The father of a girl who was allegedly the victim of female genital mutilation told her it was “OK” after the procedure which she described as feeling like “hurting in my bottom”.
The girl, known as C2, gave evidence in the supreme court of New South Wales on Thursday in Australia’s first trial on FGM charges. Her mother, known as A2, is standing trial along with a woman known as KM, who is charged with performing FGM on C2 and her older sister.
C2, now nine, gave evidence but mostly responded in one syllable answers or with “I don’t know”. A recording of her police interview in 2012 in which C2 answered yes when asked if she was cut on her genitals, was played to the court.
When asked what she felt when she was allegedly cut, C2 responded “hurting”. When asked where she felt the hurting, she said “in the bottom”.
C2 said she did not still feel the pain. She told police she had spoken to her father afterwards and he had told her “it is OK”.
C2’s older sister previously gave evidence that she imagined she was a princess in a garden when the alleged FGM happened.
The court has heard evidence from the medical examination of the girls which found it could not be confirmed if the sisters were cut on their genitals. The doctor who examined them said it is possible if they were cut it has healed, and it is also possible some tissue from their clitoris is missing.
In her report the doctor wrote she could not visualise the tip of the glands of the clitoris when examining the girls.
The defence called professor Sonia Grover, from the University of Melbourne, to give evidence on the medical report as she has spent decades working with women affected by FGM.
“I think you have to be quite careful what conclusion you draw [from not being able to see the tip of the glands of the clitoris] because in a little girl this is a sensitive area ... girls are going to pull their legs together, it might be uncomfortable to do [the examination], so it might limit your capacity to see the tip,” she said.
Grover said it was not unusual not to be able to see that area in a young girl. She said it was a possibility “something’s been done and the tip has been removed”, but there are other possible explanations for not being able to see it.
She said such a procedure would not be able to be done without pain or without bleeding.
“If [a cut to the clitoris is] minimal as anything then it hardly counts as trauma and you wouldn’t see anything if you’d actually done that, but then it’s hard to prove anything had happened,” Grover said.
Grover said she had not heard of the term “khutna”, which is the cultural term used by C1 for what allegedly happened to her.
The defence has previously said while a ceremony did take place when each girl was seven years old, it was “secret women’s business” and did not involve FGM. Instead, the defence says, the girls were “touched” on the genitals with forceps.
Shabbir Mohammedbhai Vaziri, a high-ranking member of the clergy in the Dawoodi Bohra Shia Muslim community of which the family is a part, is also standing trial, accused of helping KM and A2 after the fact.