Overcoming: My Fight Against FGM

By Ann-Marie Wilson

Three million girls across the world are at risk of female genital mutilation (FGM) each year.

When Ann-Marie Wilson met a girl named Fatima in West Darfur, who had experienced FGM at the age of five and was pregnant by the age of ten, she knew she had to do something. Her life’s work since then has been geared toward speaking out against FGM, as well as supporting the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of as many survivors as possible. 

Built on the experience of more than 3,000 FGM survivors’ stories as well as meetings with heads of state and the Pope, Overcoming tells the compelling story of how Ann-Marie leaned on her Christian faith through her darkest moments to build 28 Too Many. This international organisation offers hope to the millions of girls who, just like Fatima, are at risk of FGM each year.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Release date: Jun 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781800300255

Ann-Marie Wilson

Ann-Marie is a psychologist and training consultant with over 30 years of experience. She is the founder and director of 28 Too Many, an anti-female genital mutilation charity, and she is a regular speaker on FGM and violence against women. Ann-Marie has been awarded the British Citizen Award in recognition of her work researching and campaigning against FGM and was honoured to be one of four women chosen by Good Housekeeping Magazine for its feature on Modern Heroines. As well as leading 28 Too Many, Ann-Marie is a CMS Mission Partner and in 2017, Ann-Marie was licensed as a Lay Pioneer Minister in the Church of England, Diocese of London. She is also an Honourable Chaplain at Marie Curie Hospice Hampstead and works with St Barnabas Church in north London where she visits parishioners who are unwell. She is the author of Overcoming, which describes how Ann-Marie leaned on her Christian faith during her darkest moments to offer hope to survivors of FGM.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

She stood in a doorway with her newborn in her arms, wearing her best dress and a pair of simple sandals, a small bag by her side. I smiled and she gave me a wan smile in return. Her baby was only a few weeks old, yet she had been asked to travel by truck to live with a distant auntie (her late mother’s cousin) in the far south of Sudan.

Just a few weeks beforehand, we had found Fatima, a ten-year-old girl, alone in the scrubland of West Darfur. We had been travelling out from our medical camp during a visit to a nearby community project. Fatima was at least seven months pregnant, and we learned she had conceived at the age of ten, following a rape carried out by the Janjaweed militia. She had been left for dead, and was the only person to survive the armed raid that had left her family, village, and community dead. Rape was commonly used in the West Darfur conflict as a way of subjugating the people, and for ethnic cleansing reasons.

Fatima was alone. She had experienced infibulation, a Type III female genital mutilation (FGM), at five years old, having been sewn up to preserve her purity for marriage.¹ We gave her a safe delivery and arranged for her to be sent to her nearest relative, whom she had never met.

I looked at her, worried about her future. Fatima had survived female genital mutilation, a form of child abuse, at the age of five. By the age of ten she had been a victim of conflict rape. She faced obstructed labour, trauma, and complications in childbirth, and problems with sexual intimacy for the rest of her life. She may also have ended up with a fistula (a tear, which leads to incontinence) in future pregnancies. It seemed unlikely that Fatima would make a good union, as she was unchaste. She was likely to become a fourth wife and servant to an older wife in her extended family, or to be sold on to another, probably older, man.

What could I do? As a white, London-based human resources consultant, I was neither doctor nor nurse. I spoke only a smattering of Arabic and Swahili, and I wasn’t sure how I could help stop this happening to other girls like Fatima. I called out to God and asked, Who will help girls like this? To my amazement, I heard an audible voice say, You will.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this, but I extended my Sudanese visa and headed back to Kenya for a short trip to our aid work head office. As it turned out, I broke my foot that weekend and flew back to the UK as planned. While I was recovering, planning to return, I learned that Darfur’s troubles had escalated, and that all non-essential staff were being sent out from the project. As I nursed my broken foot, I had more time to think about Fatima – in fact, I couldn’t get her out of my mind. It was as if a shard of glass had pierced my heart and could not be dislodged.

Over the last twenty years of focusing on FGM, forced marriage, reproductive health, and gender-based violence, I have come to understand the roots of FGM, including its links to patriarchy and misogyny. I have become clearer on what works and what doesn’t in different development contexts.

