This week, Sierra Leone made history when the president signed into law the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2024. For a country with one of the highest rates of child marriage, teenage pregnancy and maternal mortality in the world, it is a crucial step forward, and a hard-won achievement for campaigners in west Africa.
Sierra Leone has 800,000 child brides – and of those more than half were married before the age of 15, so there is no question that this is groundbreaking legislation. It repeals previous ambiguous laws to explicitly name child marriage as illegal and underscores a clear commitment to girls’ rights. The legislation also establishes mechanisms for enforcement, ensuring that perpetrators – including the husband and those who enable the marriage such as parents and the person officiating – are held accountable by up to 15 years’ imprisonment, with survivors now able to seek justice and compensation.
Yet, despite these advances, the law falls short by missing the vital component in enacting the urgent reform needed to eradicate FGM, viewed by many as a precursor to marriage, regardless of age. Child marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM) are deeply interwoven, yet an amended Child Rights Act of 2024, laid out to protect girls from all forms of violence, including FGM, is still awaiting parliamentary approval. Girls’ rights campaigners and feminist activists are concerned about the move to separate these fundamental human rights issues from each other.
The more the child rights bill is stalled, the more it reveals itself as a dilution tactic of pushing against ending FGM – and the more sinister the interplay becomes between girls’ and young women’s rights and the anti-rights agenda. The rhetoric of those who refuse to criminalise FGM simply continues to harden conservative patriarchal norms and underpin far-right ideologies, wrapped in the cloak of tradition. With FGM seen as the precursor to marriage, the threat of child marriage will continue, despite the new law.
The devastating impact of FGM on girls’ and women’s psychological and physical health has been long identified internationally as a human rights violation. In April, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls named it as “one of the most pernicious forms of violence committed”, and yet current estimates show at least 230 million women and girls alive today have been subjected to FGM, and in Sierra Leone, it affects 83% of girls and women. Despite decades of campaigning by anti-FGM activists, it remains prevalent – shielded in the belief that to become a woman and be fit for marriage, girls must be cut, must be subordinate, their bodies violated and conditioned that this is the norm.
The handful of high-profile cases in Sierra Leone, including the most recent concerning the death of three girls, investigated by police in January, would have been ignored were it not for campaigners agitating and pushing it into international focus and advocating, “yes to culture, no to the harmful practice of cutting”. A Bloodless Rite, a film made by Purposeful and activists, powerfully illustrates feminist solidarity and possibility of sacred female spaces.
Like child marriage, FGM is bound up with, and inseparable from, patriarchal oppression. It is merely one manifestation of sexual violence against girls, and it exists within a broader context of cultural, structural, social, political and economic violence against women and girls. At its heart, the violence of FGM is born out of the same profound patriarchy that justifies the marriage of children.
A unified legal stance should be an imperative. Yet within this new law, that sits alongside celebrated policy milestones such as the Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Act 2023, and progressive education policies, the violence of FGM remains entrenched, normalised, and seemingly protected in the highest corridors of power.
It is clear, FGM is ingrained in vote canvassing and streaked through our politics. Further stalling will surely point to the global trend of rolling back progress on gender equality, such as the attempts to reverse hard-won gains in the repeal of the FGM law in the Gambia, and the ripple effect of the rightwing “family values” agenda across the continent.
Feminist movement partners, such as Purposeful, Not In My Name, and the Forum Against Harmful Practices, will continue to advocate and agitate in close dialogue with parliamentarians, to bring strategic litigation into the international spotlight, to pressure the government to support the strategy on the reduction of FGM, and to pass the all-encompassing Child Rights Act, pending since 2016. Only then, will we see transformative reform where girls’ bodies can fully be their own.
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Josephine Kamara is advocacy director of Purposeful, which funds girls’ rights activists in Sierra Leone and around the world
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In the UK, advice and support for those who fear they are at risk of FGM and for survivors can be found by emailing Forward, or calling 0208 960 4000, or contacting the NSPCC on 0800 028 3550, the Dahlia Project on 0207 281 9478 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, Sahiyo and the Asian Women’s Shelter have a support line for those who fear they are at risk of FGM and survivors. Call 1 877 751 0880, operating Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm