Sierra Leone, one of five countries that legally allow female genital mutilation (FGM), is facing renewed pressure to make it a crime after the deaths of three girls from the procedure on the same day made international news.
Adamsay Sesay, 12; Salamatu Jalloh, 13; and Kadiatu Bangura, 17, died in January after being cut on the first day of the Bondo initiation, a two or three week ritual that takes place in the bush, in which adolescent girls or young women are inducted into Sierra Leone’s secretive, pervasive, women only Bondo Society.
A CNN team was in Sierra Leone interviewing an anti-FGM activist, Rugiatu Neneh Turay, when she received a call alerting her to Jalloh’s death. They travelled with her to a village in the Kambia district of North West Province where they found the child’s body, five days after death, laid out in a hut awaiting police autopsy.
FGM deaths are often covered up, the bodies hastily buried, said Turay, unless somebody opposed to the practice complai
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