- 2 years ago
Nimco Ali V3 Long
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00:00 There are about 70 million girls that are about to be born between now and 2030 who are at risk of FGM.
00:06 Most of those girls are going to be born to adolescent young women who are forced into marriage,
00:10 who don't have access to economic opportunities.
00:12 If we support those young women, especially on the continent of Africa,
00:17 then not only do we allow them to have children when they want to have them,
00:20 but then they raise those children the way they want to raise them.
00:23 And the ultimate thing about that is about ending FGM so they wouldn't cut their daughters.
00:27 So ultimately it is a tangible reality, but we have to invest in African women.
00:32 And that's kind of been my passion in order to achieve that.
00:35 It's been your passion for quite a few years.
00:39 At what point did you kind of personally decide to get involved in the campaign
00:44 or to even create the campaign in the UK against FGM?
00:48 Yeah, so basically for me, it was kind of like I'm the only person that kind of has lived here.
00:54 So, you know, I've lived in the UK without FGM and I've lived in the UK as an FGM survivor.
00:58 So for me, I had that kind of duality in the whole kind of conversation.
01:02 So I kind of had this conversation throughout my life.
01:06 And I went through every single sphere of public sector.
01:08 So I went through education as a girl with FGM and tried to talk to my teachers.
01:13 I went through the NHS. I was an employee.
01:16 I was all those things I could be. But ultimately it was something that was like,
01:19 you know, I was consistently othered.
01:21 It was I think it was the birth of my niece, who's now turned 13, that kind of thought,
01:26 you know what, I just don't want her to be safe from FGM because I'm going to protect her from FGM.
01:30 I wanted her to be safe from FGM in a kind of holistic way where she was protected by the law of this country.
01:36 And that was all I wanted to do was to be able to make my niece and other girls like her safe from FGM in the UK,
01:44 which I think we've done to a certain extent.
01:47 And so just to paint a kind of picture about what was the situation before then and when you were growing up,
01:53 what was the legal situation and the policy situation?
01:58 And kind of what did people, did people even understand what you were talking about when you said FGM?
02:04 Yes. So at the beginning, they did and you had to kind of say female genital mutilation.
02:09 So you had to always consistently say what it was and explain.
02:12 And you had to spend a lot of time explaining it as a form of child abuse
02:16 and a form of violence against women and girls.
02:18 But when I was growing up, ironically, FGM has been illegal since 1985.
02:22 So it's been illegal to carry FGM in this country, but it hasn't been illegal to take girls out of the country.
02:28 So extraterritorial cutting was was actually just legal and then girls would come back in.
02:34 And that was what girls like me and most of my friends in Cardiff where we were taken out of the country and had FGM.
02:39 But then when, like, you know, in the like, you know, early to late 90s, there were still girls being cut in the UK.
02:47 But there was a lot of there was a lot of cultural relevantism in the sense of the fact that, well, these people don't know any better.
02:53 And I and I and I remember like people who were charged in terms of being able to look after me.
02:59 So whether they were like police officers, teachers, like health and health workers,
03:04 consistently always other than saying, well, you know what? It's a horrible thing, but it's your culture.
03:08 And that kind of made me a second class citizen in a country which I thought was my own,
03:13 which I felt really like, you know, happy to be in. And I was like, you know, like assimilating in.
03:20 So the whole point was the fact that I was to be protected from everything but that.
03:24 So I found that really uncomfortable. And that was something kind of that marred my growing up.
03:29 So when I grew up, it wasn't about when I grew up, when I ended up becoming an adult and being able to have the privileges
03:36 and the abilities to work in the public sector, it wasn't about articulating what FGM was to people,
03:42 was to basically actually saying that, you know, FGM is, but I need you to care about it.
03:47 And I think that was the kind of emphasis on the campaign I did.
03:50 It wasn't about explaining the types of FGM and everything else.
03:54 It's like it's a physical act of harm that's happening to children.
03:58 We need to be able to prevent it.
04:00 And it was really hard to try to kind of convince a lot of people at the beginning,
04:04 because I think they'd kind of seen themselves again in this cultural relative, like, you know, space of thinking,
04:09 well, am I being racist in questioning FGM?
04:12 But the irony is that in ignoring FGM, that you actually being racist and making young British girls feel like they weren't British at all.
04:20 And in fact, so you've advocated all along for quite a child-centred approach to FGM.
04:27 And did you ever face any backlash because of that?
04:30 Yeah, 100 percent. It's like, for me, it was about the child, because ultimately a lot of the women who are survivors like myself,
04:39 then it was the next stage about actually advocating for emotional and health support for them and that whole kind of thing.
04:46 But ultimately, it was about identifying the child and protecting the child, because children don't choose to be born into a cultural identity.
