they looked like any pair of teenage girls trading jokes and secrets.

But the bed was in a crowded hospital ward, and between the moments of laughter, Sarah Jonas, 18, and Mwanaidi Swalehe, 17, had an inescapable air of sadness. Pregnant at 16, both had given birth in 2007 after labor that lasted for days. Their babies had died, and the prolonged labor had inflicted a dreadful injury on the mothers: an internal wound called a fistula, which left them incontinent and soaked in urine.

Last month at the regional hospital in Dodoma, they awaited expert surgeons who would try to repair the damage. For each, two previous, painful operations by other doctors had failed.
“It will be great if the doctors succeed,” Ms. Jonas said softly in Swahili, through an interpreter.

Along with about 20 other girls and women ranging in age from teens to 50s, Ms. Jonas and Ms. Swalehe had taken long bus rides from their villages to this hot, dusty city for operations paid for by a charitable group, Amref, the African Medical and Research Foundation.

The foundation had brought in two surgeons who would operate and teach doctors and nurses from different parts of Tanzania how to repair fistulas and care for patients afterward.
“This is a vulnerable population,” said one of the experts, Dr. Gileard Masenga, from the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center in Moshi, Tanzania. “These women are suffering.”

The mission — to do 20 operations in four days — illustrates the challenges of providing medical care in one of the world’s poorest countries, with a shortage of doctors and nurses, sweltering heat, limited equipment, unreliable electricity, a scant blood supply and two patients at a time in one operating room — patients with an array of injuries, from easily fixable to dauntingly complex.

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(Source: United Nations Population Fund or UNFPA)

What is obstetric fistula?

Obstetric fistula is an injury of childbearing that has been relatively neglected, despite the devastating impact it has on the lives of girls and women. It is usually caused by several days of obstructed labour, without timely medical intervention — typically a Caesarean section to relieve the pressure. The consequences of fistula are life shattering: The baby usually dies, and the woman is left with chronic incontinence. Because of her inability to control her flow of urine or faeces, she is often abandoned or neglected by her husband and family and ostracized by her community. Without treatment, her prospects for work and family life are greatly diminished, and she is often left to rely on charity.

How does fistula occur?

Unattended obstructed labour can last for up to six or seven days, although the foetus usually dies after two or three days. During the prolonged labour, the soft tissues of the pelvis are compressed between the descending baby’s head and the mother’s pelvic bone. The lack of blood flow causes tissue to die, creating a hole between the mother’s vagina and bladder (known as a vesicovaginal fistula), or between the vagina and rectum (causing a rectovaginal fistula) or both. The result is a leaking of urine or faeces or both.
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Life for women in Kenya can be hard.

For women living in one of the largest slums in the world, life can be devastating.

With remarkable access to the inner areas of the Kibera slum in Nairobi, this film introduces just a few of the thousands of women, whose daily lives are blighted by poverty and serious human rights violations.