Author and advocate against gender-based violence
As an author and founder of the Global Woman P.E.A.C.E Foundation, Angela Peabody has spent most of her life confronting and advocating against gender-based violence. Her newest novel, “When the Games Froze,” confronts the issue of female genital mutilation. She sat down with us to explain more about the practice and her inspiration for the book.
What inspired you to write your latest book about female genital mutilation?
My personal life was affected by domestic violence when my sister, Rose Peabody, died at the hands of her abusive husband. He beat her to death many years ago in Liberia, and I developed zero-tolerance for any type of violence against women and girls. [Specifically] female genital mutilation, I was introduced to it because I was born and raised in Liberia, West Africa. When I was eight years old, I found out that it happened to a little girl who played with me and my friends. She disappeared and we didn’t know what had happened to her. When she reappeared, she was withdrawn. She was not the same. We were confused because we didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t realize what had happened until many years later.
Were you hoping to spread awareness when you wrote the story?
Yes, because I found that very little is known about female genital mutilation, or FGM, in the United States. I decided to write the book and fictionalize it, but to make it interesting by including the No. 1 sport in America, football, and the No. 1 religion in America, Christianity. People always ask me before they read the book, “How in the world did you combine those three?” I wanted to make it interesting for them to read as a story, but also include those facts and statistics so they could understand the seriousness of this practice.
What are some of the consequences of female genital mutilation?
FGM is the intentional removal of the external female genitalia for nonmedical reasons. There are four types of FGM. One is called the pharaonic type, after the pharaohs in Egypt; the official term is infibulation. When a girl has had infibulation, they remove not only the clitoris, but the labia majora and the labia minora. Then, whatever skin is left, they pull together and stitch up, leaving only a tiny opening that will accommodate urination. All of them are awful, but to me, that is the worst kind. There’s another type that involves removing only the clitoris, and there is another type where they remove the clitoris and the labia majora, but not the labia minora.
Now, they have all these different types, but they all totally disfigure the vagina. FGM causes swelling and cysts, so when a woman goes to have a baby, she cannot have a vaginal birth. She has to have a Cesarean section, and this is where it becomes life threatening. If she is still in the village, and a medical doctor or medical personnel are not there to see that she’s in labor and cannot give natural birth, she and the child will die. FGM is one of the reasons for infant and maternal mortality. And the health risks are severe even before a girl matures and becomes a woman. Right after it’s done to her, she can hemorrhage to death if she’s not given the proper attention. It’s done in nonclinical environments and it’s done without anesthesia. When you mutilate a little girl to that extent, she can pass out.She might not live. She might bleed to death, or she might get infected and go into convulsions and die.
Do you consider FGM to be one of the most pressing issues of gender-based violence facing women today?
Yes. I received a release [recently] about the president’s administration approving funding for major research on FGM in the United States, and somebody had responded to the release and said, “It’s the dumbest thing that I’ve ever seen come out of Washington when there are African-American girls here who need the money to be educated and you are approving this money for research on somebody else’s culture.” I was appalled at that.
It’s so pressing for the President and U.S. Congress to spend money on FGM research because it is not affecting, as the writer who sent the email said, “somebody else’s culture.” You have American girls who are at risk. Over 228,000 girls in America are at risk of being mutilated because they have immigrant parents, but they were born here, so they’re U.S. citizens. Whether you were just born here, first generation, or you were fifth generation born here, I think every U.S. citizen has to be protected by the United States government. It’s no longer the situation that FGM is being done to people in faraway lands. It’s being done to American girls right here in the United States.
How was your situation and your friend’s different, so that she received it but your were spared?
Education. My parents, had they been strictly traditional people. [They] would not have spared my sisters and I. Most definitely not. However, they were educated, and they would not allow that to happen to us.
If you tell the boys at an early age that it’s wrong to cut off a girl’s genitals, they will grow up knowing that it’s wrong and they will not do it. I think putting that message into the schools and building it into their curriculums will help to end this thing.–Kate Masters
(January 2015)