Donor Spotlight: Brad Mazon
Brad Mazon, PhD, is a Bhaiyo volunteer, nonprofit consultant, husband, father, and an advocate against female genital mutilation/cutting worldwide. When and how did your involvement with Sahiyo first begin? My involvement first began I would say two or so years ago when I found Sahiyo on social media. I became actively engaged when I donated to the annual International Women’s Day fundraiser and Comedy Show. But I’ve been involved with the issue of FGM since 1988 when I was an intern at the U.S. State Department in Somalia. I have come in and out of working on the issue, through various organizations, so when Sahiyo and the Bhaiyo program came onto my radar about two years ago, I became a donor and have remained involved ever since. Why did you decide to donate to Bhaiyo, Sahiyo’s male engagement program? My time working in Somalia and my upbringing really influenced my decision to donate. I attended a conference in Mogadishu, Somalia. It was all women who had been impacted by FGM. This event made a huge impression on me because a lot of the women I met with reminded me of my mother. I was raised by a single mother and I have always been in awe of her strength and resilience. It was the same strength and resilience that I saw in women I met at the conference. I realized very quickly that had my mother been in a situation where she was cut, she likely would have never been able to provide for me and for my family the way she did. I began to understand how FGM impacts women not just physically but also psychologically and socially. It wasn’t that these women weren’t as smart or as motivated as my mother was – it was that the opportunities to thrive had been taken from them by the patriarchy that surrounded them. I also understand that the impacts of FGM are different in different contexts. Being cut in Somalia may be different from being cut in the American Midwest, but…being cut anywhere is a violation of women’s autonomy and an act of patriarchy. Why do you feel it’s so important to support male engagement and voices within the movement to end FGM/C? There’s no sex that’s greater than the other. I believe that I am an anti-patriarchy and feminist man. At the end of the day, as I have gotten older and have become a father and now a grandfather to a little girl, I have realized – and certainly living in America right now – how strong the patriarchy is on so many things. I resent in my heart, mind, and soul that men think that they have some sort of power over women. I wanted to do something as a man, coming from a male perspective that could combat that false narrative. That’s why Bhaiyo was so exciting to me. On my first call with the group, it was with men from around the world who were doing the frontline work of going into villages and speaking to people about the dangers of FGM [and] of what it could do to their little girls. I was thrilled to be a part of that work through donating. But at the same time, I was very mindful, and still am, of my white privilege and also my Western privilege in the same sense. And when I say privilege, I mean it in a structural and economic way, because I know there is beauty, wisdom, and knowledge in Africa and Asia. I wanted to be mindful of that as I engaged in conversations with these male activists who I have great respect for. But I also wanted them to be mindful that while it’s important for men to be in the conversation, women still need to be supported to speak out at an equal level. We can do that in many ways, big and small. I’ve started changing the hashtag I use in posts from #menendFGM to #menandwomenendFGM. What I’m trying to say here is that while it’s great that we’ve got men involved, let’s not do it in a way that pushes women out. How would you like to see Bhaiyo and Sahiyo grow? I think in terms of Bhaiyo, the main thing we need is more men involved. I’ve tried to do this in my circles by sharing the survey on my Linkedin and with various people in my life. I’m always shocked at how many men aren’t involved. I also feel like we need to make FGM more well-known in the U.S. through any means necessary. We need some celebrity to get men fired up about this. Or even more high-level people in our government talking about FGM. But I’m also under no illusions that I’m doing the hard work. I know those gentlemen on the frontlines going from village to village spreading this message who are the ones pushing this work, and they have my full support and respect. I also know that getting this issue into the rooms of power in the U.S. and the world beyond is key to this movement, and we can do that by talking about FGM loudly. Why do you think others should donate to Sahiyo? I think more people should donate to Sahiyo because people don’t realize that FGM is an issue that has a tremendous impact on the world. It’s shocking to me how FGM is such a quiet menace not only to survivors but also to men who are affected by it – with their wives and sexual pleasure – or the ability to have children. I’m just surprised how it’s a form of violence, yet it’s one that seemingly the world is not comfortable talking about publicly. I also want people to understand that FGM is a form of domestic violence. In the same way that we talk about abuse and other harms against women, FGM needs to be included in those conversations. And we
Healing from Khatna with EMDR
