A protest against FGM in New York, 2013

Apart from the psychological trauma of having your flesh cut off, the physical ramifications of having your vagina sewn up include (not surprisingly) urinary tract infections, infertility and complications in childbirth, severe pain during urination, menstruation and sexual intercourse and of course, as with all rudimentary surgery, a chance of death.

“They had to rip me open so I could deliver my first child”

Susan, 35, chairlady of the Kongelai Women’s Network in Kenya explains the long-lasting effects of FGM

“I was circumcised when I was 13. The effects of FGM are terrible. It caused me a lot of bleeding and pain during the procedure. Because of the wound even urinating was painful – it would burn. According to the old women who do it, there should be no blood clots left on the wound so they take off all of the clotted blood with herbs. It is a very, very painful experience. The operation involves cutting off all of the labia and clitoris and sewing the sides that are left together leaving a small hole for sex, urination and childbirth. To do this they tie your legs together after they have cut so the sides fuse together. They leave a stick in the middle so that a hole is left during the healing process. After being circumcised girls are put into isolation for three weeks where they are mentored by older women. While you are there healing, your father is spreading the word that you are now ready for marriage. You won’t know the man and they are often much older than you because they have more money to pay the dowry. Because they are often older their energy when it comes to sex isn’t the same. So on the first night of your married life they won’t have the force to penetrate you. So girls will get a cow’s horn to drill the hole bigger. It will bleed again but then the man can penetrate more easily. This is what happened to me. It was very traumatic and painful. If the hole is too big for the man he will request that the girl is sewn up smaller. I had terrible problems giving birth to my first child because of the circumcision. The hole was too small so they had to rip me open so I could deliver and then sew it up again. I refuse to have my daughters circumcised. I don’t want them to go through the same pain that I went through. I want them to be married to education when they’re young. ActionAid training has given us awareness about the benefits of female education and the strength and understanding to finally stand up to the men in the communities.”

Trying to get women who have undergone FGM to talk about it is understandably difficult. Reliving a traumatic act isn’t easy. Mary Laiza, now 40, remembers the day she was cut in Tanzania aged 18.

“On the evening before my cutting, I made a promise to my parents that I would not let them down and I would not cry. My mother had said FGM would bring glory to our family so I yearned for the day I would be cut. On the day itself, a Maasai old woman came to my parents’ house. The procedure does not involve any pain relief. When she started cutting the clitoris, I was not surprised since I knew that area was to be cut. But she kept on cutting the other parts; I felt I was almost dying. But my parents were shouting in jubilation.”

“I stopped talking about it when I was about 11,” recalls fellow FGM survivor Nimco. “I was seven when I was cut. I was taken to Somalia from my home in Cardiff for a holiday which is when it happened. Cardiff has one of the largest Somali populations in the UK. There wasn’t a girl I knew who hadn’t been cut.

“I used to talk about it all the time to girls at the mosque and junior school, but then I went to a different school to everyone else and I thought, ‘I can’t have that conversation. I can’t explain to people.’ So I just began to talk about FGM in the third person, like it hadn’t happened to me. “For a long time I thought something different had happened to me [than to my friends] because everyone else was like, ‘What’s your problem? It’s fine.’ Now I understand that for me FGM was the only thing that happened in my life that didn’t make sense. Other people were told to wear a headscarf and told not to go out. But we were given free rein to be educated. My mum said that her daughters were never going to get married for money and they would have their own independence. And yet she had me cut.

“I can remember bits of the procedure,” recalls Nimco. “I remember the circumcisor having a go at me; I remember the smell of coffee being brewed – and the smell of Dettol can still stop me in my tracks. I remember being told to stop crying and that it was OK. But it wasn’t OK. I was just so angry for a long time. “I told my teacher when I got back, and she said, ‘Well, that’s what happens to girls like you. It’s like a Bat Mitzvah.’ But it’s nothing like a Bat Mitzvah. And that’s when I started to think, do people actually know what they’re talking about?”

Female genital mutilation: time to take a stand