Putting an end to female genital cutting

Nov 8th, 2011 10:15 AM UTC
By ONE Partners

Chun-Mei Li of Johnson & Johnson’s Corporate Contributions shares her passion for the fight against female genital cutting.

Twelve years ago, I was a small-town Chinese girl who had just moved to Shanghai –- as bewildered and overwhelmed as any cliché would predict. While toying with the idea of a career in modeling, I stumbled upon a haunting memoir -– “Desert Flower” –- that shook me to my core. It is the powerful and unflinching story of Waris Dirie who started her life as an impoverished girl in the Somali desert and ultimately becomes a successful supermodel -– even a “Bond girl” no less.

In her memoir, Dirie graphically explained that she was one of the estimated 140 million girls and women who are survivors of female genital cutting (FGC). At five years old, she was held down by family members who cut off almost all of her clitoris with no anesthesia or sterilization. It was supposed to make her eligible for marriage. Instead, it left her with a lifetime of physical and psychological scars.

More than 8,000 girls undergo this horrific practice every day. It is severely painful. Shock, hemorrhage and infection such as sepsis or tetanus are the most immediate after-effects. Long term, it causes recurrent infections to the urinary tract and to complications that can lead to the death of a mother or her baby in childbirth.

As shocked as I was to read about this, I never imagined that I would ever be in position to do anything about this practice that seemed to be a world away. Flash forward to today, and I am now part of a team at Johnson & Johnson Corporate Contributions that partners with Tostan -– one of the most innovative and successful organizations combatting FGC today.

Tostan’s success is due in no small part to its community-led approach. Instead of shaming community leaders and parents, it works with them to respectfully educate members about the dangers of cutting, which has led to willing abandonment of the practice. Tostan was spotlighted in a front page article in the New York Times, which pointed out that Tostan’s successful method has been greatly influenced by community efforts in China to abandon foot binding in girls. So this practice that had seemed so distant was closer to home than I ever imagined.

Johnson & Johnson works with Tostan as part of an overall strategy to advance the health of women and girls worldwide. The company is directly supporting the advancement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and has now partnered with the 7 Billion Actions campaign of the United Nations Population Fund to highlight the crucial role that women and girls, in particular, will play in securing a healthy, safe and sustainable world of seven billion people. As we near this critical moment for humanity, we are faced with an opportunity to make a positive change.

Waris Dirie’s supermodel status helped bring worldwide attention to the pervasiveness and danger of FGC, but as Tostan’s model has shown, eradicating the practice will happen at a grassroots level, educating one community at a time in a constructive way. It is the only way to ensure that communities come to the right decisions that ensure that women and girls are healthy, safe, educated and empowered to make a world of seven billion a better place for all.

TAGS: Children's Health, From Our Partners, Global Health, ONE