I often say I would never recommend activism as a career path for anyone. It is truly gruelling, dangerous, and often thankless work. Yet for some of us, there is no other choice.

As a survivor of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) myself, campaigning against it has never been easy. What has kept me going are the many victories we’ve had in the years since I started, along with the desperate need to protect my daughter, which catalysed this path for me.

However, after nearly two decades of fighting to end violence against women and girls, the COVID-19 pandemic has absolutely exhausted me. It is heartbreaking to see us moving backwards, to see the attention turn elsewhere, the momentum slow, and the money dwindle and be redirected. We are now at risk to lose so much progress, and the fire of this fight needs to be stoked.

How can we begin to understand the scale of the devastation of the pandemic? How do we find the hidden impacts obscured behind shame, stigma, and oppression?

Before the pandemic, we knew that every 11 seconds a girl became a survivor of FGM. In the wake of the pandemic, we know this number has now increased drastically as part of the explosion of violence against women and girls during our year of isolation. Staying at home protects us from the virus, but for many women and girls home is not a safe place.

In fact, staying at home can be incredibly dangerous — to the point that the UN termed the uptick in violence against women a “shadow pandemic”.

Read the full article about Female Genital Mutilation by Dr. Leyla Hussein at Global Citizen.