04:53 But children are born into this country to be able to be protected like every other child was.
04:57 So we had this kind of separation.
04:59 And when it came to FGM, it was like, well, we'll find we'll vaccinate you, we'll educate you,
05:04 but we won't protect you when it comes to issues that we think are too cultural.
05:08 And I thought that was a little bit problematic because the whole point is that there is no difference between NIMCO and Claire.
05:14 That were both in this like, you know, you wouldn't want that to happen to a girl from a from a Caucasian community.
05:20 So why are we allowing it to happen to a girl from an African background?
05:24 And I think being able to be confident to have that conversation, because I've sat with it for almost 20 years before I articulated that I was a survivor of FGM, made it a lot easier.
05:34 I wasn't I wasn't attacking people.
05:36 I was just trying to actually make the logical conversation of what is this cultural kind of difference in their heads,
05:44 which ironically, I think those that perpetrate in FGM really created that.
05:49 I get this thing at the same time when people still want to be able to do awareness raising about FGM in the UK.
05:55 And I was like, it's really interesting that I can know that people or communities are impacted by FGM are able to do the menial tasks of assimilating into this country.
06:06 But yet you're telling me that they don't understand FGM is wrong.
06:08 So I think sometimes we have to be able to question ourselves in the way that we look at the perpetrators and we forget about focusing on the victim.
06:17 And what about kind of reactions from within your family or within kind of your home situation when you first started to speak about it?
06:25 Yeah, it was it was it was quite horrific.
06:28 It's and I was just saying that the first ever interview that I did with my face and my name to it was in the Evening Standard.
06:34 And this is just like, you know, 11 years ago.
06:36 And I remember, you know, thinking, well, this is not going to go far because it's like, you know, it's a London newspaper.
06:42 It's like, you know, I just want to have this conversation to Londoners.
06:46 Ultimately, it's a global city and it's a global newspaper.
06:49 So the pushback I got was really, really horrific.
06:54 But I kind of stood I stood my ground because ultimately I knew I was doing something right.
06:58 And there was this idea, the fact that I should be ashamed about the experiences that I had as a survivor of FGM,
07:04 as opposed to the people who were pro or perpetrating and should be embarrassed.
07:09 So, yeah, it was it was a really horrific, like at least four or five years where I was massively alienated from my own ethnic community.
07:17 I was like, you know, I was alienated from members of my family.
07:21 But I kind of I stood my ground because I knew I was on the right side of history.
07:25 And I was also privileged enough to be able to say, well, if people don't change their minds, that I can kind of survive without them.
07:32 And ultimately, I had at one point reconcile myself to to be in an exile.
07:37 But it's like, you know, it's changed since then.
07:41 And how so talk me through after that initial kind of interview, like how did it go from that to kind of a formal, a more formal kind of campaign?
07:51 And I think it was just because I was very dogmatic about it, because I just thought now that now that I've done it,
07:57 I'm actually going to go and like, you know, just push this to the car, like, you know, to the forefront and really get those things.
08:03 So first of all, I wanted FGM to be recognised as a form of child abuse.
08:09 I want FGM to be acknowledged as a form of violence against women and girls, because this is like the fact that it was a gender specific kind of issue.
08:17 I wanted there to be health, like, you know, clinics opened up because, again,
08:21 what we did with in terms of the NHS and also social services and education is that we put it into this complete different box.
08:31 And we want I would like, you know, that the complications that come from FGM are vast.
08:36 But ultimately, you don't have to be like an extreme expert.
08:40 Every single gynaecologist and health visitor could be trained in order to deal with the complications of FGM.
08:46 But because we kind of like put it in this again into these little tiny issues was the fact that women were having to travel from Cardiff to London in order to get support.
08:54 So what happened was that NHS ended up in England and Wales putting together health clinics for everyone.
09:00 And then there was a target for that in the sense that they were funded for four years at the time.
09:05 And somebody was like, yeah, but we need these to be funded for like, you know, for a long term.
09:08 And I was like, but the whole point is we're aiming to end FGM.
09:12 So I was very, very much focused on seeing to make sure that if I was in every stage of life again.
09:18 So as a child, so when I was seven and I came back to the UK, I was very articulate and open about my FGM.
09:24 I told my teacher, but I completely kind of like shocked her, I think.
09:28 So again, it was about giving the teachers the training enough to be able to deal with that, to be able to say so.
09:33 So if a child comes in and says, miss, this this has happened to me and this is their kind of safe space, how do you take that forward?
09:40 So for me, coming from a policy background, it was always about the legislative change.
09:45 But then what was really exciting was that in 2013, the UK government said that they were going to start doing work on the international campaign around FGM.
09:55 And again, to be really be able to ensure that we are able to use our global position in order to be able to end FGM globally.
