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At least two indigenous girls have been victims of female genital mutilation so far this year in Bogotá. One of them is 13 years old and the other is barely 23 days old at the time of the practice. According to the information shared by the Ministry of Health of the Colombian capital, both cases were reported because they presented medical difficulties and had to be urgently assisted in health centers, due to the risk of anemia and even death. The entity estimates that in 2023 there will be 90 cases in Colombia, the only country in Latin America where ablation is practiced. Embera activists, like Arelis Cortés, lament the “enormous under-registration” and the passivity of the Government: “It is a debt of the country to indigenous girls.”
“It is extreme violence that is carried out due to apparently cultural issues, but we have to work hard in the country,” Gerson Bermont, district health secretary of Bogotá, explained in a press conference. “Here human rights greater than any cultural component are being violated. And they are putting the lives of these girls in danger. It is a practice that Colombia has to eradicate,” he concluded. Bermont did not detail where they had occurred or what complications they encountered.
Although there are Embera women who consider that this is part of a tradition and that, therefore, they have the right to continue practicing it, Cortés, a nurse, leader and teacher, has been going house to house in Valle del Cauca since 2015, informing families about the consequences of this practice and about the misunderstanding of thinking that it is our own tradition: “We picked up that tradition during colonization, as a consequence of sharing with the Afro brothers who arrived with slavery. But it is something very foreign to us. It is a harmful practice, it is not culture. “How is it going to be a culture to attack the life or health of our girls,” she asks herself.
Cortés and three other colleagues have transferred this and other medical information to more than 8,000 people in almost a decade of work. “It was complex at the time. Many women are submissive to what their husbands say. Furthermore, for indigenous people, talking about genitals is very taboo. But it is a little work.” Currently there are about 230 million mutilated women in the world.
Female genital mutilation is a practice that involves the injury or amputation of the female genitalia without any medical reason. Generally, the communities that practice it seek to remove the clitoris, the organ responsible for causing pleasure in women. This procedure is mainly concentrated in around thirty countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In Colombia, the Embera indigenous community and some Afro-descendant peoples maintain ablation, which, as a general rule, is usually performed with a blade or even nails and without any medical supervision. Every day, nearly 15,000 women and girls are victims of this in the world, with perennial physical and psychological injuries.
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The consequences of this procedure are terrible. In addition to the danger of the surgery itself, many women have reported chronic pain, bleeding, anxiety and depression, among many other ailments. Those affected also have a higher risk of HIV transmission, often develop infertility and many even die. The UN also estimates that treating health complications derived from the practice costs health systems 1.4 billion dollars a year.
It is precisely naming the pain, infertility and depression that has made hundreds of the families cared for by Cortés reflect. “No father wants to hurt his children,” he explains. “But we also have to understand that many women do not receive medical training because of the discrimination they receive in health centers.” That is why the leader wonders how they will know the risks of excision if the State does not arrive. “Lack of education leads to ignorance and continues to perpetuate these dynamics.”
“Nothing about communities without communities”
Despite the requests of feminists, there is currently no bill in Colombia that proposes prohibiting the practice and persecuting it until it is eradicated. The only advances of the movement have been to add the procedure as an aggravating circumstance in the crime of femicide and some sentences in which judges condemn it as domestic violence.
The question asked by Leandra Becerra, the organization’s consultant Equality Now, is whether it is the criminal route that the local activists themselves seek. “These processes have to be led by them. We should not have a bias or recrimination against indigenous peoples as if they were the only ones who have patriarchal practices. There are many racist discourses around this topic,” she explains. For Becerra, the key is in the motto of “nothing about communities without communities”: “It is their proposals that have to be carried out. Colombia should be committed to eradicating it for the 2030 agenda″, she says. To do this, the expert points out, it is necessary to generate more reliable data and finance leaders like Cortés who go door to door.
Cortés, for his part, regrets the “signaling” to the communities from outside. “The institutions have to understand that indigenous peoples are discriminated against for being indigenous, for not speaking the language well, for customs… Within this nation there is another different world. And racism leads to many women not attending the national health system or getting informed. “We need the State to reach the territories, not just to criticize them.”
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