The teenager who led the Guardian-backed campaign to end female genital mutilation (FGM) has been awarded a doctorate for her campaigning work.
Fahma Mohamed, 19, who will be a doctor of law, is one of the youngest people in the UK to receive the honorary degree, which will be presented by Bristol University on Friday.
Mohamed said she was ecstatic at being awarded the doctorate. “This has been seven years of hard work, we had so many obstacles to overcome and struggles at the beginning because it was so taboo,” she said. “It was fighting against something people were in denial about, it was hard for people to understand our point of view and for people in the community to be able to come out and say I am against this, too.
“But now people have completely changed. Of course there are still people out there who might not agree. But there are many people who have said that our work has broken the cycle of abuse in their family. I am so glad and thankful to everyone I have met on this journey, [who] has been willing to listen to me and others doing this work and given me the opportunity to help young girls out there.”
Mohamed was 14 when, along with the Bristol-based charity Integrate, she started the campaign to end the practice of FGM in Britain.
Two years later she fronted a national campaign with the Guardian and Change.org to stop the abuse. She met the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, who praised her work. Her campaign in the UK culminated in compulsory training for public sector workers to help teachers, doctors and social workers identify and assist girls at risk.
According to government figures, more than 20,000 British girls a year are thought to be at risk of being cut. Despite previous government promises to stop FGM, experts have warned that not only are girls still being taken abroad to be cut during the holiday “cutting season” but some are being mutilated in Britain.
Medical groups, trade unions and human rights organisations estimate that there are 66,000 UK victims of FGM in the UK and more than 24,000 girls under 15 are at risk. Victims can be just a few weeks old.
The fight against FGM, described by Germaine Greer in the late 1990s as “an attack on cultural identity”, became front-page news, endorsed by David Cameron. Jaha Dukureh, a 26-year-old American woman originally from the Gambia, was also key to putting the issue at the top of the political agenda. She said: “Because of our success with the Guardian in the Gambia, we are scaling up what we did in the Gambia to other parts of the world and empower the people that will bring real change.”
Dukureh along with the campaign platform Change.org, Equality Now and the Guardian have already persuaded the Obama administration to conduct a national survey on the prevalence of FGM in the US, where it is estimated that 500,000 girls are at risk.
