Women: Equality and Advancement

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (LD)]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson of Abinger, for her stirring and powerful speech on the UN Commission on the Status of Women and work arising therefrom. I am pleased and reassured today to learn of Her Majesty’s Government’s new determination to tackle the double trauma of female genital mutilation and of forced, underage marriage for girls.

The Birmingham Trojan horse report, which your Lordships’ House received this afternoon, brings both crimes against young females inside the orbit of a narrow band of extremely restrictive Islam. Undoubtedly, from the evidence so painfully experienced, the cruel actions that result from forced marriage and FGM can—and do—claim that Islam’s teaching provides full justification for these brutal practices on helpless children. Indeed, the claim is regularly made that Islam not only authorises but demands them. Evidence of the strength of this view in some Muslim countries is easy to come by. Under the immediate past Egyptian President Morsi, ambulances with cutters roamed the streets, loud-hailing families to “bring out your girls”. Under Morsi’s brief reign the percentage of girls under five who were assaulted by bloodstained adults and had their genitalia sliced away without anaesthetic rose from 83% to over 90%.

Where is the verse in the Holy Koran that dictates such bloody and continuing sacrifice to Allah? It cannot be found, for it does not exist. What of the Hadith? Compiled some 400 years after the founding of Islam, the Hadith offers further Koranic interpretation, but there is no mention there, either, of child marriage or female genital mutilation. Therefore we must deepen the search and track back easily the FGM genesis from its common name; it is known as the “pharaonic practice”. There we have it—this was an ancient Egyptian custom, which perhaps predated even the union of Upper and Lower Egypt in 3000 BC or so. Therefore the evil that we tackle today is theologically unconnected with Islam or with any true Muslim practice. Instead, it is a vicious torture practised by certain societies to dominate their women by the use of carefully targeted and deliberately inflicted bitter and lifelong pain.

By no means all Islamic countries practice FGM. The Islamic Republic of Iran, a country I know well, allows none of it, and nor does her neighbour, Iraq. The pharaonic practice failed to spread far in the Arabian peninsula and the Persian Gulf, but its proponents from Egypt and parts of the neighbouring countries have successfully brought it to western nations, including —to our great shame—the United Kingdom. Today, our Government declared their wish to eliminate those practices from the British Isles, and from the globe, but how best to tackle FGM and its unhappy sister, forced marriage at an early age? A further horror to add to make up the trilogy of hatred for women is the concept of honour killing—another misery for young girls to fear and suffer. So there is much to do.

My own findings on tackling successfully these unhappy issues come from my grass-roots experience around the world. Small achievements led to my setting up and working through the AMAR International Charitable Foundation and Asociatia Children’s High Level Group. AMAR is a large charity that works exclusively in the Muslim world; Asociatia Children’s High Level Group is a smaller NGO that tackles the same problem of exclusion in the very different Christian Orthodox settings of central and eastern Europe. There, inside the boundaries of the European Union, a section of society persistently practices marriage of underage children, most often to older men, which it claims is an ingrained custom that will not be denied.

These practices are neither Christian nor Muslim. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child makes that plain. All nations have signed and almost all ratified or incorporated that most powerful of all UN conventions. Those community leaders who insist on child marriages, honour killings and female genital mutilation can now be persuaded, through an understanding of the convention’s articles, that their customs are outdated, irrelevant and destructive of the very same communities that they lead.

For example, the AMAR Foundation, which I chair, has worked in the Mesopotamian marshes, serving the marsh tribes, for 23 years now and continues to do so. Historically, the people of the marshes have carried out a small number of honour killings every year. As they track their ancestry to Sumerian times, the numbers of dead young people mount dramatically. By careful persuasion, explanation and teaching by AMAR staff over some years, these tribal leaders have discarded honour killings completely. In place of the blood revenge for the stain on family honour, AMAR and the tribal leaders have created a new deal of water buffalo, clothes and food—a huge achievement that the 300,000 tribal people highly appreciate.

AMAR has approximately 2,000 staff and works through capacity and institution-building in health and education across Iraq, from north to south and east to west. AMAR works in close partnership with central and local government in the KRG region. It now additionally serves the recently internally displaced people from Mosul and refugees from Syria, giving a catchment area of those whom AMAR cares for in the millions.

Some years ago, the AMAR teams planned and began work on gender-based violence. This great programme started in the Kurdistan Regional Government area in the north and is now countrywide. It successfully combats gender-based violence throughout Iraq by promoting a cultural discourse on gender. The programme provides protection against gender-based violence through support, training, outreach and publicity. AMAR professional staff give direct and social assistance to GBV victims through eight special centres in seven of Iraq’s 18 governorates. Through the creation of special GBV training workshops, AMAR’s team has now trained 1,000 police and 109 local NGO staff.

In-house lawyers have referred and handled nearly 2,000 cases of GBV, and thousands of students and schoolchildren, their teachers and professors are trained each month. By March this year, nearly 7,000 school classes, 3,000 classes in universities and 5,500 public workshops had been successfully delivered. There was continuing publicity of this groundbreaking two-year project through mainstream media and through the production and distribution of a monthly bulletin. These are the practical, core building blocks that I recommend for the creation of an enlightened society that does not inflict cruel and inhumane punishments on defenceless children and powerless women in imagined retribution for the ill luck that is assumed to have created the community’s poverty, alienation and distress.

The GBV programme’s focus on women’s empowerment and gender equality is matched by AMAR’s other projects for women across the nation. A network of 500 AMAR women health visitors visit more than 3,000 families each month as a part of the foundation’s comprehensive women and reproductive health programmes, which are carried out through 50 primary health centres in six governorates. The human rights and rule of law programme gives thousands of women key knowledge of basic rights and helps them use them. All this work meets the professional standards of the WHO and UNESCO, and is based on the UN conventions that today’s conference here in London, led by UNESCO and supported by Her Majesty’s Government, demonstrates so well. AMAR’s work takes place in the Islamic world with mainly Muslim professional staff, giving the lie to claims that the abuse of women is an Islamic requirement.

I strongly support our Government’s initiatives on gender-based violence, on female genital mutilation and on arranged marriages. I know that they will succeed. We in the AMAR Foundation stand ready to share our deep and powerful experience, which is succeeding.