Three powerful women share their story in LINDA. magazine
Published in  
Advocacy
on
December 21, 2022

Three powerful women share their story in LINDA. magazine

The 21st of December 2022, the new LINDA. magazine was available in bookshops in the Netherlands. This was a very special edition, because three powerful women shared their personal stories about FGM/C. I am so proud of them and would like to thank the LINDA. team for a very nice collaboration!

A few months ago I received an e-mail from an editor at LINDA. and I immediately became very excited. It was amazing that a prestigious magazine (with so many subscribers!) aimed to draw attention to the practice Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C). I brought the editor of LINDA. in touch with the three women who were featured in the magazine and I provided background information and statistics about FGM/C that was published along the three interviews. I also joined them for the photoshoot that took place in Amsterdam. The result is stunning and I am so proud of them!

In the magazine, you can read that Istahil and Sahra were both born in Somalia and Aicha in Guinee. They underwent FGM/C when they were a young girl (Istahil was for example 6 years old, Aicha 9 years) and for different reasons, but the consequences they still face today are very similar. All three are so brave to talk about the impact it still has on their lives. Aicha shares for example that she doesn't enjoy sex and that she doesn't experience sexual pleasure, which makes her feel "less" female. Sahra explains that her father and grandma actually didn't want her to undergo FGM/C, but that her mother couldn't resist the social pressure. If she wouldn't undergo the practice, there would be no man who would marry her. Istahil shares that she had painful sex and only after her first delivery she started to enjoy enjoy it. She was happy, but at the same time disappointed realising that this had been taken away from her all those years...