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Uplifting the Marginalized is a podcast that amplifies voices working to create a more inclusive world. Hosted by Clemence, each episode features personal stories, impactful projects, and actionable insights from activists, leaders, and changemakers dedicated to empowering marginalized communities. Tune in and discover how you can make a difference.
Intro Outro [00:00:00]:
Welcome to Uplifting the Marginalized, a podcast dedicated to highlighting the people and projects making a real difference in the lives of marginalized communities. Hosted by Clemence, Uplifting the Marginalized offers inspiring stories and practical ways for listeners to contribute to positive change in their own communities and beyond.
Clemence Sop [00:00:20]:
Hello everybody and welcome to my podcast called Uplifting the Marginalized. This is a project that is very dear to my heart. I do believe in creating and providing opportunities to people at the margins. I think it's a duty for us who have made it out of the margins and people who are well off to create those opportunities and extend a hand and hold the ladder steady for everybody to have an opportunity to thrive in their own way. In my journey, I have been inspired by so, so many women and one of them is Juliet, who is my guest today. And Juliet, thank you so much for joining me on this mission and in this journey.
Clemence Sop [00:01:08]:
And I do hope today that our guests are going to really understand what female gender mutilation is, the impact it has on the world and what we need to do to change. And so I'm very inspired by you and I'm going to ask you to start by introducing yourself to our audience.
Juliet Albert [00:01:27]:
Thank you, Clemence. It's lovely to be here. So my name is Juliet Albert and I'm a specialist midwife for women with female genital mutilation here in London. And I've been working in this area since 1998, so a really long time.
Clemence Sop [00:01:43]:
So I just want to level set so that the audience can understand. We talk a lot about there are a lot of issues affecting young women in marginalized community, one of which is this female gender mutilation. I was just looking at mind blowing statistics, right? According to the World health organization that 230 million girls and women alive today have undergone FGM. This is crazy. In over 30 countries across Africa, the Middle East, Asia, it is a practice that is happening. Can you enlighten us on what that is and how it affects women?
Juliet Albert [00:02:25]:
So female genital mutilation is any cutting or other injury to the female genital organs for non medical reasons. And it happens all over the world, Sadly. I mean, 230 million women is more than 5% of the global female population. And it's still happening today in the 2000s. It causes lots of health problems for young girls. It's not the same as male circumcision, it's completely different. The intention behind fgm, I know it's sometimes it's referred to as FGMC or female genital cutting. But the intention behind it is to stop women having sexual pleasure and make them behave.
Juliet Albert [00:03:09]:
And some of the women have had their labia removed, their clitoris part of their clitoris removed, and sometimes they're also stitched up so that the opening hole of the vulva is severely restricted, causing long term physical problems as well as long term psychological problems. Because often it's carried out by elderly women, traditional circumcisers using no anesthetic at all, using perhaps glass or a razor blade. And the girl is often held down and it's extremely then a traumatic memory for her.
Clemence Sop [00:03:50]:
I also come from the margins as well. My origins is I'm from Cameroon and I am 32 of 32 children. It is sad to see that these practices are mostly they are non medical reasons to just echo what you said. Are they culturally related?
Juliet Albert [00:04:09]:
I think yes. But there's lots of different myths that are related to fgm. So you might say it's a traditional practice rather than a cultural practice, because there's so many different myths are used to justify fgm. So for example, some people say it's culture or it's religion, but actually it's something that's been passed down through generations and is deeply embedded in some societies. So parents might say to their children, if we don't do it, nobody will ever marry you. Or they might say you'll never get pregnant or your child will die during childbirth or your clitoris will keep growing until it sweeps the floor. So there's so many different myths used to justify FGM that it's not just one culture or one person or one community that does it. It's such a heterogeneous group of different communities and it's very deeply embedded in some societies.
Clemence Sop [00:05:08]:
Sadly, very sadly. Can you please walk us through your journey and how you came about to start being very active and advocating for this cause?
Juliet Albert [00:05:19]:
Well, as a midwife working in London, I worked for Imperial College and I run the Sunflower Clinics. But when I first started, I really just went to visit a woman in labor in the middle of the night. And I realized that when I was looking at her perineum after childbirth that she had fgm. And I'd never been taught about it before. I really didn't know anything about it. So I began asking questions. I attended a study day with an amazing woman called Adwa Kwatengkluvice, and she was at the time the leader of a charity called Forward UK. And there were about 12 people in the room, all kind of professionals from different disciplines.
