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Somali community
must address the hidden issue of female circumcision
• I would like to express my condolences to the
family of Mahir Osman. The senseless loss of a child must be
the hardest loss to bear.
The following is to the Camden Somali Forum.
May I suggest that you look very closely at the reasons for
these youths. There is, it seems to me, a problem in the Somali
communities with regard to youths that has to be addressed from
within.
And this problem will not be solved in isolation from the issue
of how Somali females are treated. The behaviour of the youths
is directly related to the way in which Somali women are expected
to behave.
Your young women are bearing in silence the burden of an atrocious
human rights abuse, namely female genital mutilation which you
are not addressing, and the host society seems unable to face
up to this either.
It’s not possible for these young girls to integrate with
girls from other ethnic cultures because their experience of
themselves as female is so alien to all other groups of females.
The most hopeful way forward our society has, indeed any society
has is to hold in respect a set of cohesive moral values. This
does not mean that all aspects of a cultural tradition must
be obliterated or that the host community has all the best answers.
However, while an ethnic community continues to practice a tradition
that contravenes the rights of a female child to her natural
genitals, while it has this particularly horrific form of sexual
control of its women, then its women cannot integrate and its
men cannot be respected.
Young boys and girls who are allowed to mix as teenagers have
the opportunity to learn how to respect each other as autonomous
human beings of equal value, as is expected in a modern liberal
democracy. Somali youths do not have this opportunity to mix
with their own young girls and because of this they are not
likely to understand how to mix nor indeed would they be seen
as welcome with other young women either and so “all-male”
groups are their only option.
Anyone who has seen a football crowd knows that the male en
masse is not a pretty sight to behold. They become very aggressive
and threatening. One of the advantages of the modern liberal
democracy is that women and girls are found everywhere and have
a civilising affect on the male’s tendency to aggression.
True integration with respect occurs not when the males only
are allowed into the host society but when the females are allowed
to relate to each other too. This integration is almost impossible
with women so badly mutilated as to be unable to actually enjoy
the experience that women from all other cultures enjoy.
I suggest that you will not get at the problem of your aggressive
youths unless you look at the manner in which you are treating
your young girls.
E Chambers
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