Despite not initially wanting to run my own charity, 28 Too Many, it became clear that this was a necessary step to raise the funds needed to complete the work. My life experience as an entrepreneur, psychologist, coach, and board member enabled me to put into action many of the skills required to launch the charity, which happened in 2012 – two years after the full-time project started. I used the first two years as a time of training, and was accountable under the umbrella of Church Mission Society (CMS) as a pioneer in its Africa team.

I was lucky enough to be awarded a Tearfund Inspired Individual scholarship from 2011–15. The four years of mentoring, training, and support, alongside other pioneer charity leaders in the making, helped me avoid the burnout that would likely otherwise have followed the long hours and overseas travel.

As 28 Too Many grew, the board meeting of four trustees around my kitchen table in 2012 made way for a board of ten at pro bono London offices. The board grew and was shaped, moulded, and reshaped into the professional board we have today. During this season, I spent up to four months a year in Africa, clocking up fourteen African country visas on my passport, and a TripAdvisor rating of having visited more than 60% of the planet.

Just as every collection of stories contains great joy and amazing examples of hope, there are also accounts of hardship and setbacks. Colleagues have come and gone; some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have chosen not to collaborate; reputation challenges have been contested; and risky opportunities have been offered – some of which did not pay off. Friendships in this sector have waxed and waned, but all the while our work has grown in reputation and become increasingly useful to high-profile users of our reports.

We became known for our two-pronged approach to ending FGM: first, to provide research that would inform change agents, country leaders, the UN, European and UK governments, faith leaders, and influencers (such as educationalists, health workers, the police, and social workers); second, to provide resources and training presentations for local activists to use to help end FGM in their communities, and then to help them advocate for countrywide change.

We produced reports on each of the twenty-eight countries in Africa that practise FGM, which have since been updated with an expanded scope to include the existing law in each country. We have also produced thematic reports on FGM and medicalization, social norms, and thirty reports on the law, with other specialist reports to follow. Our website was revamped twice in six years, and has finally become the research portal of my dreams, translated into several languages. This has enabled many more of our target beneficiary groups – vulnerable girls at risk of FGM, professionals, policymakers, NGOs in Africa, and change agents – to access pertinent information and make sound decisions.

I look back to 2005, when I first felt called to stand up for girls and women like Fatima. My heart’s work has now reached the age of a teenager! I feel privileged to have listened to more than 3,000 stories of girls and women who have survived FGM, many of whom have gone on to be thriving survivors, activists, and campaigners with a desire to stop it happening to the next generation. I have seen the movement come of age and birth initiatives, such as roles for men and boys in ending FGM. Most of the survivors were not vocal about their own FGM when I started in 2005, yet their daughters have remained uncut.

All was going well until 2015, when I was suddenly and completely unexpectedly diagnosed with cancer. Following my diagnosis, the charity wobbled. Most of our team had joined as volunteers, and for various reasons almost all of them left fairly soon after I was diagnosed. It may have all been a coincidence, but it felt fairly dire, as it became impossible for me to take any time off work during my treatment because I felt the charity would collapse if I did. Within seven months of my diagnosis we had regrouped the board. We had an acting chair and chair-in-waiting, and a new deputy who helped recruit or cover key roles. The ship restabilized, and it has gone from strength to strength.

Having cancer has given me a better perspective on the trauma and on the physical and mental impact of FGM, as I too cope with chronic issues. I have also campaigned for various disability rights, such as creating the Please give me a seat badge for Transport for London. I have joined various disability campaigns for palliative care rights, better clinical trials, and accessible transport. I have enjoyed being a research subject for PhD students, authors, and those in media. I have widened my fundraising skills, from the £1 million I helped raise for Medair and the annual £150,000 for 28 Too Many’s needs to dressing up for a Santa Run – completed with sticks and a wheelchair. I also reframed the Brighton Marathon that I could not complete in March 2015 by designing my own, with a twenty-eight-mile route in the shape of Africa. I was pushed in a wheelchair by twenty-eight teams, each representing an FGM-researched country. The forty people involved raised more than £20,000!

