Crimes (Definition of Female Genital Mutilation) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Crimes (Definition of Female Genital Mutilation) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

It is truly a pleasure this evening to stand and speak to this historic bill. It’s historic in a couple of different aspects, but I will open, really proudly, to acknowledge that this House is coming together not only in consensus but, for the first time, to present and vote on a members’ bill that’s brought by members from parties across the House. I just want to start by acknowledging my co-sponsors, Priyanca from Labour and Jenny from New Zealand First and Jo from the National Party. I also want to acknowledge the Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians group and Louisa Wall, who chaired our select committee as we deliberated and also supported us in bringing this bill in this unique way to the House.

It is, I think, a night for celebration, as well, of the communities who came to us and who made this law possible. It is truly, I think, lawmaking for the affected communities, by the affected communities, in that this bill and the definitional change of “female genital mutilation” (FGM) is something that feminists—men and women—from affected communities have been calling for and educating us about for years and years.

This bill amends the Crimes Act 1961 to insert a definition of “female genital mutilation” that is holistic and up to date. Our laws were outdated, in that we only criminalised what, I guess, is now known as the worst kind of female genital mutilation. We’ve learnt now, through the education and the generosity of the communities that have come to us to speak to us about what this practice truly entails, that there are forms that we would, certainly under standing law, call lesser, less serious, minor, or ceremonial, and we know that the harm is still so immense both on the psyche of the young girls and women who are undergoing this type of harm but also physically. Others have spoken about the intense pain, the scars, and the sense of degradation that stays with women and girls. In fact, we know, with any patriarchal practice, part of the purpose of performing any kind of gender-based mutilation—and in this case there’s nothing that can be ceremonial that isn’t harmful when it is a cut or a piercing without consent and performed, most often, on very young girls.

This bill, of course, takes away the defence of consent, because we know that in circumstances where female genital mutilation is imposed on a young girl or a woman, coercion is involved in the cultural aspect and in the fact that it’s often parents and senior community members that are imposing the practice on a young girl. So the law is updated in that aspect as well, and it also is a criminal offence to take a young girl or woman out of New Zealand for the purpose of performing female genital mutilation on them.

But I do want to come back again to those communities that came to us: the female genital trust, the Somali community, the Eritrean community, the Kurdish community, the Ethiopian community, and Indonesian community leaders. These are all communities that have worked together and separately as part of different groups in the refugee community and have been educating their own within their own communities, and they’ve been educating us as lawmakers as well.

I think it stands to be noted that whether it’s a patriarchal practice that degrades women through family violence or whether it’s something like FGM, we all have some form of misogyny, some form of equity that we need to work on, within our genders and our cultures. New Zealand is a place where we have epidemic levels of domestic and sexual violence against women, as well. So while we have this kind of harmful practice in all cultures, we also have voices for equality and for empowerment of women in all of our cultures.

These communities have really taught us that we as lawmakers do have to pay attention to all of the different communities and marginalised women that we serve. Tonight, together, we have come to this House and we’re changing New Zealand law to reflect what their cultures truly want and aspire to. So I do thank them, and I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Tonight, we do make history in New Zealand Parliament with the multi co-sponsors of the Crimes (Definition of Female Genital Mutilation) Amendment Bill. I want to thank all the submitters, the Health Committee, and my co-sponsors of this bill. Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians are there to actually support women to stand for office, but we have gone much further this term. We have given a voice to children who were forced to be married; to end this term by protecting children—well, girls—and women from the heinous actions of female genital mutilation. It is my pleasure and my honour to thank everybody for their contributions, for their support of this bill, and I commend it to the House. Thank you very much.

Thank you Madam Speaker. I’ll take a very short call now in the third reading of the Crimes (Definition of Female Genital Mutilation) Amendment Bill and acknowledge the co-sponsors of this historic multi-members’ bill. Congratulations to all those in the House, all those who have worked on this bill, to see it tonight as we’re about to pass it into law. I congratulate you, and I thank you that we have together been able to work across the House in unison, sharing our many voices to say, “Do not take the power from women, from young girls, any longer.” We will not accept it, and we want to return their power to them so that they can live good and wholesome lives. There are no health benefits to female genital mutilation; therefore, there is no point to it whatsoever other than to control women and to keep them in a place that is not where we expect our young women and girls to be as we move into the 2020s.

