On July 7, 2016, we at Sahiyo hosted our first Twitter chat on Female Genital Cutting (FGC) from our Twitter handle, @sahiyo2016.

The need for an online debate on this subject evolved for various reasons. For the past several months, Dawoodi Bohras on social media have been increasingly vocal about their varied views on female khatna. Then in May, a 17-year-old girl died in Egypt because of excessive bleeding caused by circumcision – a tragic reminder of the dangers of FGC even among cultures not known to practice severe forms of cutting. Finally, the controversy over khatna intensified in June, when prestigious news magazine The Economist published a shocking, irresponsible editorial advocating for the allowance of milder, medicalised forms of FGC.

Bohras, who predominantly practice Type 1 FGC – removal of the clitoral hood – were clearly divided on this issue and the time seemed ripe to have a debate on khatna on a platform as public and democratic as Twitter.

We used the hashtag #NoMoreKhatna for the Twitter chat, inviting anyone and everyone to participate – and overall, we can say that the chat was a success. A large number of individuals and prominent organisations joined in to make their voices heard, and we are thankful to all of them.

Most importantly, the chat included the voices of several Dawoodi Bohras who believe khatna must be practiced. Many of them took the trouble of creating new Twitter accounts to participate in this discussion, and their voices helped to showcase the challenges involved in changing social norms around khatna.

We began the chat with a set of basic questions: What is FGC? What are its types? What have you experienced or heard about Bohra khatna? What are the health consequences of FGC? The responses that emerged also led to other discussions.

We asked participants about the reasons given for the practice of FGC, and multiple points were brought up.

Unsurprisingly, the question of whether milder forms of FGC should be allowed – whether the practice should be treated as a medical procedure – sparked animated debate on the Twitter chat.

Another controversial aspect of the debate, of course, is the matter of a child’s consent and whether parents have the right to decide whether their daughter should be cut.

While these tweets are just excerpts from a much larger Twitter discussion held on July 7, you can read more about how the chat went by going through Sahiyo’s Twitter handle (@sahiyo2016) and the hashtag #NoMoreKhatna.

The chat helped us understand the challenges that lie ahead for all the women and men working to bring an end to khatna: even though any form of female genital cutting is non-consensual and a violation of a child’s universal human rights, the practice is steeped in faith and religion and there is a danger of khatna becoming medicalised in the Dawoodi Bohra community.

Fortunately, the Twitter discussion did not end after the two hours scheduled for the chat – it is encouraging to see that the debate continues even today!

To see the entire Twitter conversation on Storify, click here – https://storify.com/sahiyo2015/getting-started

Sahiyo is delighted to announce that our organization was awarded a grant by the International Association of Women in Radio and Television ( IAWRT, www.iawrt.org) to conduct a media training workshop in Mumbai, this August.

Media has played crucial role in informing people at large about the practice of female genital cutting or khatna In India and bringing this critical issues to the forefront. Yet, we have also seen how facts on FGC within the Bohra community have been misunderstood or misportrayed by journalists, leading to unintentional harm to survivors and those women and girls who might be at risk. This media workshop will then allow Sahiyo to have a dialogue with the media on how to approach the topic of khatna or FGC in a culturally sensitive, non-sensationalized portrayal.  

We wish to empower the media about the nuances of FGC practiced by the Dawoodi Bohra community, provide resources to the media about how to report on gender violence in a beneficial way, as well as speak of the challenges FGC activists have encountered or are likely to encounter in this line of work.

The media training workshop in August will be Sahiyo’s first workshop of this kind in Mumbai. Watch our website for more details.

Sahiyo is pleased to announce that Mariya and Shaheeda will be attending the upcoming Tostan Training Centre (TTC) in Senegal this July as Orchid Project Fellows.

Over the past 25 years, Tostan has witnessed positive social transformation in thousands of communities in eight African countries. Although contributing to the abandonment of FGC was not one of Tostan’s original goals, it has become a rallying point for social change. So far over 7,200 communities from Djibouti, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Somalia, and The Gambia have publicly declared their decision to abandon both FGC and child/forced marriage. As Tostan has always explained and as their external evaluations have shown, public declarations are critical in the process for total abandonment and necessary for building critical mass, eventually leading FGC to becoming a thing of the past.

They are now offering individuals and organizations the opportunity to learn from their decades of experience in leading human rights-based education programs. The TTC  is designed to provide the theoretical and practical backing that people working in community development can use to reflect upon their own practices and better realize their communities’ aspiration

Their unique set of of trainings use a participatory, learner-centered approach that draws its strength from the expertise of trainers with extensive experience in rural Africa, implementing the Tostan Community Empowerment Program. Their trainings serve individuals and groups who share a commitment to human dignity, transformative learning, holistic empowerment, and collective action.

When asked about what learnings they hoped to gain from attending the TTC training, Mariya and Shaheeda provided the following replies:

 Mariya: I have spoken to Molly Melching about visiting Tostan to learn for years since I first earned of Tostan’s existence and since I first became interested in addressing FGC within the Dawoodi Borha community (the community I was raised in). On a personal level, it will feel like a huge accomplishment to finally witness how a successful program operates to end human rights violations. On a professional level, I hope that the training will help guide the direction that Sahiyo takes to form its own programs in India and amongst diaspora Indian communities. I also hope to be able to connect with other, more experienced, and knowledgeable individuals who can serve as mentors or advisors for Sahiyo as we plan the activities of our nascent organization.

