Faces of resistance | From excision to reconstruction
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Shamsa Sharawe was 6 years old when she was taken with her cousin and sister to their grandmother. In the room, a woman she had never seen was waiting for the three little girls, a stool placed near her.
Shamsa Sharawe remembers the innocence with which her 5-year-old cousin sat on the stool first, unaware of the pain that awaited her.
“They grabbed her limbs, held her still and spread her legs,” she said in a video that went viral on social media.
Now aged 32, Shamsa Sharawe has become the face of the fight against female genital mutilation on social networks.
Watch a video of Shamsa Sharawe on TikTok
More than 230 million women and girls around the world have undergone genital mutilation, according to estimates from the World Health Organization. They include partial or total removal of the clitoris organs, labia minora or labia majora, and, in the most extreme cases, narrowing of the vaginal opening by suture.
Female genital mutilation is considered a human rights violation by the United Nations. Yet they continue to claim victims.
Full professor in the faculty of nursing at the University of Montreal, Bilkis Vissandjée has just returned from a mission to Guinea where she witnessed the extent of the scourge.
“At the maternity ward where I was able to collaborate with a doctor colleague, it turns out that the vast majority, if not all, of the women who came to give birth there were circumcised,” says the woman who is also a researcher at the Public Health Research Center at the University of Montreal.
Violence and control
Shamsa Sharawe became known thanks to a video published on the TikTok platform, which has now been viewed more than 12 million times.
In harsh words, the young woman recounts in detail her excision, which occurred in Somalia. “With a double-edged razor, they cut off my clitoris, my labia minora, my labia majora, then they sewed me back together,” she explains to the camera.
The pain was such that she will never be able to describe it: she was not given any painkillers during the excision.
“We were told that we were going to be more respected, cleaner women,” says Shamsa Sharawe, who now lives in the United Kingdom. Conversely, they were told that those who did not undergo the procedure were victims of bullying and social exclusion. “The clitoris was simply considered dirty,” laments the young woman.
Traditions, beliefs, religion: the reasons given to justify female genital mutilation are numerous and vary from one community to another.
Bilkis Vissandjée, however, prefers to describe them as violence “linked to systems of control of the body and sexuality of women and girls”.
“They undermine bodily integrity, health, dignity and autonomy,” underlines the professor, who collaborates with several organizations working with immigrants.
More than four hours on the operating table
Since her initial video, Shamsa Sharawe has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on social media who have followed her through the final stage of her recovery: genital reconstruction.
She traveled to Germany, where a surgeon gave her back what had been brutally taken from her: external genitalia.
PHOTO NARIMAN EL-MOFTY, ARCHIVES THE NEW YORK TIMES
Shamsa Sharawe is surrounded by a medical team after her genital reconstruction operation in a hospital in Germany, December 2023.
She agreed to be followed by a team from New York Timesin addition to having documented the entire process on his social networks.
“I’m finally going to have a clitoris.” I’ll finally know what my vulva originally looked like. And I will finally be able to live in a body that I do not consider my enemy,” she says in a video filmed in her hotel room the day before the operation.
The young woman remained on the operating table for more than four hours, the time it took for Dr Dan O’Dey to sculpt her new labia majora and form a new clitoral tip from part of the remaining clitoris.
“I have a vulva. I have a functioning vulva,” Shamsa Sharawe exclaimed shortly after waking up.
Since then, she has campaigned so that victims of female genital mutilation around the world have access to free, quality care.
Mme Vissandjée, who shares the same fight, highlights the courage of the young woman. “I believe it is necessary to raise awareness,” she emphasizes.