So, on that note, I’d like to say thank you to you all. It’s been a pleasure to work with you. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. As I said just before, it’s with great pride that I rise to take a call and a contribution on the third reading of this bill, because, as I mentioned again earlier, female genital mutilation (FGM) is a global issue. There are a number of girls around the world who have been affected by FGM and who are at risk of being affected as well.

This became an issue in New Zealand in the mid-1990s, after the settlement of people from countries where FGM is or was practised. However, it’s not an ethnic issue. It’s not a cultural or religious issue, per se—and I’ll come back to that point in a second. However, I want to pay tribute at this point to the FGM Education Programme, which was established back in 1997 in response to the growing need for intervention, as we saw an increasing number of women being affected potentially by FGM here in New Zealand.

The FGM programme aims to improve the sexual and reproductive health outcomes of women affected by FGM and also to contribute to the prevention of FGM being practised here in New Zealand. They have achieved gains over the years through the implementation of a national FGM community awareness programme, education activities, the development of national FGM resources, guidelines, and recommended best practices as well.

I also want to commend them for the way in which they’ve done that. The women I’ve met, the two women who lead the programme in New Zealand, Nikki Denholm and Ayan Said, have worked for years within communities that are affected by FGM—and therein lies the key to addressing issues of violence against women and human rights issues. The key lies in actually working with communities who are affected to support them to stop those practices. And I want to commend them for that.

We see that they have made progress over the years, through the three longitudinal surveys that they have undertaken, in 1997, in 2007, and in 2017. These are surveys that were undertaken with communities affected by FGM here. The aim of the surveys was to assess community attitudes and beliefs towards FGM and how that’s changed over time, and the findings from those surveys were then used to inform future strategies around child protection and education initiatives to reduce the incidence of FGM as well.

The 1997 survey indicated strong community support for FGM, a lack of FGM knowledge and skills among health professionals in New Zealand, and poor maternal healthcare experiences. In 2007, the survey indicated a significant decrease in support for FGM and improved healthcare experiences in Auckland. The 2017 survey, though, showed a further decrease in support for FGM more broadly but an increase in support for type four FGM—and therein lies the crux of this bill, because this bill will expand the definition of FGM in the Crimes Act to cover all forms of FGM, including type four. The 2017 survey also showed that there was less satisfaction with maternal healthcare in regions that have received minimal FGM health education activities, which points to the fact that we need to continue the awareness raising and the education function of the FGM education programme. Consultations with communities that are affected by FGM also present a strong argument to support this bill.

Back in 2019, last year, the FGM Education Programme undertook community consultations with key community leaders and educators across the five largest communities that are affected by FGM here in New Zealand, to get a little bit of feedback about this bill. I want to thank them for doing that as well, because here in the House we were incredibly clear that we wanted to get this right and that we wanted to ensure that we did it with the support of the communities that are affected by FGM.

The findings of that consultation were that this bill reflects a global movement towards zero tolerance of FGM and it better aligns New Zealand’s legislation with international best practice as well. There was unanimous support for this bill because it will better protect their communities. They highlighted that legislation is incredibly important because it is a strong deterrent and has protected at-risk girls to date. Those consulted expressed a strong support for the proposed bill and the inclusion of the World Health Organization (WHO) definition, which is what this bill does. They also highlighted that FGM has actually been made illegal in many of the countries that they came from and so felt that their wider communities would accept legislative change here in New Zealand as well.

Last year, I travelled to Kenya to attend the Nairobi Summit in my capacity as the chair of NZPPD—the New Zealand Parliamentarians’ Group on Population and Development. The year 2019 marked the 25th anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development, in Cairo, where 179 Governments adopted a landmark programme of action which set out to empower women and girls and to benefit families, communities, and nations. The Nairobi Summit was co-convened by the United Nations Fund for Population Activities and the Governments of Kenya and Denmark, and it began with a very strong statement by the Kenyan President, Uhuru Kenyatta, who committed to ending FGM in Kenya by 2022. And I just want to acknowledge Minister Poto Williams, who presented New Zealand’s statement at the Nairobi Summit last year.

This is a bill that will align our legislation with international best practice and what the WHO has asked member states to do. Some of the changes—very quickly—that were suggested or recommended by the select committee were really to just tighten up some of the wording in the legislation to ensure that the definition was fit for purpose and consistent with other parts of the bill.

