Young girl told to imagine she was a princess during ‘genital mutilation’

Female genital mutilation: Young girl told to imagine she was a princess during ‘genital mutilation’

Sarah Crawford
The Daily Telegraph
September 16, 2015 

A GIRL who was allegedly the victim of female genital mutilation told authorities she was told to close her eyes and imagine she was a princess in a garden when she was allegedly cut.

“She told me to think of that so I didn’t feel as much but I did feel it a little bit ... it hurt,” the girl, aged 8, said in a recorded interview with a police officer and a social worker at her primary school.

The interview, recorded on August 29, 2012, was played to a jury today at the first trial for female genital mutilation in NSW.

On trial are the girls’ mother, 38, along with a retired midwife, 71, and a high-ranking Sheik from the Shia Islamic sect Dawoodi Bohra.

The mother and the midwife, known only as A2 and KM to protect the identities of the girls, have pleaded not guilty to two counts of female genital mutilation which carries a maximum penalty of 21 years.

The religious leader, Sheik Shabbir Mohammedbhai Vaziri, 59, has pleaded not guilty to being an accessory after the fact to female genital mutilation.

In the interview, the social worker asked the girl, known as C1, if she knew about the Dawoodi Bohra procedure of khatna where a girls private parts are cut.

“Yes,” she said. “It is because it has happened to me.”

C1 went on to describe how khatna was performed on her when she was seven by an unknown woman in a Wollongong house while her mother, grandmother and her great aunt stood by.

She told the social worker and a police officer that in her culture, “it has to happen to every girl, it has to be at seven, I think it has to be.”

C1 said she next met the woman when the same procedure was carried out on her six-year-old sister at their family home in Sydney during the school holidays in 2012.

The Crown alleges the mother arranged for the midwife to carry out the procedures on her daughters which is believed to have taken place in October 2009 and July 2012.

In his opening to the jury, barrister for KM Stuart Bouveng told the jury that she only touched the girls with forceps for a few seconds during the procedure.

He said a medical examination of the girls at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead showed there was “no evidence of scarring,” and the genital tissue looked “normal.”

The Crown alleged that when police began investigating the practice of female genital mutilation among the Dawoodi Bohra Sheik Vaziri told people to tell say they do not believe in the practice.

The Dawoodi Bohra are a Shia Islamic sect with about a million followers worldwide who mostly live in western India and Pakistan.

C1 and her sister C2, now aged 11 and nine, will give evidence on Wednesday.