Statistics reveal poor families pose biggest hurdle to efforts to abolish practice
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- Soher, a thirteen-year-old girl died Thursday evening while being circumcised at a private clinic in a village of governorate of Daqahliya, north east of Cairo.COURTESY FAMILY
Cairo: The death of a 13-year-old
girl at a private clinic while undergoing a circumcision operation has
once again highlighted that female genital mutilation continues to
endanger lives in Egypt despite laws forbidding the practice.
The family of the girl,
identified as Soher, filed an official complaint, accusing the doctor
who performed the operation of having caused her death.
The girl died on Thursday evening in a village in the Daqahliya governorate, north-east of Cairo.
Doctors and nurses in Egypt
have been banned from performing procedures involving female genital
mutilation (FGM) since 2007 following the death of two young girls after
being subjected to such surgeries at public hospitals. The procedure
was subsequently declared illegal in 2008.
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The ban notwithstanding,
poorer families continue to put youngsters at grave risk. According to
national statistics, around 80 per cent of girls born to poor families
become victims of FGM, as against only 30 per cent of girls from
wealthy, educated backgrounds.
“We left our daughter with
the doctor and the nurse. Fifteen minutes later, the nurse took my
daughter out of the operation room to a nearby room, along with three
other girls whom the doctor was circumcising,” Soher’s father, Mohammad
Ebrahim, a farmer, told the Al Masry Al Youm newspaper.
“I waited
half an hour hoping that my daughter would wake up but, unfortunately,
unlike the rest of the girls, she did not,” Ebrahim said.
“The doctor brought her back
to the operation room and then we were surprised when an ambulance
transferred her out of the clinic. When we asked the doctor what was
going on, he told us that she was weak and that the clinic did not have
the necessary [medical] equipment to treat her. When we reached Aga
Central Hospital, they told us she was dead. If I had known the
operation was going to kill her, I would never have [allowed] her to
have it. The same doctor conducted a similar operation on her elder
sister two years ago, and villagers visit this doctor because he has a
remedy for everything at low prices,” the distraught father said.
“The doctor does everything
and the nurse helps him. Doctors at the Aga Hospital told me that she
died of an anaesthesia overdose,” the girl’s mother, Hasanat Naeem
Fawzi, said.
“I want nothing but to hold the doctor accountable and to have justice for my daughter,” Hasanat said.
The girl’s uncle, Mohammad,
said that the doctor had offered the family 20,000 Egyptian pounds
(Dh10,299) in return for an assurance that they would not file a
complaint against him.
Tareq Hamouda, head of the
Aga prosecution in Daqahliya, summoned the doctor for an interrogation
and ordered that an autopsy be conducted on the girl to find the cause
of death.
Abdul Salam, the family’s
lawyer, said that although most forensic doctors were on vacation, the
prosecutor was able to call on one to conduct the autopsy. The health
inspector’s report, he added, confirmed that the cause of death was a
sharp drop in blood pressure resulting from shock trauma.
Abdul Wahab Sulaiman,
undersecretary of the Ministry of Health in Daqahlia, said that the
Health Directorate had not yet been notified of the incident. He
stressed that FGM is strictly prohibited and that the doctor had
violated the law.
— Ayman Sharaf is a journalist based in Cairo
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