The Unfinished Fight Against FGM By Dr. Mahmoud Dugdug

04:33 AM April, 15 2026

Sudanese Online
محمود ابكر دقدق-الدوحه
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The Unfinished Fight Against FGM

By/ Dr. Mahmoud Dugdug

Every year, 4.5 million girls face a violation that will mark them for life. Most are under five years old. Most will never consent. And most of their communities will call it tradition.
Female genital mutilation, or FGM, remains one of the most pervasive human rights violations against women and girls worldwide. Despite decades of activism, legal prohibition in numerous countries, and overwhelming medical consensus against the practice, over 230 million women and girls alive today have undergone some form of genital cutting. The numbers demand our attention—not just as statistics, but as individual lives forever altered.
What FGM Actually Is
The World Health Organization defines FGM as "all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons." The classification covers four distinct types, ranging from symbolic nicking to the most severe form, infibulation, which involves cutting and sewing closed the vaginal opening.
The physical consequences are devastating and often lifelong. Immediate risks include severe bleeding, infection, and death. Long-term effects encompass chronic pain, urinary problems, menstrual difficulties, sexual dysfunction, and complications during childbirth. The psychological trauma—depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress—often goes untreated and unacknowledged.
Where It Happens
FGM is concentrated in 31 countries across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, with Somalia, Guinea, Djibouti, Egypt, and Eritrea showing the highest prevalence rates. Somalia alone reports that 99% of women aged 15-49 have undergone the procedure. In Egypt, despite being illegal since 2008, approximately 92% of women in this age group have been cut.
Yet the practice is not confined to its traditional heartlands. Migration has spread FGM to Europe, North America, Australia, and beyond. In the United Kingdom, an estimated 137,000 women and girls have undergone FGM or are at risk.
One of the most persistent and damaging misconceptions about FGM is that it constitutes a religious requirement. This is false. No major religious text—the Quran, the Bible, or the Torah—mandates female genital cutting. The practice predates Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, rooted instead in cultural traditions around controlling female sexuality and ensuring marriageability.
Major Islamic authorities, including Al-Azhar University in Cairo and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, have explicitly condemned FGM. Christian leaders worldwide have rejected any scriptural basis for the practice. Yet in many communities, religious language is invoked to justify what is fundamentally a social norm—one maintained by pressure, shame, and the fear that uncut daughters will never marry.
Progress, But Not Enough
There is cause for cautious optimism. Kenya has reduced FGM prevalence from 49% in 1984 to 15% today. Sierra Leone has seen significant decline. Egypt, despite its high numbers, has made measurable progress in changing attitudes among younger generations.
The most striking finding is that half of all progress made in the past 30 years occurred in just the last decade. This suggests that education, legal reform, and grassroots activism can work—and work relatively quickly when properly resourced and implemented.
But the overall picture remains alarming. The global pace of decline would need to accelerate 27 times over to meet the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal of eliminating FGM by 2030. In countries like The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, and Somalia, prevalence has barely shifted. Meanwhile, population growth in affected regions means more girls are born into at-risk communities each year than ever before.
Medicalization: A Dangerous Trend
Perhaps the most troubling development is the medicalization of FGM—the increasing tendency for the procedure to be performed by healthcare providers rather than traditional cutters. In Egypt, 72% of FGM procedures are now carried out by medical professionals. In Sudan, the figure is 67%.
Proponents argue this makes the practice safer. The World Health Organization rejects this reasoning entirely. Medicalization legitimizes FGM, undermines efforts to eliminate it, and violates medical ethics. A harmful practice does not become acceptable simply because it is performed in a clinical setting with anesthesia.

What Must Be Done
Eliminating FGM requires coordinated action across multiple fronts. Legal prohibition, while essential, is insufficient alone. Enforcement remains weak in many countries, and laws mean little without community buy-in.
Education is paramount—particularly for men and boys, who often hold decision-making power within families and communities. Religious and community leaders must be engaged not as obstacles but as allies, equipped with accurate information about what their faiths actually teach.
Healthcare providers need training to recognize and respond to FGM, while being held accountable if they participate in it. Survivors must be supported with comprehensive medical and psychological care, and their voices must lead advocacy efforts.
Most critically, the underlying gender inequality that makes FGM possible must be addressed. Where women and girls are valued equally, where their bodies are understood as their own, and where their futures are not contingent on conformity to harmful traditions, FGM cannot survive.
A Personal Responsibility
FGM is often dismissed as a distant problem, a practice confined to other cultures and other continents. This complacency is dangerous. In an interconnected world, silence is complicity. Every community that hosts diaspora populations from FGM-practicing regions has a stake in this fight. Every individual who encounters a survivor—or a girl at risk—bears responsibility to act.
The 4.5 million girls at risk this year cannot wait for gradual cultural evolution. They need immediate protection, and they need the world to stop looking away.
The fight against FGM is unfinished. It demands our attention, our resources, and our unwavering commitment to the principle that no girl, anywhere, should have her body violated in the name of tradition.

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