What was actually happening to the women

This practice is not only extremely painful and distressing, it's also an ongoing infection risk: the closing over of the vagina and the urethra leaves women with a very small opening through which to pass menstrual fluid and urine. In fact, sometimes the opening can be so small that it needs to be cut open to allow sexual intercourse or birth - often causing complications which harm both mother and baby.

Type 4: This covers all other harmful procedures like pricking, piercing, incising, scraping and cauterising the clitoris or genital area. The most frequently cited reasons for carrying out FGM are social acceptance, religion, misconceptions about hygiene, a means of preserving a girl or woman's virginity, making the woman "marriageable" and enhancing male sexual pleasure.

In some cultures FGM is regarded as a rite of passage into adulthood, and considered a pre-requisite for marriage. Although there are no hygienic advantages or health benefits to FGM, practising communities believe that women's vaginas need to be cut - and women who have not undergone FGM are regarded as unhealthy, unclean or unworthy.

Often it's performed against their will, and health professionals worldwide consider it a form of violence against women and a violation of their human rights. When FGM is inflicted on children, it is also seen as a form of child abuse.

Many of the women surveyed by Unicef and the WHO said it was taboo to even discuss FGM in their communities for fear of attracting criticism from outsiders, or - in those places where FGM is illegal - for fear it would lead to prosecution of family or community members.

The above map was put together by The Woman Stats Project, who have collated research on the issue, including data from the UN and Unicef. According to a Unicef report carried out in 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East, the practice is still being widely carried out, despite the fact that 24 of these countries have legislation or some form of decrees against FGM.

In countries such as the UK, where FGM is illegal, expert and barrister Dr Charlotte Proudman says it is increasingly being performed on babies and infants.

Therefore it is "almost impossible to detect" as the girls are not in school or old enough to report it. Recently a mother in London became the first person in the UK to be found guilty of carrying out FGM on her three-year-old daughter. She will be sentenced on 8 March. Image source, Getty Images. This woman in Mombasa, Kenya shows the razorblade she has used on girls' genitals.

This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. She is now an anti FGM campaigner. There has been significant progress made in eliminating the practice in the past 30 years. Young girls in many countries today are at much lower risk of being subjected to FGM than their mothers and grandmothers were in the past. However, progress is not universal or fast enough. In some countries, the practice remains as common today as it was three decades ago.

Over 90 per cent of women and girls in Guinea and Somalia undergo some form of genital mutilation or cutting. Around 1 in 3 adolescent girls years who have undergone FGM were cut by health personnel. In some communities, the practice has been driven underground rather than ended, leading to girls being subjected to cutting at younger ages amidst greater secrecy. Opposition to the practice is building though. In countries affected by FGM, 7 in 10 girls and women think the practice should end.

In the last two decades, the proportion of girls and women in these countries who want the practice to stop has doubled. Ending FGM requires action at many levels, including by families and communities, protection and care services for girls and women, laws, and political commitment at the local, regional, national and international levels.

The programme supports zero tolerance laws and policies, while working with health workers to both eliminate female genital mutilation and provide care to women and girls who have undergone the procedure. To help change social norms, we work with communities to openly discuss the benefits of ending FGM and to build opposition to the practice. The programme has also provided access to prevention, protection and treatment services. During the s, the Taliban not only brutally imposed social restrictions on women such as mandatory burqa coverings, but, more fundamentally and deleteriously, restricted their access to health care, education, and jobs.

It prohibited women from appearing in public spaces without a male chaperon, de facto sentencing widows and their children to starvation. The Taliban regime destroyed Afghan institutions and the economy, which was already devastated by decades of fighting and the Soviet scorched-earth counterinsurgency strategy. The resulting immiseration critically affected women and children. And, with the exception of poppy cultivation and opium harvesting , the Taliban prohibited women from holding jobs, including working as doctors for other women.

The post-Taliban constitution in gave Afghan women all kinds of rights, and the post-Taliban political dispensation brought social and economic growth that significantly improved their socio-economic condition.

