Egypt's NCW, NCCM launch anti-FGM campaign Thursday

CAIRO – 13 June 2019: The National Committee of the Eradication of FGM will launch on Thursday an awareness campaign via radio against female circumcision, on the occasion of the National Anti-FGM Day which falls on June 14.

The committee is headed by Maya Morsy, president of the National Council for Women, and Azza al-Ashmawy, secretary general of the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood (NCCM).

As many as 18 radio stations will broadcast the campaign, which aims at raising awareness of the reported dangers of the FGM, which have been endorsed by many international organizations and medical specialists, as well as the penalties imposed by the law against the perpetrators of such act.

FGM is carried out by some people especially in some countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, through cutting or removing some or all of the external female genitalia.

In statements on Wednesday, Ashmawi said the campaign is entitled "Budour Month" after the name of a 11-year-old girl who died of complications of a circumcision surgery in a private clinic in the Egyptian village of Mughagha, Minya governorate, in 2007.

She asserted that NCCM has been working over the past few years on several programs to counter such practices through the various mass media means.

Ashmawi also said that in 2016, the government toughened the punishment against those involved in such practice and established the anti-FGM national committee under the chairmanship of the NCCM.

Egypt imposed a complete ban on female genital cutting — also known as female genital mutilation or circumcision — in June 2007 after Budour Shaker died of an excessive dose of anesthesia while being cut at the private clinic in Upper Egypt.

Egypt’s Grand Mufti, the government’s official arbiter of Islamic law, decreed during the same year that female genital cutting was forbidden by Islam, in his strongest statement yet against the practice.

FGM was criminalized by Egyptian parliament in June 2008, thus creating a paradigm shift by moving the practice from social norm to crime.

---

Additional reporting by MENA