Asma El Dareer

Asma Abdel Rahim El Dareer (born c. 1949) is a Sudanese physician known for her research in the 1980s into female genital mutilation. She was one of the first Arab women and feminist doctors to speak out publicly against the practice.

A former deputy director of health statistics and research for the Sudanese Ministry of Health, El Dareer led a research project into FGM at the University of Khartoum faculty of medicine from 1977 to 1981. As part of this project, she conducted the first large-scale survey of women who had experienced FGM, interviewing 3,210 women and 1,545 men in five Sudanese provinces with a high prevalence of Type III FGM (infibulation).

El Dareer is the author of Woman, Why Do You Weep: Circumcision and its Consequences (1982) and co-author of Female Circumcision in the Sudan: Prevalence, Complications, Attitudes and Change (1983). She is a former president of the Babiker Bedri Scientific Association for Women's Studies.

Background

El Dareer became interested in FGM when she was infibulated by a nurse at age 11 in 1960. In Woman, Why Do You Weep, she wrote that the wound became infected and that she was given five injections of penicillin. When she was 18, her younger sister also underwent FGM. Her father wanted a milder form, but her mother insisted on infibulation, which is known in Sudan as "pharaonic circumcision". A compromise was reached and her sister ended up with an intermediate form that was nevertheless very similar to infibulation.

In the 1970s El Dareer studied medicine at the University of Khartoum. She began studying FGM as a fifth-year medical student when she wrote a research paper for a course on community medicine. In 1977 the faculty of medicine chose her to head a research project into FGM in Sudan. She obtained her MSc in 1981. Her books, Woman, Why Do You Weep and the co-authored Female Circumcision in the Sudan: Prevalence, Complications, Attitudes and Change, summarize that research.
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