According to "The Independent World" website, in February of 2009 a female journalist who was in Sierra Leone was kidnapped by a secret society, forced to strip naked, and walk through the streets because she was reporting on genital mutilation. This headline really surprised me, because it seemed like the kind of behavior that I would have expected to see decades ago or longer, when the cat called "female circumcision" was first let out of the bag. This poor woman was publicly humiliated because she was fighting for the rights of thousands of girls all over the Middle-Eastern and African world, at least from an outsider's point of view. To many of the people in Sierra Leone, she was invading and bringing a public value judgment against a precious rite of passage.
Another woman from Sierra Leone is also appalled by female genital mutilation. Rugiatu Turay has created an organization called the Amazonian Initiative Movement. The organization works at the local level to stop female genital mutilation by directly stopping the "practitioners" who perform the surgeries. At the time of the publication of the article, about 400 "practitioners" had stopped performing female genital mutilation as a result of the organization.
Rugiatu Turay says that "Silence means consent." This really struck me. So many of us are comfortable living our lives for ourselves, doing our own thing. But there are so many women (and men) around the globe who are suffering tremendously, while we sit back and relax in the lap of luxury. We may agree that they have rough lives, feel sorry for them, even wish that we could help, but it's true: our silence is our consent. We must be a voice for the voiceless!
No comments:
Post a Comment