Who will help the runaway brides of Kenya?
By Roseleen Nzioka
It is the season yet again when hundreds of potential "brides" in some Kenyan communities will flee for their lives – literally.
School holidays are ordinarily supposed to be the best time of the school calendar for most students, with many of them looking forward to traveling or just spending time with their friends, family and relatives. You know just chilling, as the young would say.
Sadly, the holiday season is seriously dreaded by students from certain communities, in particular schoolgirls in primary and secondary school.
It is at this time that some communities round up girls aged between six and 16 (or older) to face the much dreaded initiation to womanhood through very gruesome mutilation of their genitals.
Although there is no particular season set aside for female genital mutilation (FGM), it tends to be done during school holidays.
Recently a seven-year–old girl died from the cut in Wajir. A nurse at the Wajir district hospital confirmed that the girl underwent infibulation, the worst form of FGM common in North Eastern Province.
Her mother and the circumcisor were arrested by police amid protests from the community. Relatives want the two released, arguing that the girl's death was fate!
The dictionary defines mutilation as "an injury that causes disfigurement or that deprives you of a limb or another important body part." Under normal circumstances if you chopped off someone's leg or hand or any other body part, you would be apprehended and taken to court (that is if the lynch mob doesn't get to you first).
Yet somehow when that body part happens to be the genitals of a seven-year-old girl, the lynch mobs are nowhere to be seen and the arm of the law is twistable.
The media is awash with reports of thousands of girls fleeing their homes and joining relatives or going to safe havens such as schools and churches to escape FGM.
Last year the Gender, Children and Social Services Minister Esther Murugi castigated health workers who are nowadays cashing in on the practice, purporting to perform "safe" excisions. It is a sad day when nurses and mothers abet the retrogressive practice yet they know better than anyone else the adverse side effects.
Because the practice violates the law and various international human rights instruments that the Kenya government has signed, the ceremonies accompanying the rite have gone underground in many communities, making it very difficult for the authorities to arrest the culprits.
But all is not lost as anti-FGM campaigns are paying off, thanks to the untiring support from donors dedicated to eradicating the vice. So sensitised are the young girls in communities that still practice FGM that they have now taken matters into their own hands. Girls as young as eight years old are literally running away from their homes when they sense that they are about to be cut.
FGM is a procedure involving partial or total removal of the female genital organs or causing any other injury to them. It has no health benefits at all. Almost half the rural districts in Kenya practice FGM.
The Children Act 2001 of Kenya recognises FGM as a crime. However, girls who reject this vice face social rejection due to the cultural implications of ushering a young girl into adulthood (read marriage and child bearing). Thankfully a few anti-FGM advocates have strategically replaced the cut with an alternative rite of passage of counselling young girls. However this has sadly not deterred parents from marrying off their young school going daughters.
Sample this: Eighty five percent of the more than 100 school girls in Kuria who underwent an alternative rite of passage into adulthood that did not involve the cut in December last year have dropped out of school for early marriage.
Parents of the girls have been roundly criticised by anti-FGM crusaders for allowing their girls to be married at an early age.
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