From a collapsed health care system with essentially no medical services available to women during the Taliban years, the post-Taliban regime constructed 3, functional health facilities by , giving 87 percent of Afghan people access to a medical facility within two hours distance—at least in theory, because intensifying Taliban, militia, and criminal violence has made travel on roads increasingly unsafe.

In , fewer than 10 percent of girls were enrolled in primary schools; by , that number had grown to 33 percent 4 —not enough, but progress still—while female enrollment in secondary education grew from six percent in to 39 percent in By , 21 percent of Afghan civil servants were women compared with almost none during the Taliban years , 16 percent of them in senior management levels; and 27 percent of Afghan members of parliament were women.

Yet these gains for women have been distributed highly unequally, with the increases far greater for women in urban areas. For many rural women, particularly in Pashtun areas but also among other rural minority ethnic groups, actual life has not changed much from the Taliban era, formal legal empowerment notwithstanding. They are still fully dependent on men in their families for permission to access health care, attend school, and work. Many Afghan men remain deeply conservative.

Typically, families allow their girls to have a primary or secondary education—usually up to puberty—and then will proceed with arranged marriages. Even if a young woman is granted permission to attend a university by her male guardian, her father or future husband may not permit her to work after graduation.

Without any prodding from the Taliban, most Afghan women in rural areas are fully covered with the burqa. Loss of husbands, brothers, and fathers to the fighting generates not only psychological trauma for them, but also fundamentally jeopardizes their economic survival and ability to go about everyday life. Widows and their children are thus highly vulnerable to a panoply of debilitating disruptions due to the loss of family men.

Not surprisingly, the position of Afghan women toward peace varies greatly. Educated urban women reject the possibility of another Taliban emirate. Rather than yielding to the Taliban, some urban women may prefer for fighting to go on, particularly as urban areas are much less affected by the warfare than are rural areas, and their male relatives, particularly of elite families, rarely bear the battlefield fighting risks.

For them, the continuation and augmentation of war has been far less costly than for many rural women. By contrast, as interviews with Afghan women conducted by one of us in the fall of and the summer of showed, peace is an absolute priority for some rural women, even a peace deal very much on the Taliban terms. The Taliban already frequently rule or influence the areas where they live anyway.

While rejecting a s-like lockdown of women in their homes that the Taliban imposed, many rural women point out that in that period the Taliban also reduced sexual predation and robberies that debilitated their lives. A recent study by UN Women and partners showed that only 15 percent of Afghan men think women should be allowed to work outside of their home after marriage, and two thirds of men complain Afghan women now have too many rights.

Male Afghan political powerbrokers often resent quotas for women in public shuras assemblies and elections such as for parliament, where 27 percent of seats are reserved for women. The UN study also revealed that 80 percent of Afghan women experience domestic violence. Others have been prosecuted for killing their brutally abusive husbands , including in self-defense.

Currently, there is no realistic prospect of the Afghan government defeating the Taliban. There is also little reason to believe that even an open-ended American military commitment to Afghanistan, including a new significant increase in U.

If a prolonged and bloody civil war can be avoided through negotiations, the Taliban will most likely become a significant actor in the Afghan government.

It is conceivable that the Taliban could become the dominant and most powerful actor in a future Afghan government. The Taliban already rule significant parts of the country — indeed much of the countryside—and determine, sometimes in negotiations with local communities, what local life is like, including what freedoms women have or do not have. Thus, the Taliban inevitably will shape in significant ways the rights and existence of Afghan women.

Almost always, it means mandated codes of dress and behavior. Often, sharia systems compete with formal legal systems within a country, even as the latter can also be informed by sharia. Some of the Taliban interlocutors suggested during the fall of interviews 11 that in a future Afghanistan, with the Taliban in control or sharing power as they imagine will be the outcome , women could still hold ministerial positions, though a woman could never be the head of state or government.

First, many Taliban tell their interlocutors what they want to hear—giving different messages to Western diplomats, journalists, and researchers; Afghan powerbrokers or Afghan society in general; and their rank and file. Second, there may well be little agreement among members of Taliban leadership shuras , and between them and mid-level military commanders, as to what any kind of peace should look like regarding a variety of social and political arrangements, including the roles, freedoms, and restrictions on women.