Juliet Albert [00:06:03]:
And she said, everybody in this room can make a difference and can help change this practice. And I was just one of those seminal moments when you just think, okay, I need to do something about it. And at the time where my hospital is based, there was a very large Somali population in particular. And so I suddenly realized that there were lots of women coming to the hospital with problems caused by fgm. And often they were saying, can you help me? Or can you help my sister or my friend? And I realized that we weren't really doing anything about it. So that was the beginning, really of my journey.
Clemence Sop [00:06:41]:
It's quite interesting when you talk about being in a room where people are talking about a specific problem and just getting that awareness, to know all of us here can contribute. And this is the reason why we are all having this conversation and we're broadcasting it now on all of these platforms. Platforms is that the message is that all of us, every single one of us, can do something to change the practices. I want to go back to because, you know, when you talk about these topics, it feels very much distance to a lot of people. Right? You're explaining it. Can you walk us through the journey? I want people to understand and see life, experience life through the lenses of a woman who has been, who has undergone this. And I know you've worked with a lot. Would you be open to sharing some of those experiences so that we can have a better understanding of on the effect it has on people's lives, actually?
Juliet Albert [00:07:36]:
Oh, I mean, it's difficult. There's so many stories that women have told me over the years, and some of them are really very, very distressing. So, for example, a woman who came to the clinic would say that she remembers that she was about 12 years old, that there was a group of girls, they were in a row from babies up to the age of 12. There were about 30 young girls and the circumcised and moved along the row cutting. And the girls were screaming, being held down by a group of women. And then she described how when they got to her, they cut her. And afterwards she was bleeding so heavily, her mum got very scared and she carried her to the local kind of traditional doctor's hut. And she took him, her into the hut and said, my daughter's bleeding, can you help? And he said, oh, well, she must be bleeding because she's a witch.
Juliet Albert [00:08:35]:
So he beat her. So this is very typical. Sometimes there's other intersectional violence as well. I've met women who have had things like juju, witchcraft, forced early marriage, They've been trafficked so often it's not only FGM that's the problem, but I think that it can sometimes be just a one off event. So a girl might be told that she's going to a coming of age ceremony, but she's very lucky because she's going to be a grown up, she's going to get to dress in a pretty outfit, that she's going to get lots of presents and then the next thing she knows she's held down and she's being cut with no anesthetic. So the stories really range from person to person. Every story is individual. But I think women come away and as they grow up they recognize that they were powerless and that they've suffered a massive trauma.
Juliet Albert [00:09:32]:
They feel different, they feel like they're not normal and they don't belong. And often those are women that are then migrating to other countries where they're fearful of telling anybody because there's such a stigma attached to it. So there's a lot of secrecy around FGM. And we also know that FGM's been carried out in migratory countries. So now we've had three legal cases in the UK where sadly, mothers and other people have been sent to prison for carrying out FGM in the UK and in the USA there was a very big case in 2018 in Michigan, Detroit, with a Bora Indian Muslim community where a doctor had been performing FGM on young girls. Sometimes think these things happen somewhere else, but actually they don't.
Clemence Sop [00:10:26]:
Well, thank you so much for that insight. It's crazy when you were, you were explaining and when you were just discussing these facts right now and just enlightening all of us on the fact that it doesn't happen far away is mind blowing. To see that people are still practicing all of this even in the UK and the case in Michigan, it got me thinking, is the problem not bigger than just this act of the genital mutilation? Because I was thinking about the theory of change, right? Because coming back to and understanding the impact of culture, right, where I was raised, you know, it's a common practice. We early child marriage is a common practice. We live up to those moments. It is a definition of success to some extent. When you are able to get a husband at an early age, you're successful, right? So you prepare for that, you make sure you live up to that is like, okay, I'm going to write an exam. So.
Clemence Sop [00:11:28]:
Because if you, if you get a young guy or an older guy to pick you, to choose you to become a Wife at an early age, you are no longer a burden in that sense in quote unquote to your family, but you suddenly belong because you are a wife. You can have some sort of somebody else is taking care of you. So we live up to this moment when you were talking about, oh, these are the myth around this. To me it sounds like it's a deeper problem than just any problem resolving. This has multiple facets. Right. What has been your experience and what do you think again back to is happening in Michigan is happening within communities here. We're kind of creating awareness and hopefully people listening in will have a better understanding.