Shaheeda: I am very interested in learning about the success of Tostan’s Community Empowerment Program (CEP) in driving community-led change on human rights and gender-based violations. I want to understand how the CEP model employs diverse concepts of Health, Hygiene, Peace & Security, Problem-Solving, Literacy etc. for creating a holistic activities to engage with the local communities. From the research perspective, I am especially keen to explore and learn about the monitoring and evaluation methods for measuring program success and communication strategies employed by Tostan for creating a dialogue on change. Lastly, I want to understand the complexities that Tostan faces in terms of program implementation, as we would like to be able to predict and preempt similar problems that might arise during the course of Sahiyo’s work in India.

Sahiyo looks forward to hearing back from Mariya and Shaheeda after the training! Stay tuned to our blog to learn more about their experiences as well!

Sahiyo is excited to announce that the Wallace Global Fund has awarded a $30,000 grant to Orchid Project, as support for the organizational setup of Sahiyo. The Orchid Project has a vision of a world free from FGC and Sahiyo is a transnational organization with the mission to empower Dawoodi Bohra and other Asian communities to end FGC and create positive social change through dialogue, education and collaboration based on community involvement. Both Orchid Project and Sahiyo want to put Asian communities on the map of areas affected by FGC.

Sahiyo’s founding group includes a social worker, a researcher, two filmmakers and a journalist, all of whom had already been speaking out, in their own ways, against the practice of khatna or FGC. As the collaboration grew, Sahiyo’s founders realized the need for an organized, informed forum within the community that could help drive a movement to bring an end to FGC. That is how Sahiyo, the organization, was born. Sahiyo is the Bohra Gujarati word for ‘saheliyo’, or friends, and reflects our organization’s mission to engage in dialogue with the community to find a collective solution towards ending the practice of FGC.

For generations, the practice was clouded in secrecy, and thus a first goal of Sahiyo’s was to break the silence shrouding the continuation of the practice. In July 2015, Sahiyo launched an exploratory online survey to understand the purpose, extent and impact of khatna among Bohras. The survey was created with inputs from experts like Dr. Gerry Mackie, Molly Melching (Tostan), and members of the German-Iraqi NGO Wadi. More than 400 women completed the survey in the six months that the survey was open. Preliminary results indicated that close to 80% of respondents stated that khatna was performed on them. Survey results also showed a definite need for community awareness and engagement programs to bring the subject of FGC out of the realm of secrecy and promote discussions about its adverse effects. As a result Sahiyo began community mobilization to end FGC by engaging in the following activities: peer-to-peer counselling, storytelling and undertaking extensive online outreach programs through various public awareness and advocacy campaigns.

With support from the Wallace Global Fund, Sahiyo is moving towards the development of sustainable programs that can both strengthen Sahiyo organizationally and increase our capacity to work on FGC in a meaningful way.

Thank you Wallace Global Fund for your support!

Sahiyo will be hosting a Twitter Conversation on Female Genital Cutting (FGC) to be held on Thursday, July 7th from 6:00- 8:00 PM IST for India; 2:30-4.30 PM for Egypt; 8:30-10:30 AM EST for the United States.

We will be moderating the discussion from the Sahiyo Twitter handle (@sahiyo2016) and will be using the hashtag #NoMoreKhatna to carry on the conversation.

 With the recent and unfortunate occurrence of an Egyptian girl dying from “female circumcision” and the article by the Economist advocating milder forms of FGC, there is an urgent need to point out that all forms of FGC must be banned.

We have seen within the Dawoodi Bohra community, how these misconceptions and misbeliefs are being used as justifications for the Bohra community to continue FGC, by “othering” these mild forms of FGC as something separate, different, and okay from the severe forms of FGC. Please see the Guardian article “The Economist prompts outrage as it backs ‘minor FGM’” to learn more.

Sahiyo asks you to join this discussion on Twitter even if it can only be for 10 minutes so that your voice is also heard in opposition to FGC.

Hope you can join us!

On June 22, 2016, Sahiyo’s cofounder, Mariya Taher came out on camera to discuss FGC in the United States and the work she has been doing to support other women and girls who are at-risk or who have undergone FGC and are living in this country. Her work into this area of gender violence began in 2008 when she started her Master of Social Work program at San Francisco University and decided to research FGC amongst immigrant communities living in the United States. Her motivation for pursuing this topic – she had undergone it herself at seven years old and understood the complexities involved with the practice. She understood that FGC was viewed as an obligatory social norm in the communities that practiced it and that it would be a challenge to help communities understand that this tradition was in fact, a form of gender violence, illegal in the United States, and against many existing human rights conventions. In 2015, she helped ABC news shed light on this practice by participating anonymously in their multimedia news piece, “Underground in America: Female Genital Mutilation”.  The short video in the piece was subsequently nominated for a Webby Award in the category of Individual Short or Episode. Then in 2016, as the work of Sahiyo became more public and widespread, she showed her face on camera in the follow-up piece produced by ABC News, “Underground: Risk of FGM Increasing for Women in the U.S.”, says CDC.

When asked why – “It took me eight years to decide to reveal my face on camera. I had researched and written about FGC in print for years, but revealing your face on camera is very different. It meant my personal life and professional life were enmeshing and I knew it also meant that my family could be on the receiving end of backlash from their religious community, and from others who did not understand the complexities of power and control when it comes to gender violence. I also understood that not everyone is able to come out and publicly speak out against it and there are many reasons that range from fear, concern for friends and family members, legal reasons, not wanting to be viewed as a victim, and more. They are all valid reasons. I had taken many years to work through all of the potential unintended consequences of speaking openly, and I knew that I had finally reached a place where I could be a support for others, and because I am a social worker, I had the knowledge and background of working in social services to understand how to go about creating them for women and girls at risk for or who had undergone FGC. This is what I hope to do and this is why I revealed my face on camera.