The charity will always be my baby, yet it is now one of ten legacy projects I plan to complete by 2022. We are looking at future options for the charity, which I will share later in this book.

I conclude with tips on how to get involved with 28 Too Many yourself. Buying this book has already taken you one step in the right direction, with all my profits from the book going toward our work to end FGM and violence against women.

1I will explain more about female genital mutilation, infibulation, and deinfibulation in Chapter Three.

ONE:

YOUTHFUL AMBITION

I am often asked, How do I find my calling? In my own life, I have always found it is easier to look back reflectively and see what patterns can be discerned.

I come from a line of entrepreneurial men and women. My paternal grandmother ran a boot and shoe shop in Manchester in 1900, so my father was privileged to have boots without holes, as opposed to ones that were lined with newspapers to keep the feet as dry as possible. My maternal grandfather was a carpenter who made joinery tools and built his own house in 1920s Birmingham. This meant my mother sorted screws, nails, and washers in glass jars from a young age, and ran the bookkeeping from the age of twelve. My uncle also joined the business, so most of my household furniture was hand-carved by family members.

My father planned to start a business in post-war Palestine with an Arab partner and his Jewish fiancée, selling war munitions abandoned in the desert, but this fell through after the Suez Crisis. My mother worked for the civil service, retrained as a cordon bleu cookery trainer and taught domestic science to adults at a technical college in High Wycombe after she married my father, and then worked as a bookkeeper from the time I started school, dedicating the last twenty-five years of her life to the profession – the last six on a self-employed basis.

Seeing different businesses during my early years fuelled my interest in life beyond the village I had grown up in. As a child of five in 1967, I announced to my family that I wanted to be a surgeon, perhaps because I had enjoyed my plastic doctor and nurse kit a little too much! I joined the Red Cross a year later and loved it – the skills exams, the MENCAP holiday clubs, volunteering at a retired nurses’ home, and more – and I continued with this activity until I left for university. I was chosen to represent the Buckinghamshire branch of the Red Cross on a Russian exchange at the age of sixteen, which was a life-changing experience, and my Duke of Edinburgh’s Gold Award was presented by the duke for my contribution to the Red Cross and pseudo medical-related service.

A bright all-rounder, I particularly enjoyed the sciences as a youngster. After spending six years at a convent school, I passed the eleven-plus, which enabled me to attend a girls’ grammar school. When it came to choosing options at the age of fourteen, my last choice was to take either needlework and dress-making, or cookery. Having taught domestic science, my mother encouraged me to take needlework. Her philosophy was that anyone could follow a recipe, but that needlework was a skill that needed to be taught. As a result, I can make my own clothes (yet choose not to) and was taught cookery by my cordon bleu cookery trainer mother (although I have very few dinner parties these days). Both offered vital survival skills overseas in later life when provisions were scarce!

Becoming a surgeon seemed increasingly unlikely by the time I turned fourteen. I hadn’t transitioned well from the convent’s traditional science teaching to the grammar school’s Nuffield curriculum. How was I supposed to work out the colour of one planet from the colour of another? I still wonder about that!

I revised my career options, deciding to become an occupational therapist instead, and life seemed to be taking me down the required path. Then a few things happened that changed my overall destiny. The sister of a very close friend took her own life, which made me question the value of study and hampered my motivation. I didn’t really know how to study or see why I should. I also started a relationship with the brother of this friend. I underperformed in my O levels (GCSEs), but had attended various careers taster sessions: one for a physiotherapy rehabilitation unit run by a friend’s father; one with Caledonian Airways to become a stewardess; and one at a high street bank’s model bank training site in Teddington. Weirdly, I loved being locked into the bank and running it for a day. I made a mental shift, recognizing that I could help people via various non-medical routes.

The world of work

My O level results were good enough for me to do A levels in Biology, French, and English, yet I had set my heart on Economics and needed Bs in Maths and English instead of an A and C, respectively. The school was not as convinced as I was that they averaged out!

