Female genital mutilation is a human rights violation – UNICEF

A child protection specialist at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Nkeiru Maduechesi, has said that the organisation has categorised Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as a human rights violation, saying that the agency is concentrating efforts at stopping it.

Maduechesi, who spoke at a public engagement in Owerri on the harmful effects of FGM, said that there is often the erroneous equation of female genital mutilation with male circumcision, saying that FGM destroys the reproductive rights of the girl child by distorting the work of God.

According to her, nature had created a woman in such a way that supports her physiological will to support everyday healthy living, stressing that tampering with such physiological configuration in the name of removing anything that gives a woman pleasure is depriving her of her right to enjoy fruitful and pleasurable relationship.

She said that UNICEF is encouraging states governments, through the adoption to the Child Rights Act, to outlaw the practice and provide sanctions to offenders.

Maduechesi, who is a child specialist in the Enugu office of UNICEF, said that five states in Nigeria have been identified as the most endemic in the harmful practice of genital female mutilation, adding that Imo and Ebonyi states being in the Enugu zonal area of UNICEF are the most endemic.

Rather she said that the practice encourages women to seek for pleasure from different men, when they could not find satisfaction from one person owing to the fact that their physiological state had been tampered with and would no longer be able to serve her.