Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2014-02-06-Speech-4-021-000"
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"en.20140206.3.4-021-000"2
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"Madam President, I shall start by saying that I do not find it surprising – but I do find it quite disgusting – that you have MEPs of the far right, like MEP Morganti, trying to use this barbaric practice, this pain of so many women, as an argument to back up a racist, Islamaphobic line of argument. We should remind ourselves that African cultures, cultures that have Islam as a prominent religion, are not alone in barbaric practices against women. Let us look at the violence against women within the EU, within white Christian EU communities. Let us look at the domestic violence which affects one in five women, let us look at rape which affects one in 10 women. This is not about imposing some great European values on other countries or other cultures, it is a struggle for human rights, for women’s rights, for children’s rights, which involves people in African cultures struggling for those rights and with their allies all around the world.
Alice Walker wrote a very powerful novel about the experience of a woman living with FGM called
. She said it was about the ways in which women are rather routinely mutilated in most parts of the world and how people tend to think of the pain done to women as somehow less than the pain done to men. That gets to the point about what FGM is about. It is not some isolated barbaric practice, it is about the oppression of women. It is a manifestation and an instrument of oppression against women and it is a way of denying women as sexual beings, of denying sexual pleasure to women. The EU has a responsibility here. Every year, an estimated 20 000 women flee these practices and seek asylum in the EU. About 9 000 of them flee having been cut themselves. The rest flee in order to protect their children.
Reports from victims illustrate that they are often met with disbelief, with scepticism, with a lack of knowledge about this practice. Activists have also raised the fact that some Member States have deported women back to countries where they are at risk of FGM. This is another dark stain on Europe’s immigration policies, and we have plenty of them at the moment. Member States have an obligation to protect women and girls trying to escape FGM.
In many countries where FGM persists the practice is illegal. It goes to show that more than laws are needed: investment in publicly owned, free healthcare systems that guarantee full sexual and reproductive rights to women, that lower the dependence on traditional circumcisers, who often also play a role as midwives or nurses in the community; ending the economic dependency of women through establishing a living wage; full employment; closing the wage gap and a full programme of education."@en1
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"Possessing the Secrets of Joy"1
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