A girl who allegedly underwent female genital mutilation (FGM) in Australia has described seeing a woman holding a “silver tool” that looked “a bit like a scissor” on the day it allegedly happened.
However, in conversations with her father about two years after the event he insisted she had not been cut.
The girl, known as C1, was seven years old and is one of two alleged victims in the first FGM trial in Australia. The second alleged victim is her younger sister, known as C2. The prosecution claims the FGM took place between 2010 and 2012.
Now aged 11, C1 gave evidence via video link in the NSW supreme court on Wednesday after watching a recording of her police interview in 2012, which was shown to the court.
In the interview C1 said she lay on a bed in a house in Wollongong while the procedure took place and imagined she was a princess in a garden.
Asked by the crown prosecutor, Nanette Williams, if she remember the day, C1 responded “briefly”. Asked if she remembered seeing the woman accused of carrying out the FGM, known as KM in court, C1 said, “I think so, yes.”
When asked what she saw in KM’s hands that day, she said, “It was like a silver tool.
“It looked a bit like a scissor. It had sort of a pointed, roundish, stick sort of thing and then two finger holes, I think, I’m not sure.”
C1 drew a picture of what she saw which was tendered as evidence.
Police bugged the phones and cars of the girl’s family in 2012 and in a recording played to the court the father insists to C1 that she was not cut.
“No we do not cut, we cannot cut. Nothing was cut of yours, we don’t do the cut. We can’t cut it here,” he said in the car on the afternoon of her police interview.
C1 said to her father that she had seen scissors and “they do something with scissors”.
He responded: “Not with scissors, they do forceps. Forceps is used for cleaning purposes to check up.”
The defence have previously said the girls were touched on the genitals with forceps, but not cut.
In the cross examination of C1 Stuart Bouveng, the barrister for KM, asked if she knew what a cut, a pinch and scratched. He then asked her what she felt that day lying on the bed in Woollongon when the FGM allegedly took place.
“It was short, didn’t last long, it was like a pinching or a cutting, I’m not sure,” she said.
C1 said she did not feel pain afterward when she had a shower. She also said that when her eyes were closed and she was imagining she was a princess in a garden “I felt something touch it [her genitals] and then a bit of pain and then a bit of a weird sort of feeling.”
When asked by the crown why she had used the word pinching for the first time to describe the feeling, C1 responded “It’s because I don’t really think it was a pinching it just felt a bit like it”.
“Because I’m not completely sure it was a cut although most likely it was cut, I remember a sort of pinching, I don’t really know though,” she said.
Her mother, A2, is facing trial alongside KM, and showed no reaction as she watched her daughter give evidence. When she watched the police interview of her daughter, she covered her face with her hands at times and looked towards the ground.
C1 also told of the day her younger sister allegedly underwent FGM, although she was not present in the room. She watched television downstairs in their western Sydney home.
In the police interview she said her sister did not talk about what happened to her.
“Because she knew already it happened to me,” C1 said in the 2012 interview. “Eventually she forgot about it.”
Asked if she could explain what happens during the procedure C1 grew quiet and said, after a pause: “Not very much because I’m not used to talking about it because my mum tells me not to go around telling everyone that much.”
A high-ranking clergy in the Dawoodi Bohra Shia Muslim community, Shabbir Mohammedbhai Vaziri, is also standing trial, accused of helping KM and A2 after the fact.
The defence has previously said the girls’ genitals were not mutilated and instead they took part in a ceremony which was “secret women’s business”.
The trial continues.