SINGAPORE, April 4 — Amid the crowds of people at the Kampong Gelam Ramadan bazaar looking for food or clothes for Hari Raya, a group was making its rounds distributing booklets advocating its cause: To end the practice of female genital cutting (FGC) in Singapore.

The group, which calls itself End Female Genital Cutting Singapore, is a community-led movement founded in 2020 by local Muslim-raised women and activists.

A pilot study conducted by the group on 360 Muslim women in October 2020 found that more than three quarters of its respondents had undergone FGC.

The group's booklet states that FGC is also known as sunat perempuan or female circumcision, and that it involves the cutting of some genital tissue.

The group hopes to abolish the practice by dispelling what it described as “myths” surrounding the practice. These include the commonly held belief that female circumcision is compulsory in Islam, or that it is different from female genital mutilation (FGM), which is predominantly done in Africa and Arab states.

Asked for its stance on FGC, the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (Muis) said that it “holds the position that any form of procedure which has been medically proven to bring harm, including female genital mutilation or FGM, should be avoided”.

It added that it does not have data on the prevalence of FGC or FGM in Singapore.

When TODAY joined the advocacy group at the Kampong Gelam Ramadan Bazaar on Friday (March 31) night, it was distributing its booklets along Kandahar Street.

Produced in-house, the 39-page booklet — titled “10 myths of female genital cutting” — addresses what the group perceives to be “common misconceptions” about the practice and challenges oft-cited Islamic literature that has been used to justify the practice.

Among the “myths” listed are that female circumcision is “compulsory or highly encouraged in Islam”, and that it is a “safe procedure when done by a doctor”.

Saza Faradilla, 28, one of the founding members of the movement, told TODAY that this is the first year it is distributing these booklets at the Ramadan bazaar.

In 2022, it had given out its booklets outside some mosques, but had not targeted the bazaars as it was operating on a smaller scale then.

The group sees its outreach at the Ramadan bazaars as a kind of grassroots or “guerilla” advocacy strategy, where it primarily reaches out to a demographic whom it believes is most impacted by the practice.

“The Ramadan bazaar draws a crowd that is younger, that is a bit more hip — that is our target audience. We are not reaching out to people who are very, very set in their views about FGC,” said Saza.

“Who we are hoping to reach out to are people who are unsure, who maybe have never given a second thought to FGC.”

The campaigners said that they had not received negative feedback from bazaar-goers since they began their outreach efforts. In fact, they believe that some of those who took their booklets might have been expecting a different type of information.

“They might be thinking ‘oh, this might be a booklet on where to find FGC in Singapore, where to find the doctors who do FGC’ — which is also good, because then these are the people who might pass these booklets to maybe their children or their nieces and nephews, and kind of unsuspectingly pass on information to counter FGC, in the hopes of encouraging it,” said Saza.

What bazaar-goers say

Bazaar-goers who had accepted the booklets said that it was the first time they had received materials on FGC in a public setting.

“In terms of being at the bazaar setting itself, I think for some people, they might feel like it is out of place, furthermore as it is in the month of Ramadan,” said Nurul Atiqah, a 25-year-old analyst who said that female circumcision is something her family had practised for generations.

“For me, in a nutshell, it really depends on who you approach,” she added, stating that the older generation might not receive the information as positively as younger people.

Hazimah, who works in the field of education and declined to give her full name, said that she never thought of circumcision as “something that is violating, or something that is not supposed to happen in the first place”.

“So when I educated myself further, I realised this is something I don’t want to do if I had a daughter,” the 25-year-old added.

On the campaigners doing their outreach at the Ramadan bazaar, Hazimah called it a “very good opportunity” to reach their target audience.

“Most of these people are the Malay-Muslim community, and most of them are probably someone who have gone through the sunat perempuan, and probably they might not know about it.” She added that she usually just seeks out information about the practice online.

A social worker who wants to be known only as Fizah said that she was “quite shocked” about the topic being broached in Ramadan.

“In this holy month, such sensitive topics shouldn’t be brought up during this month, I feel,” said the 30-year-old. “Maybe if they do it before or after, it’s fine.”

United Nations’ stance on female genital mutilation

The United Nations' Population Fund, the body's sexual and reproductive health agency, said that girls and women who have undergone FGM “live predominately in sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab states, but FGM is also practised in select countries in Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America”.

Since 2012, the UN General Assembly had designated February 6 as the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation.

It describes FGM as “all procedures that involve altering or injuring the female genitalia for non-medical reasons”. On December 20 that same year, the assembly passed a resolution banning the practice.

The UN Human Rights Council had also adopted a resolution on July 17, 2020 pertaining to the elimination of FGM, with the aim of reaching zero tolerance by 2030.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights describes FGM as a “harmful practice as it constitutes a serious violation of women’s rights” in a story published on its site.

A 33-year-old co-founder of the Singapore campaigners, who wants to be known only as Filzah, believes that it is the right time to advocate on this issue, “looking at just the global scale of things, where everyone all over the world is also being more vocal about women’s issues and gender-based violence”.

Saza added: “I hope that the conversations that we start about FGC don’t just end specifically about this practice, but also go beyond it — to thinking about what does consent look like in Muslim communities... and how can we bring back the Islamic tradition of critical thinking, of questioning, versus today — what we see is more dogmatic beliefs.” ― TODAY