10:02 So it was it was because of the fact that I thought I had nothing to lose because I did that first interview.
10:08 I'd got the death threats. I got the I got the kind of like, you know, the emotional punch in the gut that I was expecting.
10:17 And then I thought, you know what, I've done it. Like, you know, they want to be able to break me.
10:21 They want me to be scared and not to talk about it again.
10:25 But I'm going to show them and I'm going to make sure that I can know that that girls in this country and then hopefully globally will be safe from the act.
10:32 And what do you think? I mean, looking back now, what do you think were the kind of major wins from that initial push?
10:40 Yeah. So I think the major wins were basically getting.
10:45 So again, it was like I always say it was. So it was the health secretary of state at the time.
10:51 Jeremy Hartley picked up the evening standard that called me into his office, then did the fact that he was going to do data because we'd already been using,
10:59 I can know random numbers for how many women were affected by FGM.
11:02 So to basically make FGM pathways through the NHS as a reality in order to be able to see women who who who've had FGM as a second secondary thought of the NHS,
11:14 but also part of the NHS, that was an incredible thing.
11:17 I think another incredible win was the fact that Theresa May, when she was prime minister.
11:22 So we wanted to really add FGM to the Children's Act in order to be able to make sure that children are protected and seen.
11:29 Because at the moment, many of the families where FGM could happen look like normal families from the outs.
11:35 Like, you know, there's none of those kind of children at risk factors.
11:39 So but if you put the act of FGM into the Children's Act, then it makes it like a like a like an easier threshold in order for people to be able to engage.
11:50 So that was going to go through as a private member's bill.
11:53 I kind of get emotional about it because I put myself together.
11:56 And I know because it was just it was just it was just one of those things.
11:59 The fact that it was it took such an incredible long time to kind of get that.
12:03 So talk to me about how you came to set up the Five Foundation and what kind of led to yeah, what kind of led to you making that a focus?
12:15 Yeah. So basically, so the Five Foundation is a global partnership.
12:19 So to end FGM and like, you know, in 2013, when the UK government said, oh, we're going to fund ending FGM.
12:28 And we're going to put all this money in it with a great because that's what was always needed.
12:31 It was like a focus on a kind of, you know, more more money towards the issue.
12:36 But then what happens is that very like, you know, solemn.
12:39 Do we ever actually get that money to the women on the ground, the women who need it?
12:43 So when that first program, like, you know, I was invested in, I thought, OK, let's do this.
12:47 And then that didn't work out. And then it got re-invested again in 2018.
12:54 And I thought, OK, fine, we're going to redo it again.
12:55 We're going to really like this time to focus on like, you know, African women, like, you know, the women who are at the forefront.
13:01 But yet again, it was this there's a level of like sexism and racism when it comes to the international development space,
13:06 where the fact that we want to be able to give money, but we never able to think that we can actually give it to black and African women.
13:13 So ultimately setting up the FIVE Foundation was to say that from this side of the world, we've been successful,
13:20 but let's actually help the women who are the forefront of it.
13:23 So really getting money to the grassroot activism.
13:25 And it's about thinking locally, but like, you know, thinking locally, but acting globally.
13:31 And the issue is the fact that there are we've got new stats are coming out today, which is like 12000 girls are cut every single day.
13:39 And most of those, if not every single one of those are on the African continent.
13:43 So the reality is that we're not going to be able to end FGM unless we invest in African women on the front line.
13:49 And that is what the FIVE Foundation is about. It's about saying that there is enough money, but the commitment is not there.
13:56 And there's also not that kind of brave, like, you know, being brave and being innovative from foundations and philanthropy in order for us to be able to invest in the developing countries.
14:09 And we talked a little bit at the beginning about kind of arriving at that, ending FGM by 2030.
14:15 What do you think still needs to be done over the kind of next six years?
14:18 What are the main or what are the main kind of positive steps that people can be taking?
14:25 What governments can be taking?
14:27 Yeah, the first thing is like the governments can be taking is the fact that I know it's difficult for governments to be able to give directly.
14:32 So the UK government can actually work collectively with FIVE Foundations and with philanthropy in order to be able to give to grassroots organisations.
14:41 So that's what we're interested in.
14:42 We're not interested in this like, you know, hashtag of end FGM and February the 6th being a focus on the fact that what the numbers are.
14:49 But those numbers are actually all individuals, that there are people.
14:52 So the reality is, if we want to save the next 70 million girls from this horrific act of violence, we have to be able to invest in African women.
15:02 So that is the key thing that I really, really want to be able to emphasise.
15:05 It's the fact that each and every one of us as taxpayers, as voters, like, you know, we need to change the way that the global south and the global north actually connect.
15:14 And the fact that the only people that are going to end FGM are going to be African women.
15:18 And those African women are on the continent, obviously.
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