Dar Es Salaam - A baby
girl born on Christmas Day in a remote region of Tanzania was
subjected to female genital mutilation by her great-grandmother
and died a few days later, police said.
The girl was born to a 16-year-old single mother in the
Manyara region of northern Tanzania. Five days after her birth,
her 70-year-old great-grandmother performed the ritual which led
to complications and the infant died in hospital.
Francis Massawe, Manyara Regional Police Commander, told the
Thomson Reuters Foundation on Tuesday the mother and
great-grandmother had been arrested and a criminal investigation
was underway.
FGM is illegal in Tanzania and campaigners say many
communities are rejecting the harmful traditional practice.
However, the Network Against Female Genital Mutilation
(NAFGEM) that works with communities in the Kilimanjaro and
Manyara regions, said there was evidence families who were still
cutting their girls were starting to doing it at younger ages.
"Girls used to be mutilated around the age of 10 years old
and it was a traditional practice to prepare them for marriage,"
Francis Selasini, executive coordinator of NAFGEM, told the
Thomson Reuters Foundation.
"Those who are still cutting are performing it on girls who
are younger to avoid prosecution."
NAFGEM staff visited the baby in hospital and took the
teenage mother to one of the NGO's shelters, but she was later
arrested when the baby died, he said.
Campaigners said uneducated teenage mothers were coming
under pressure to allow their baby girls to be mutilated.
"Some see FGM as a tradition that must be kept," Selasini
said.
An estimated 200 million girls and women worldwide have been
subjected to FGM. In Africa, it is thought that 3 million girls
are at risk every year.
FGM often causes a host of health problems. In some cases
girls may bleed to death or die from infections. Others may
suffer fatal childbirth complications later in life.
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