In an article in International Health Policies, Fabienne Richard, Midwife, MSC, PhD in Public Health and Director of GAMS Belgium (founding member of the Concerted Strategies against FGM) contributes to the debate on the medicalisation of FGM. As a reaction…

Natalie Kontoulis is the Communications and Advocacy officer of the END FGM European Network. She had previously been working on European policy for the UK government and as a translator at the European Commission.

“I realized that I wanted to work on Human rights and gender issues. The issue of FGM really interested me, it was something that I became passionate about because I saw it as a very extreme form of gender-based violence. On a more personal note, I had a boyfriend who was from Guinea. We had never spoken of FGM.”

“(…) in most communities in which FGM is practiced, women do it, and now they are aware of the harmful consequences. They begin to understand that it is wrong and wish to abandon it. But the fact that men don’t speak about it, can restrain their newly-developed courage to talk about the practice. But if some men stand up and join the movement to say “enough, we don’t want it!” It can motivate them, it can give them hope to know that some people understand that yes, there is a suffering, and it prevents one to blossom. I do think so, yes.”

The care philosophy of CeMAViE relies on a multidisciplinary support that is very topical in medical care. A lot of pathologies are now dealt with in a transversal manner, by different specialists at the same time. The idea is to avoid that the patient goes to different doctors throughout a few months. When the problems are related to one another, we try to make doctors see their patients here. In other words, doctors move and the patient doesn’t instead of the usual opposite. This is why I decided to settle in the perineum clinic which has been devised for multidisciplinary community care.