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Your Letters
 
Somali community must address the hidden issue of female circumcision

• I would like to express my condolences to the family of Mahir Osman. The senseless loss of a child must be the hardest loss to bear.
The following is to the Camden Somali Forum.
May I suggest that you look very closely at the reasons for these youths. There is, it seems to me, a problem in the Somali communities with regard to youths that has to be addressed from within.
And this problem will not be solved in isolation from the issue of how Somali females are treated. The behaviour of the youths is directly related to the way in which Somali women are expected to behave.
Your young women are bearing in silence the burden of an atrocious human rights abuse, namely female genital mutilation which you are not addressing, and the host society seems unable to face up to this either.
It’s not possible for these young girls to integrate with girls from other ethnic cultures because their experience of themselves as female is so alien to all other groups of females.
The most hopeful way forward our society has, indeed any society has is to hold in respect a set of cohesive moral values. This does not mean that all aspects of a cultural tradition must be obliterated or that the host community has all the best answers.
However, while an ethnic community continues to practice a tradition that contravenes the rights of a female child to her natural genitals, while it has this particularly horrific form of sexual control of its women, then its women cannot integrate and its men cannot be respected.
Young boys and girls who are allowed to mix as teenagers have the opportunity to learn how to respect each other as autonomous human beings of equal value, as is expected in a modern liberal democracy. Somali youths do not have this opportunity to mix with their own young girls and because of this they are not likely to understand how to mix nor indeed would they be seen as welcome with other young women either and so “all-male” groups are their only option.
Anyone who has seen a football crowd knows that the male en masse is not a pretty sight to behold. They become very aggressive and threatening. One of the advantages of the modern liberal democracy is that women and girls are found everywhere and have a civilising affect on the male’s tendency to aggression.
True integration with respect occurs not when the males only are allowed into the host society but when the females are allowed to relate to each other too. This integration is almost impossible with women so badly mutilated as to be unable to actually enjoy the experience that women from all other cultures enjoy.
I suggest that you will not get at the problem of your aggressive youths unless you look at the manner in which you are treating your young girls.
E Chambers
Address supplied
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