Stop Female Genital Mutilation.

I did not see the programme on TV last night on female genital mutilation. I did read the comments on twitter. Its a subject I never thought I would blog about but I find I must for all sorts of reasons....not least the comments about it being a mainly Muslim practice and done in the name of religion.....It is neither of those things...
For ten years in Rochdale in the seventies I taught English as a second language at a teaching centre....most of our pupils were Muslim. Many were from the villages in Bangladesh who had lived in poverty through various troubled times.
They arrived with little or no English and the centre was set up to remedy this.
After a year we found that one of our pupils was pregnant with no idea how or why....The girls knew fine where babies came from having seen birth at various times. They just had no idea how the seed got there...sounds far fetched but it was predominantly true.
They needed information and I was given the task of teaching them about sex. The parents permission had to be sought and they gave it freely...
I sent for some books on the subject but most of my weekly talks were illustrated by my drawings....the only way of reaching girls with a very limited English vocabulary...
They soon became known as Misses dirty pictures and I was careful to take them home with me...
Once the girls trusted me enough to start talking they were very open with a lot of laughter and giggling but we communicated well.
None of them had been cut.  I had read about it in the papers and asked them outright sometimes....I even talked to the Imam once...he had also heard of it but was adamant it was not done in Pakistan.
I have been horrified by the extant to which it is done and the amount of tissue sometimes cut away.
The only reason behind this seems to be to stop females from having any pleasure in the sexual act!
To read that some girls are sewn up  and have to be cut again for sexual intercourse and then again to allow the birth of a baby is just so appalling that it is time to call for legislation to try to stop this...
In France apparently people are being jailed for mutilating  small girls, sometimes as young as 6 or 7. Strangely women are the ones who cut their own sex....
If this is being done in our country then we must have the power to stop this...
God gave us all our organs....taking pleasure in sex and love is no more wicked than enjoying a good meal...unless of course its done to excess...
Cutting off the female genitalia is just  barbaric .
And it has nothing to do with religion....