Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-06-13-Speech-3-586-000"
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"en.20120613.32.3-586-000"2
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"Madam President, I would first like to pay tribute to all the mutilated women and girls who have had the courage to tell of their suffering.
It is important to know exactly what genital mutilation is. We always think of the excision of the clitoris, but there is also infibulation. Allow me to describe it to you. The labia majora are also removed, the vulva is sutured with string or with acacia spines until scarring occurs covering the vagina and the urethra.
To permit urination, menstruation and the evacuation of vaginal secretions, a small reed stem is introduced during suture, leaving a minuscule orifice in the scar tissue. According to an eye-witness account, the worst thing is menstruation and urination. It takes one hour, sometimes two, to urinate. Later, when these girls have their periods, they have to introduce a small stick into the vagina to open up a passageway to allow the blood to flow out. Young girls squat and contract the bladder to urinate. They roll about on the ground and it is very painful.
I have met gynaecologists in Brussels who discovered women giving birth having been infibulated and the husband refused to allow them to remove the infibulation. That is happening here.
This ownership by men of their wives or, more precisely, of their sexual organs, is not part of Muslim tradition. It is a millennium-long custom which corresponds, in our Christian tradition, to the chastity belt, with which the crusaders girded their wives before leaving to deliver Jerusalem into the hands of the infidels.
However, centuries later, over and over again, the same battle is being fought by women for their freedom. Even today, the same religious obscurantism in cruel patriarchal systems perpetuates, before our eyes, these forms of torture, from which all taboos must be lifted, and I thank the Commission for taking up this issue."@en1
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