13 June 2017 - NPWJ News Digest on FGM & women's rights

Ottawa pledges money to gender-equality projects
By Metro News Ottawa, 12 Jun 2017

Grassroots groups across the country are getting a spending boost for projects meant to make Canada’s next 150 years more equal for women. Status of Women Minister Maryan Monsef announced $18 million in funding for 50 programs across the country with women’s groups, as a 150th initiative. “Projects they are leading will benefit from these dollars, so we can get closer and closer to equality in this country,” she said. The Liberal government has been criticized in the last week for their new feminist approach to foreign aid, which came without any new funding and alongside a massive increase in defence spending. Monsef said the government’s approach is to make gender equality a part of every program and every ministry. She said the new program is going to invest in local organizations, which she argued the previous government all but abandoned. “Evidence points to a really important correlation between gender equality and the health of grassroots organizations in countries, so what we are doing is investing in communities.”

Michigan Case Adds U.S. Dimension to Debate on Genital Mutilation
By the New York Times, 10 Jun 2017

As more details emerge about the first-ever charges of female genital mutilation in the United States, the case is opening a window onto a small immigrant community, while stirring impassioned discussion about genital cutting among women who have experienced it. At a hearing in Michigan this past week, a federal prosecutor said the defendants — two doctors and a clinic manager from a small Shiite Muslim sect — were believed to have arranged cutting for up to 100 girls since 2005. The prosecutor, Sara Woodward, said investigators had so far identified eight girls. The unprecedented charges provide an unusual case study of a practice outlawed in the United States two decades ago but still seen in parts of Africa, the Middle East and, less frequently, South Asia. The focus on the Dawoodi Bohra, a sect of about 1.2 million based in western India, with clusters in the United States, Pakistan and elsewhere, is spurring Bohra women to describe their experiences publicly. Some are doing so for the first time, defying the sect’s historic secrecy about cutting and taking a risk that they or relatives will be ostracized. “This Michigan case made me think I want to speak out,” said Nazia Mirza, 34, who was cut at age 6 in her hometown, Houston. “To me it’s very much like a rape survivor. If you don’t say anything, then how are you going to expose it and bring awareness?” The case prompted Tasneem Raja, 34, a journalist, to write about being cut in New Jersey. She said she had received “an outpouring of emails from people saying thank you.” But Ms. Raja said the case was exposing a spectrum of feelings. Even among Bohra women who oppose cutting, she said, views range from “women who say this has greatly impacted their sex life and their ability to enjoy sex, to people like me who walked away with lifelong emotional trauma, to people who say, ‘I don’t see what the big deal is.’”