I talked to a friend’s father, who happened to be a director at the bank. I was quite nervous going to see him in the drawing room rather than chilling out with his daughter in the kitchen. At the end of the meeting, he said that it was fine to leave school if I wanted to work in business, as I could take exams in banking while I worked. I ordered the application forms, went to a local branch, and was offered a job in the same town as my secondary school. I felt I had outgrown my local neighbourhood and was ready to spread my wings, so I rejected the job and applied for one at a north-west London branch. This was also successful. I learned that the local day-release course was enrolling at High Wycombe College, so I signed up before starting work in Edgware Road.

I learned a lot at the bank. Out of the three boys and three girls, only the boys and I were enrolled at the college. The HR manager seemed annoyed that I had signed up. Sometime later I was tested on my encoding skills, and I chose to do all the easy items in the pile first to reduce the task by 50%. Unfortunately, the test only seemed to count the most difficult ones!

As a slow typist – not having learned to type at school – I was transferred to the regional head office. I suddenly fitted in again and was valued. The significance of what I was doing was explained to me, and I began to understand the bigger picture.

By the age of seventeen I had experienced the different expectations the bank had of men and women. My enlightened college statistics tutor counselled me and said that I had already hit a glass ceiling and would face many more. Girls were expected to work in the machine room and marry bankers, who took the exams. Boys only had to do a week of encoding before being appointed as cashiers, while girls remained data input clerks for years, or until they married bankers.

I studied hard and loved my work and study, as I could see the relevance of both. I applied to university to take business studies and was accepted under the proviso that I achieved a distinction in my business BTEC (which was equivalent to three A levels). It was not easy to gain a university place without A levels, yet I received a number of offers. I chose Manchester, as that was where my father’s family was from, and I hoped I might be able to reconnect with some relatives we hadn’t seen for a long time owing to the geographical distance.

Choosing a business degree gave me an all-round understanding of work. I found it difficult to select from the list of first-year options, so I chose to learn German from scratch and manufacturing technology. This led to a five-month placement in Germany with two other students from my course.

We were placed in a German steel factory making dye moulds. I loved it, and we lived in an apartment in the top penthouse suite of a hotel. The Falklands War broke out while we were there in April 1982. We heard the announcement on British Forces radio, and it sounded as if the UK had been invaded.

We were befriended by a missionary couple and their family, who hosted us for church and a tea of American waffles on a weekly basis. My time in Germany certainly wasn’t just tea and waffles, however, as I recall the factory’s chief executive showing an unhealthy interest in me. He would request my presence in his office each week, and being young and naive I felt flattered to be singled out. I chose not to tell anyone, as my tutor had told me how important this placement was for the university. I dealt with favouritism, sexism, grooming, and cross-cultural and religious issues during my time in Germany, as well as noticing the differences between the way factory and office workers were treated. The experience took years to mentally process and recover from.

In my third year I was pleased to be offered a one-year placement with Marks & Spencer (M&S). I delivered electronic point of sale (EPOS) training to cashier staff, looked after recruitment and staffing, and learned basic retail skills in men’s underwear with my trusted tape measure! I was in charge of Christmas gifts, January returns, and inspecting food hygiene in the staff restaurant. I also produced a purple outfit that turned out to be top of the winter range. At an M&S pie factory, I learned about the relationships suppliers have with their buyers. It was my experiences at this pie factory – where pigs came in and pies left – that led to lifelong vegetarianism.

The skills I gained at M&S were invaluable – learning to get along with many different people from diverse backgrounds, and to work in a culture where all stores operated as copies of each other. For example, all pay rises were announced at 8 a.m. on a set date across all stores.

I returned to the bank during my fourth-year summer holidays (having also worked there during my second-year summer holidays), and was a well-paid student, meaning I graduated without any debt and with enough money to buy a brand new car.

My father was dying by the end of my degree. I needed to be closer to home, so I chose an HR trainee role in the south-east region at British Gas, passing the two-day assessment at a centre in Stratford. We were observed continuously, and even my gesture of offering my room to a man whose room was not ready but who needed to change may have raised eyebrows, as I had been put in the four-poster honeymoon