Today is the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation
In a tribal region of Afghanistan, a sad 10 year old girl, heavily made up and veiled, sits silently at her wedding ceremony to a 70 year old man. In a rural village in China, old women hobble along on tiny feet with toes fused from decades of binding. In India, a woman aborts a female foetus after a scan reveals the sex of her baby.
These are just three examples of traditional cultural practices that harm women and serve as a means to subjugate and control them; in many instances, these practices are directly linked to religion, another weapon of discrimination against women.