A female Kenyan doctor has approached the court to decriminalize Female Genital mutilation (FGM) for women after the age of 18 years.
The doctor, Tatu Kamau wants the court to allow women above 18-years-of-age to be able to choose whether they want to practise FGM, a highly regressive and patriarchal practise, or not. The doctor demands the decriminalization with the thought that women should have the right to choose what happens with their bodies.
Kamu is representing herself at the Nairobi High Court to annul the Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation Act 2011. She argues that the practice is an age-old Kenyan tradition, and the ban is a violation of women’s right to exercise her cultural beliefs. She had also filed a petition stating the same in 2017.
She says, "Women who took their daughters for circumcision were not taking them there to destroy them. Those children were not thrown away afterward, they were celebrated as respected members of the society. To use the word in our context suggests that it is malicious and that we are intentionally damaging our females. To me, it is very wrong,"
Kamau is also pushing for medical practitioners and certified traditional cutters to be allowed to take the practise forward. "We could have had limitations of where you can do it, when, who can do it for you and how ...Those things could have been controlled ... such that you have certain months of the year and that is the only time you can do and it can only be done by certain professionals, those are the only people who are allowed to do it," Kamau said.
