Women Rights

History Has Been Made. Female Genital Mutilation Banned In Nigeria.

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“More than 130 million girls and women have experienced female genital mutilation or cutting …”

 

Nigeria made history by outlawing female genital mutilation. The ban falls under the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 2015 that was passed in Senate on May 5 and recently enacted into law.

This was one of the last acts by the outgoing president, Goodluck Jonathan. His successor, Muhammadu Buhari, was sworn into office this past Friday, May 29.

 Female genital mutilation or cutting (FGM/C) is the act of either partially or totally removing the external female genitalia or causing injury to the female genital organs for non-medical purposes.

According to UNICEF:

“More than 130 million girls and women have experienced FGM/C in 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East where the practice is most common.”

With the help of community activism, campaigns and numbers of organizational efforts to end this practice, UNICEF reported that teenage girls were now one-third less likely to undergo FGM/C today than 30 years ago.

Now with the new law criminalizing this procedure, the hope is the ban will fully eliminate this practice and be strongly enforced to combat any existing societal pressures.

The World Health Organization cites immediate harmful effects of FCM/C that include hemorrhage (bleeding), bacterial infection, open sores, and long-term consequences that include infertility, childbirth complications and recurring bladder infections.

In another UNICEF report, communities who practice FGM often do so to reduce sexual desire in women and to initiate girls to womanhood, among other purposes.

According to “The Guardian‘s” analysis of 2014 UN data, a quarter of the women in Nigeria have undergone FGM.

Stella Mukasa, director of Gender, Violence and Rights at the International Center for Research on Women, explains the complexity of the implementation of the new law banning FGM/C.

“It is crucial that we scale up efforts to change traditional cultural views that underpin violence against women,” she wrote in an article for “The Guardian.” “Only then will this harmful practice be eliminated.”

Under hashtag #VAPPBIll, Twitter users celebrated the bill’s passing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act serves to protect women and violence in multiple aspects. BuzzFeed News cited a 2013 version of the bill that highlights its purpose to eliminate violence both in private and public, and end physical, sexual, domestic and psychological violence.

Female Arab scientists urge defence of women’s rights.

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A conference of female Arab scientists has called on policymakers and science organisations to help them network within and between countries and safeguard hard-wonwomen’s rights, which they see as under threat in the wake of the Arab Spring.

Attendees of the International Conference on Women in Science and Technology in the Arab Countries, held in Kuwait last week (21–23 April), stressed that it was increasingly important to develop strong ties among women scientists due to the region’s political flux and threats to women’s empowerment.

“Political instability in some nations [has] raised questions over whether the gains of recent years could be reversed,” the conference’s closing document said.

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Heba Handoussa, managing director of the Egyptian Network for Integrated Development, said that, in the decade leading up to the Arab Spring, civil society in most Arab states advocated women’s empowerment and right to work.

“But, although the new constitutions in the Arab Spring countries confirmed gender equality, this aspect has rarely been translated into straightforward laws, policies and practices that are responsive to women’s rights,” she said.

While the Islamist parties now running many Arab countries say they support women rights, in practice they are reversing many of these rights, Handoussa added.

But women are fightingto keep existing rights andgain even more.

In Yemen, they are trying to do this through discussion with the government rather than protests, said Rokhsana Ismail, a chemistry professor at the country’s Aden University.

“The political instability is affecting all developmental plans, not only in the field of science and technology,” Ismail tells SciDev.Net. “Our battle now is to strengthen the legal and policy frameworks governing women’s workplace rights to promote the participation of women scientists in the workforce.”

Accordingly, the conference recommended that national policies should be crafted to support women’s progress, for example by funding scientific research by women. Policymakers should continually review these policies to recognise changing conditions and needs, it said.

One method highlighted at the conference for women to gain greater recognition and funding for their work was to improve networking among women scientists.

“Arab women scientists often lack long-standing professional networks,” Samira Omar, vice-president for the Arab region at the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD) and director of the Kuwait Environmental Remediation Program, told SciDev.Net.

Omar argued that networks should be developed dealing with specific national or regional priorities as these might find it easier than individuals to overcome obstacles to funding.

According to Omar, the formation of national chapters of organisations such as OWSD — as the conference document recommended —and the World Academy of Sciences would be a good way to develop communication between scientists, not only in the region, but with developed countries.

The conference’s recommendations are due to be presented to the World Science Forum in Rio de Janeiro in November.

Source: http://www.scidev.net