By: Sunera Sadicali Trigger warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of female genital cutting (FGC). Khatna (or FGC) is much more than a physical wound. It has stayed quiet in my mind. I was not conscious of the impact of FGC on me and had dismissed it with all kinds of justifications. My therapist uses eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) to help me process the trauma, and we decided to address this episode of my life that “I cared little about.” EMDR is an evidence-based trauma therapy that uses bilateral brain stimulation to process traumatic experiences. In a simple way, it helps the person to make sense of and resignify the trauma, resulting in a more adaptive and coherent narrative of the past experience and their life. In a nutshell, this is how it is performed: 1. First, the therapist helps the patient identify the traumatic memory they want to heal from. 2. Through sounds, taps, or eye movements, the therapist guides the patient through processing the memory as the patient focuses on it. 3. The therapist and patient repeatedly do this until the memory is no longer disturbing. With EMDR I go back in time; my therapist asks me, “Where are you? What do you feel in your body?” I visualize the waiting room, the sliding doors, and my sister on my left side. She is small, and she is as scared as I am because nobody explained to us what was going to happen. Our cousin was taken, and suddenly we heard a loud scream. “I feel in my body the fear of the pain, of the unknown. I feel fear in my whole body. I know that whatever is happening there, I am the next one.” My eye movement continues from one side to another. I feel safe with my therapist, I flow, I am in my body. Next, I am laid down on that gurney. The room is half dark, my aunt is on my right side, and my mother is on my left. In front of me, there is a woman, a doctor with a white coat. “I feel the fear in my body again.” They grab me from my legs, I am in a lithotomy position, and they hold me down with force. I can’t see my pelvis, I can’t see what is going to happen, nobody is telling me. There is no explanation, no asking consent, no describing the purpose of the act. “I feel the pressure of my legs, and suddenly, a sharp pain like an electric shock coming from my genitals.” I cry all along in fear and pain. She tells me it is a little worm that needs to be cut. That’s all. My eye movement continues from one side to another. “I go back to the pain, to the fear.” There is a silence between the act and the worm. There is a silence that has never ceased to exist, nobody told you before the worm, nor after the pain. There is silence between me and my sisters, silence between my mother, and between my aunty and myself. We never talked about the act itself. How it was done. “Why?” I believed it was not a big deal. Não era para tanto. “You don’t have to complain because it was a very small cut, look how they do it to African women.” Until today, I had not understood the seriousness of what had happened to me. The living body sensations it had caused. How it was carried out, and executed as the norm. The norm is that you are not allowed to complain. Entering my body through EMDR, feeling the moment of Khatna again, before and after, allowed me to understand the beliefs that were generated from this act. The belief is that whatever happened to me is “not so important,” because it was not seen as important then. Traumatic experiences generate wrongful beliefs about ourselves. The belief that you have no right to complain. That it was for your own good, you were lucky enough that a doctor performed it, that you felt little pain. These are ways to cover up violence. Silence, lies, force, violence, continuing to perpetuate and defend a crime. Since it was implemented, EMDR has been recognized as evidence-based psychotherapy by the National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices (NREPP) and in 2012, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended the use of EMDR in adults and children with post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). The brain has the intrinsic capacity to heal itself from disturbing events and experiences, by forming different pathways. If this is not achieved, for example, because of the lack of emotional support in childhood to help integrate these experiences, or validation, reparation, or acknowledgment from the external world, parents, or attachment figures, the traumatic memories will be blocked and retained as an implicit memory…buried inside the mind without having permission to come out. It then becomes a wound that keeps inflicting damage, in our unconsciousness. This creates unhealthy beliefs about ourselves, especially as a child. Children need to protect their relationship with their parents, and their family, to keep the attachment and love alive; they will unconsciously excuse their parents, and if it’s needed allow wrong beliefs about themselves to justify what has happened to them. EMDR, with its bilateral stimulation, helps me to connect and restore the balance in the systems that process traumatic experiences. It is a bottom-up therapy that installs positive information on various levels: the body, emotions, sensations, and belief systems. I am currently receiving EMDR therapy, and I was recommended this modality — along with psychotherapy — to promote healing in general, especially from FGC as it happened in childhood and is related to sexuality and patriarchal mandates. EMDR works at a body level, and works on the memories of the body sensations, allowing the non-adaptive beliefs to emerge and to be replaced by new more positive, and resilient ones. Related links: Learn more about Asian Women’s