Clemence Sop [00:12:12]:
I would also know what they can do to help reduce these practices. What according to you are the multiple facets that need to be changed or the different actionable items that we need to take at the different phases of this problem to just start mobilizing change? Because it's mind blowing when looking at the statistics.
Juliet Albert [00:12:32]:
Look, it comes down to this kind of gender based violence. Violence comes down to patriarchal systems that are very, very hard to change and deeply embedded worldwide. Worldwide, but in particular certain parts of the world, this kind of patriarchy is more common. And until female valued equally, then these problems are going to exist on a smaller scale. I think we also can look and say, for example, we need to educate. Education is absolutely key, educating women and men so that they understand the health consequences of FGM and early forced marriage, which after all is rape every day on a young girl. So these kind of things I think boil down to education. We also need to look at the health systems that are in place because if we're not taught about anatomy and physiology and health promotion, then that's part of the education that I think is lacking.
Juliet Albert [00:13:36]:
So we have to challenge these patriarchal systems, but we also have to look at a more local level about how do we ensure that people are educated about these things and they understand the health consequences of FGM and they understand that if female children aren't treated equally, how it actually affects the economy of the whole place and the future. So, you know, it's challenging, it's a challenging situation. And I think from my point of view, I'm looking in particularly at services. And what services do we actually provide to help women with fgm? And sadly these are very lacking, I think not only in the uk, but I'm seeing it obviously from my position and in the uk, although we have some services for FGM survivors, there are still many issues. We have very rarely have psychosexual support. We do have some trauma counseling available. But generally speaking, it's difficult for women to even know that specialist services exist. And in the uk, we also don't have access to something called reconstruction surgery, which the idea of reconstruction surgery is to try to put back what's been taken away.
Juliet Albert [00:14:53]:
And this can be very empowering for women who have problems with things like genital pain, body dysmorphia, so they might feel like they don't feel whole and they want to put back what's been taken away. And some women, it's to try and improve sexual pleasure because they're having those sorts of problems. So we need to make sure that women have access to this type of treatments as well that can help them with their FGM health consequences.
Clemence Sop [00:15:22]:
And obviously all of those don't happen overnight. Right. So if we're focusing on the job that you're doing in the UK to kind of help and support these women, my heart goes out to them because there's one thing, these are women who have been able to migrate to the uk. I'm thinking of how devastating it is for the women who are still living those cultures and having to deal with this consequence on a day to day basis. You mentioned a few milestones because obviously we hope that we can get women, we can get women to support this cause, you know, to support all of the therapies that you mentioned to support so that these women can have access to the help that they need and they can gain their self confidence back and know they can be empowered to go on, on their journey. What are the courses and, and how can people contribute to these courses?
Juliet Albert [00:16:18]:
Well, there's lots of amazing charities that work with FGM survivors and it's certainly one of the issues is funding for charities that often these small charities have to compete against one another for funding. So supporting FGM charities is something that can definitely help. So, for example, we've been working on a parliamentary petition in the UK to say that reconstruction surgery with psychosexual therapy should be available for FGM survivors. That in the uk, actually we have surgery for women that have vulval cancer so they can access reconstruction surgery. We also have gender reassignment surgery in the uk, where men are given labia and clitoris so that they can become a woman, and yet FGM survivors aren't able to access reconstruction surgery. So this is a real discrimination against FGM survivors. So one of our goals is to ensure that the government addresses this situation and makes reconstruction surgery available on the nhs. So we set up a parliamentary petition because in the UK, if you get 100,000 signatures, it then gets discussed by the government.
Juliet Albert [00:17:33]:
Actually in Parliament, they have to discuss the issue. So one of our things is that sort of in policy, trying to policy change at that level. But also women are sadly having to go to other countries in Europe to access surgery. So, for example, they might go to France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Germany, all these countries that are offering reconstruction surgery. In fact, in the USA as well, there's an amazing consultant called Marcy Bowers who does reconstruction surgery for FGM survivors in the US as well. So we're trying to look on lots of different levels how we can support women to get access to this surgery. So I'm now leading a project called ACEs UK and what we're trying to do is apply for funding for a clinical trial so that we can also contribute to the evidence base on reconstruction surgery. So that would mean we actually set up a service and we make sure it's safe.