There was quite a bit of discussion at the select committee stage around ensuring that this bill didn’t inadvertently include cosmetic enhancement procedures and criminalise those. There was a fair bit of discussion there in terms of how we altered the wording to ensure that that didn’t happen. So the new section 204A(1)(b)(iii), which prohibits pricking and piercing, scraping, and cauterising—that could actually include genital piercing, tattooing, and labiaplasty, for example—was changed to include a section with a new paragraph that said “does not include a procedure carried out [on female genitalia] for cosmetic or enhancement purposes only.”

There were a few other suggestions or recommendations by the Health Committee, including providing national guidelines or recommending to Government that we have national guidelines—for example, for police, so that, if there was a case, there could be prosecution. Oranga Tamariki at the moment has such guidelines to respond to FGM, but, of course, they’re not the agency that’s responsible for prosecuting FGM as a criminal offence.

There were a few matters that lay outside the scope of this bill that did come up and were raised by submitters, and those were issues around male circumcision and also intersex surgeries that are performed, often on children without their consent. Those were considered by the Health Committee but were considered to lie outside the scope of this bill. There was consideration, I guess, or acknowledgment that these are issues that require some further consideration and, potentially, legislation of their own. But including that in this legislation would be a significant policy change or a step outside of what this bill intended to do.

In the time that I have remaining, I just want to point to the fact that this is a hidden issue, like many other forms of violence against women and girls and many other human rights violations that exist. As I mentioned previously, FGM Education worked with affected communities to look at how societal norms have changed and the fact that some practices that may be carried out with the best intentions of those practising them actually have no health benefits and have actually complications that result from them, and working with communities to change their own societal norms as well.

We need to be very clear, as I said, that this is not a religious or a cultural issue per se; it’s a women’s rights issue. It’s a human rights issue that’s often perpetrated under the guise of culture or religion. But there’s no justification for it, and as we’ve seen from the work that FGM Education and others like refugees and survivors have done, we have seen that there are many from within affected groups who stand against it as well. We need to be careful, though, that we don’t vilify specific communities, because this causes them to feel further marginalised and further silences women who need support and those who are working within those communities towards change.

I end with an African proverb: “When sleeping women waken, mountains move.” Can I acknowledge my co-sponsors, the Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians, the FGM Education Programme, and women from affected communities who continue to stand against this. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. Tēnā koutou katoa. “We are women, hear us roar, in numbers too big to ignore”—and that’s 40 percent. That’s what can happen when women across the House join together and collaborate to progress types of legislation that are obviously relevant to women in Aotearoa New Zealand. So I want to say congratulations to Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians (CWP); to the members who joined that collective that have enabled us to collaborate, to form an alliance, and, in doing so, to actually give effect to the voice of women in New Zealand, our ethnic women, our migrant women; to the FGM Education Programme; to Ayan and Nikki; and to our immigrant communities, many of you who actually were brave enough to talk about female genital mutilation (FGM) as a heritage practice but also about the relevance of that heritage practice here in New Zealand. We, through your voice, were able to come together and use our position and status here in Parliament to amend section 204A of the Crimes Act.

We have now ensured that all forms of FGM are illegal in New Zealand, and that will mean that we are sending a clear signal that FGM in any form is the subjugation of women. It is sexual violence, it is sexual abuse, and it is sexual exploitation, because fundamental to the practice actually is the labelling of women as sexual things for men. That was the whole intention of it: take away women’s sexual pleasure; she only has one role, and that is to be a sexual object for her husband. So we’re rejecting that, and, in doing so, we’re changing the lives of women and girls.

I’m incredibly proud of our Parliament. I want to thank the Business Committee, who enabled this to happen. So, Madam Deputy Speaker, I want to thank you for your role as a member of CWP and your voice within that context that has enabled Golriz Ghahraman, Priyanca Radhakrishnan, Jenny Marcroft, and my very good mate Jo Hayes to be part of this multi-member bill. We have created history. I also need to acknowledge David Seymour, who was insistent that his name be on the bill. He was very clear, though, in the end that this was a CWP kaupapa. He’s not a member, but he—and I also want to acknowledge Jami-Lee Ross, because they could have objected when we brought this kaupapa to the House for our ability to do it. So without further ado, I really want to commend this process and the alliances that we have formed across the House as women and also, obviously, this bill to the House. Kia ora.

Bill read a third time.