Dawoodi Bohra

female genital mutilation

In female genital mutilation PIL in Supreme Court, it’s Dawoodi Bohra women vs Dawoodi Bohra women 02:18

foreskin

clitoris

Islam

An independent study released in February said majority of the respondents suffered from low self-esteem, shame, betrayal, anger, and depression as a direct consequence of the ritual

A group claiming support of 69,000women approaches the SC, which is hearing a PIL against, saying such a thing doesn’t happen within the community.At a time when women from the Dawoodi Bohra community are hoping their fight against female genital mutilation has reached a stage where victory is within sights, a section among them has come out strongly in support of the practice.Less than three months after the Union government urged the Supreme Court to issue directives to curb female genital mutilation, a group of Dawoodi Bohra women, under the banner of Dawoodi Bohra Women’s Association for Religious Freedom, has filed an application in the apex court saying the ritual involves “circumcision and not mutilation”.Pleading that it be made party to the public interest litigation (PIL) filed by Delhi-based advocate Sunita Tiwari in the Supreme Court in February last year against the Dawoodi Bohra practice of khafz, and on whose basis the Centre sought directives from the apex court, the women’s association said khafz was the community’s “integral religious practice to achieve purity and cleanliness”.Tiwari had said in her PIL that khafz didn’t have any religious reference and was carried out without any medical reason. She said the practice should be declared a non-bailable offence. She said the women from the Dawoodi Bohra community were forced to undergo khafz suffer physical and mental trauma their entire life due to “the unhygienic and illegal surgeries performed on their person for non-medical reasons during their childhood”.The Dawoodi Bohra Women’s Association for Religious Freedom, which claims to have 69,000 membetrs, cited 13 religious texts to prove its point. Claiming this was a matter of religious freedom granted under the Constitution via Article 25 & 26, the group has said the PIL should be heard by a five-judge Constitutional bench.“Khafz (circumcision) as practiced by the community involves a nick on the femalecovering the clitoris. No part of theis touched during the process. The practice finds mention in the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity as well, and circumcision is gender neutral in all sacred texts,” the group’s application said.“Khafz as recorded in Fatimid jurisprudence (the school ofpracticed by the Dawoodi Bohra community) is an integral part of the religious practice to achieve taharat (religious purity) and cleanliness. For the Dawoodi Bohra men and women, the practice constitutes an integral ritual mentioned in several texts. Taharat is a necessary requirement for the valid performance of prayers,” the application said.Justifying girls as young as seven years old being put through the ritual, the application said boys were circumcised soon after birth, while seven was the “right age for females” as the “prepuce of the female child is sufficiently developed by that age, but not yet thickened, making the procedure simple with the least possibility of complications, minimally invasive, and harmless”.Tiwari had said in her PIL that khafz didn’t have any religious reference and was carried out without any medical reason. She said the practice should be declared a non-bailable offence. She said the women from the Dawoodi Bohra community were forced to undergo khafz suffer physical and mental trauma their entire life due to “the unhygienic and illegal surgeries performed on their person for non-medical reasons during their childhood”.We Speak Out, a survivor driven association of Bohra women fighting to end the practice, intervened in the PIL last year itself. They have spoken about how 'khafz' practiced in the Bohra community falls under the World Health Organization's definition of FGM, and is already illegal in several countries.The group filed its application on Friday, when independent researchers Lakshmi Anantnarayan and Shabana Diler submitted an affidavit in the same PIL narrating their interview with a seven-year-old who bled the entire night and had to undergo surgery after being subjected to khafz. Anantnarayan and Diler’s application said the procedure was carried out by a nonmedical person, even as a Godhra-based gynaecologist, Dr Sujat Vali, also submitted an affidavit in court narrating how he found that the clitorises of 20 Dawoodi Bohra women, whom he examined, was smaller than the organ’s normal size. The affidavits were filed in support of We Speak Out's intervention application.In February this year, Anantnarayan, Diler, and co-researcher Natasha Menon, along with WeSpeakOut, a coalition of Bohra women against female genital mutilation and the women’s rights organisation Nari Samata Manch, released a study titled ‘The Clitoral Hood A Contested Site’, which said that 97% of the female respondents who remembered their own FGM as children, recalled it being very painful.The study, which interviewed 94 women, said 33% of respondents said the ritual had an adverse impact on their sexual life, while 10% of the women reported having urinary tract infections and incontinence.A majority of the respondents said they suffered from low self-esteem, shame, betrayal, anger, and suffered from depression as a direct consequence of the ritual, the study said.