Juliet Albert [00:18:36]:
So we have ethical committees that make sure we're doing it properly and that we're transparent and that we're safeguarding women and not putting women under any pressure to take part. And so that is one of our goals, is to set up a service in the UK for reconstruction surgery and psychosexual therapy.
Clemence Sop [00:18:54]:
I'll come back to one of the actionable items you mentioned, so thank you. A lot of things that we can all do and we're going to highlight all of those actionable items for our listeners to actually take actions. You need 100,000 signatures in the UK for your petition and so we're going to highlight that. And if you're listening in and you are from the uk, it wouldn't take you more than five minutes to sign a petition that would go a long way to save and give a woman a new chance to life, hope and probably an opportunity to become her own success story and to live on with her life and gain the self confidence. Juliet, I am so amazed and in awe of the work that you do. It takes a special person to start acting on causes they do believe in. I wanted to take this last part of the podcast to address the women from your end who have been through this, right, because you work with them. What would be your piece of advice to them? And on the flip side, what would be your piece of advice to the same women who are still living in this remote conditions and to the young girls who have just undergone that or who are on the roadmap? Do you have that done to them? What is your message to all of.
Juliet Albert [00:20:15]:
Them to the women that I see who are, in a way, they've already looking for help. So, for example, here, if they're pregnant women, we ask them at their booking appointment whether they've had fgm. In the uk, that's standard practice. So we are identifying women and sometimes they've never told anybody about it before. So maintaining this secrecy probably actually doesn't help. I think that we have to talk. We have to encourage women to speak out and girls to speak out, particularly girls who think they might be at risk of fgm. They need to go and speak to somebody that they trust and an adult, a teacher maybe, or somebody that they can tell that they think this is going to happen to them.
Juliet Albert [00:20:59]:
Because I think the secrecy just allows this practice to be perpetuated. We have to work a lot harder at educating people about the problems. So my advice really is to speak out to women and say, share the fact that you've undergone this practice, because others will learn from it. I think, as well, it's very difficult because reconstruction surgery is about women being under pressure to maybe conform, to be like everybody else. And that's not always, always the best thing for all women. So for some women who've had fgm, as long as they can live happily with themselves, they don't need reconstruction surgery, all of them. What we want, though, is for women to be able to access it if they want it, if it might benefit them. But there are a lot of women with FGM who are able to enjoy sexual pleasure and are able to enjoy their lives despite having had fgm.
Juliet Albert [00:21:58]:
I would really encourage women to seek out counseling, trauma therapy or psychosexual therapy. There is help out there. It may be difficult to find, but nowadays we've got the Internet. Have a look and see what's out there that you could find help with. And don't forget, there's lots of women as well in the world who haven't had FGM and they're not able to orgasm or enjoy sexual pleasure. So we must be really careful about putting people in boxes and saying that they only are able to do one thing or another, because that's not the case. Everybody's different. And some women are able to have fantastic lives in spite of having had fgm.
Juliet Albert [00:22:37]:
So we need to just be quite careful about how we treat this subject, because it is a very sensitive subject.
Clemence Sop [00:22:43]:
It is very sensitive indeed. That was my hope, that today our listeners were able to have a better understanding of the topic, a better understanding of what they can all do. And for all the women who are undergoing all of these practices or on the roadmap, it is important for them to know that they are not alone. Right? And that they have women like yourself, Juliet, fighting very hard for their causes. I have learned a lot and it was a very delightful conversation. Thank you so much for the work that you do. We hope that this is a platform or a starting point to get people to sign the petition in the UK. We need 100,000 signatures and we are going to leave the link of the petition as an attachment to this podcast.
Clemence Sop [00:23:32]:
And thank you very, very much, Juliette for joining us today. And I know for sure with women like you fighting for the right causes, there is a future. For the marginalized, there is a future and we're hopeful. So thank you very much.
Juliet Albert [00:23:46]:
Thank you, Clemence. Thank you very much.
Intro Outro [00:23:51]:
Thank you for listening to Uplifting the Marginalized. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share and leave a review to help us reach more people. Check out the show notes for links to our guests work and join us next time as we continue to share stories that inspire action.