The Power of a Story: Mariya Taher Shares the Story Behind Her Powerful Fight to End Gender-Based Violence and the Founding of Sahiyo
“We have seen how our storytelling has had a ripple effect in encouraging more and more survivors from many different communities.” Today’s woman dreamer, Mariya Taher, is the founder of Sahiyo, an NGO fighting for women’s rights and ending gender-based violence. Based on her own personal experience, Mariya seeks to empower other women to share their stories. In 2018, she received the Human Rights Storytellers Award from the Muslim American Leadership Alliance and in 2020, she was recognized as one of the six inaugural grant recipients for the Crave Foundation for Women. An Incredible Story-teller, her work has been showcased in NPR’s Code Switch, HuffPost, Brown Girl Magazine, The Express Tribune, and The San Francisco Examiner, to name a view. Mariya is a true trailblazer, “creating a better and brighter world for future generations of girls”, and we are honored to share her story.
I was born in the U.S. and my parents migrated here from India in the 1970s. At the age of seven, when my family went back on trip to visit relatives, I underwent female genital cutting (FGC), also known as female genital mutilation, or as it is called in the Bohra community I grew up in, Khatna. Khatna normalized for me as something every girl underwent. I didn’t question it until I reached highs chool and I recall a friend becoming angry and stating that we had undergone Female Genital Mutilation. That was when I made the connection that Khatna was a form of gender based violence. I tried to learn more about the issue for my educational purposes and to understand how the community I grew up in could continue such a practice. However, as I did research, I could barely find any information about it occurring to U.S. born women nor that it happened in India -- all I found was that FGC occurred in Africa and amongst African diaspora communities. I realized that my story was not part of the global conversation on FGC. In fact, only in the last few years has the United Nations recognized FGC as a global issue affecting women and girls of all different backgrounds - race, religion, economic status, etc.
In time, I realized I wanted to work in gender-based violence (GBV) and went to graduate school for my Master of Social Work. While in grad school, I learned more about other forms of GBV, such as domestic violence, sexual assault -- and as I learned about these issues, I started making connections to FGC. For instance sexual assault is a learned behavior just like domestic violence is for children who grew up in families where they witness it. Research shows that these children often grow up perpetuating those cycles of abuse by becoming abusers themselves or survivors. FGC continues because one generation learns it as a child and perpetuates it to the next generation. In time I decided for my MSW thesis, since no data existed about FGC occuring in the Bohra community in the U.S., I would conduct an exploratory study to obtain the information. The study was titled “Understanding the Continuation of Female Genital Cutting in the United States.
That was the beginning of my story in this field - because I felt neglected in a sense or left out of the global picture of girls who underwent it, I wanted to fill that gap in knowledge.
Today, we do have more data. Globally, FGC affects over 200 million girls and women, with many more at risk of undergoing the harmful practice each year. Within the United States, the Center for Disease Control reports that the number of women and girls affected by FGC is half a million. Yet, I’m still not part of either data figure as I was born in the U.S. and again it happened to me in India. Both the global and the U.S. statistics are based on data collected by UNICEF in about 32 countries within Africa and the Middle East. The U.S. figure is extrapolated from the global figure and then immigration patterns to the U.S. are applied to determine the half a million figure. These numbers leave out anyone who lives outside of those 32 countries. Additionally, these figures do not recognize that the U.S. and Europe have a history of using medically ‘necessary’ clitordectomies to repress female sexuality (up until the 1950s, clitoridectomies were commonly used to treat hysteria, mental illness, lesbianism) -- that history has been forgotten and the issue has become “othered,” meaning there is a stereotype that FGC doesn’t happen here or that only “outsiders” bring it to this country.
To further fill this gap and decrease that sense of “othering” or that only outsiders bring FGC to this country, I went on to write about my experience and what I had learned from my MSW Thesis. In time, that led me to connect to the four other women who would become cofounders with me in establishing our organization, Sahiyo. Sahiyo is the Bohra Gujarati word for ‘saheliyo’, or friends, and reflects our organization’s mission to engage in dialogue with the community to find a collective solution towards ending female genital cutting.
One of the first things that Sahiyo did in 2016, was to conduct a larger study based on methods used from my MSW thesis to gather some basis of understanding of what Khatna was and how prevalent it was in the global Bohra community. Over 385 women took part in our study. One major finding of the study was that 80% had undergone FGC confirming it was prevalent in the community. We also found that the majority of participants stated that they did not want FGC to continue (81%). What our data showed was that the community was experiencing what we call “pluralistic ignorance,” a social psychology term that refers to the idea that “no one wants to believe, but everyone thinks everyone believes.” In other words, FGC continued because no one spoke up about it, and challenges, such as fear of excommunication or social stigma from within the community, caused people to be silent about it and continue it. What we recognized was that FGC was a social norm, and what we needed to do was reframe the idea that FGC was a way to be culturally accepted into the community, to show instead that it’s a harmful practice that should be discarded.
To do so, we had to help build a critical mass of voices speaking out against FGC.
This initial research informs many of our organization’s projects and we see our education and awareness programs based on a theory of change - that storytelling can create the critical mass needed to inspire societal change. Our storytelling programs come in many different ways through blogs, social media, picture campaigns, and prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, when we could, in person events. One project we have conducted that has really helped to understand the myriad complexities of FGC and who it happens to is our Voices to End FGM/C project. In 2018, Sahiyo and a partner organization, StoryCenter, launched a digital storytelling project to bring survivors of FGC together in a safe space to surface their personal experiences. The project sought to mobilize a critical mass of storytellers and activists from across the globe to share and heal from their experiences, connect and grow as leaders in their own communities, and create short videos calling for an end to this harmful practice. Today, we have 38 videos created by participants who were part of the workshops, and we will be hosting our next workshop virtually in January 2021.
Through these various programs, we have seen how our storytelling has had a ripple effect in encouraging more and more survivors from many different communities not typically recognized as practicing FGC to speak up on the issue and confirm that FGC happens in their community as well. We’ve heard stories from Singapore, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and more. In fact, a recent report from Equality Now, US End FGM/C Network, and the End FGM EU Network has confirmed that FGMC occurs in 92 countries around the world.
Today, Sahiyo is a transnational organization, with headquarters in the U.S. and India, and in 2018, we were recognized by the Population Reference Bureau as one of six inspiring organizations working to end female genital cutting. And none of it could have happened, had I and many others broken their silence on this harmful practice. In sharing our stories, we sought to create a better and brighter world for future generations of girls.
Thank you Mariya for educating and inspiring our empowered women’s network!
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BIO: Mariya has worked in gender-based violence for over a decade in the areas of teaching, research, policy, program development, and direct service. In 2015, she cofounded Sahiyo, an award-winning, transnational organization with the mission to empower Asian communities to end female genital cutting (FGC). In 2018, she received the Human Rights Storytellers Award from the Muslim American Leadership Alliance and in 2020, she was recognized as one of the six inaugural grant recipients for the Crave Foundation for Women. Since 2015, Mariya has also collaborated with the Massachusetts Women’s Bar Association to pass legislation to protect girls from FGC, and after starting a Change.org petition that gathered over 400,000 signatures, in August 2020, Massachusetts became the 39th state in the U.S. to do so. Mariya is also an extensive writer with her work appearing on NPR’s Code Switch, HuffPost, The Fair Observer, Brown Girl Magazine, Solstice Literary Magazine, The Express Tribune, The San Francisco Examiner, Cecile’s Writers’ Magazine, and more. Follow her on Twitter @mariyataher83