By Hassan Abdi Omar

I think of a girl named Amina – though that is not her real name, because she exists in the silence. She was twelve when her mother told her she would miss school for two weeks during the April holidays. They would visit her grandmother’s village. No further explanation. When Amina returned to class, something in her had changed. She moved differently. She spoke less. She sat carefully. Her teacher noticed but did not ask. Her friends noticed but did not speak. Amina’s mother had made it clear, this was not a topic for discussion.

No report was made. No investigation followed. No one was prosecuted. And in our statistics, Amina’s county recorded zero FGM cases that month.

This is the uncomfortable reality Garissa County refuses to name, the most dangerous assumption in the fight against FGM is that fewer reported cases mean fewer girls are being cut.

Eighty-eight per cent. That is what the data says about Garissa, that nearly 9 in 10 women have undergone FGM. The 2022 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey corroborate it: 82.5 per cent.

Think about what that means. In a classroom of 40 girls in a Garissa primary school, 35 of them will likely face cutting before they reach adulthood. In a health clinic, 9 in 10 women will carry the physical and psychological scars. In a community gathering, the vast majority of mothers have made the same choice their mothers made to have their daughters cut.

Yet in the official reports, the numbers disappear. Zero reporting in some areas. One girl rescued over three years as of 2025.  This is not progress. This is a hidden epidemic.

Mothers know

Everyone knows the law now. Mothers know. Fathers know. Even cutters know. But knowledge and enforcement are not the same thing.

Parents have learned to use the rhythms of family life as cover. “Your grandmother is unwell. You will visit the village during the holidays.” No child questions this. A girl boards a matatu with her mother, expecting to see relatives. Instead, she is taken to a quiet compound, to an older woman with sharp instruments and certainty. It takes an hour. Sometimes less. By the time she returns to the city, the evidence is her altered body and her silence.

School holidays, December, April, August, have become cutting seasons. Teachers know this. So do hospital workers. But by the time a girl returns to school, weeks have passed. Infection may have set in. But the girl says nothing, and her silence is often accepted as normalcy.

Garissa’s border with Somalia means relatives live on both sides. A girl can be taken “to see family” and disappear into a network that enforcement cannot reach. Private, home-based cutting happens in the intimate spaces where no authority can intervene, a grandmother’s bedroom, a neighbour’s compound, a rented house.

The practice has not disappeared. It has simply learned to hide in the spaces where families are trusted and authority is distant.

Why Silence Persists

The law says FGM is prohibited. But a mother in Garissa knows something different: that her daughter’s marriageability may depend on it. That her community will judge her if she breaks with tradition. That her own mother will see her as betraying the culture that was passed to her. So, she cuts her daughter.

Later, when a healthcare worker asks about FGM, the mother lies. When a teacher asks why her daughter seems withdrawn, she says nothing. When her daughter cries in pain at night, she explains this is normal. Silence becomes survival.

A teacher suspects a girl has been cut. She knows the law requires her to report. But she also knows her neighbours’ faces when anyone speaks against tradition. She knows the parent who will pull their child from school. She knows the whispers that will follow her through the market. So, she stays silent, and tells herself she is not sure enough to act.

A survivor seeks help. She goes to a clinic expecting protection. Instead, the healthcare worker asks how this happened, why she let it happen, whether her family knows. The shame multiplies. The girl leaves without receiving treatment, and tells other girls: reporting will only bring more humiliation.

A cutter needs income. She has cut girls for twenty years. It is how she feeds her family. When she hears about the law, she feels threatened not by its moral clarity, but by its economic consequences. So, she continues more carefully. She finds safer houses. She works with people she trusts. She becomes better at hiding.

This is why silence persists. Not because people do not know better. But because speaking up costs something, safety, belonging, income, dignity.

What Needs to Happen

Prevention must reach girls before the holidays. A Community Health Promoter in a village knows every family. She knows which girls are at risk, which mothers are wavering, which fathers have not yet decided. She must be trained, resourced and given authority to have conversations in homes and community spaces – before a girl is taken away.

This means prevention happens not in distant offices but in the spaces where families make decisions. It means a trusted community member asking a mother: “What are your fears about your daughter’s future? What would it take for you to protect her from cutting?” These conversations happen in whispers, over tea, in the privacy that families trust. This is where minds change.

Enforcement must mean that reporting changes something. When a teacher reports suspected FGM, someone must actually investigate. Not weeks later. Now. The girl must be seen by a doctor. Her family must be spoken to – not to shame them, but to protect the child and offer alternatives. A case must be documented.

If a girl is actually at risk, she must be protected not removed from her family if that is avoidable, but monitored, supported, kept safe. And if cutting has occurred, the person who performed it must face consequences that are real enough that others think twice.

A religious leader in Garissa has influence a police officer will never have. That leader must sit with elders and say clearly: FGM is not required by our faith. It is a cultural practice, not a religious obligation.

A chief must tell families directly: cutting girls is against the law, and I will enforce it. A father must tell his son: we protect our sisters and daughters, not because it makes us modern, but because it makes us human.

A woman who has cut girls for years faces a choice: keep doing what she knows and risk arrest, or stop and lose her income. Without another option, she will choose cutting. But if there is a real alternative, a skill she can learn, a business she can start, income she can earn, the equation changes. This means economic support, not charity. It means treating cutters as people who made survival decisions, not monsters, and offering genuine pathways out.

Action time

Recently, when the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) convened a stakeholder engagement under the EU-funded Komesha FGM Sasa programme, implemented by KNCHR in seven counties, Garissa leaders did more than identify the challenges. They committed to action. Their pledge was clear: identify or report five FGM cases within three months.

When the three months are over, those five names matter. Not as statistics, but as girls- girls whose futures now depend on whether this commitment becomes real. Did anyone actually identify them before they were cut? Did anyone tell them they had a choice? Did anyone protect them when it mattered?

If five cases were identified, what happened next? Was a girl taken to a doctor who treated her with dignity? Was she given counselling by someone trained to understand what she had been through? Was her family offered support to choose differently for her younger sister?

Were the people who cut these girls investigated? Not eventually, when the case goes cold. Actually investigated. Was there a real police report? A real interview? Evidence collected? A prosecutor who reviewed the file and decided whether to pursue charges? Or did the case disappear, as so many do?

And what changed in the communities where these girls live? Did people have conversations they had never had before? Did a chief make a public statement? Did a mother decide she would not cut her daughter? Did a cutter consider a different life?

These are the questions that matter. Not because they are easier to answer, but because they determine whether Amina and the thousands of girls like her grow up protected or hidden.

I think again of Amina. In three years, she will be fifteen. By then, she will have been living with her injury for three years. She will have learned to hide the pain. She will have learned shame. She may have learned to believe that what was done to her is normal, that all girls experience this, that she should not speak. Or Garissa can make different choices.

A fifteen-year-old Amina could instead live in a county where her teacher felt empowered to ask if she was safe. Where her clinic would treat her respectfully if she came seeking care. Where her family would know that cutting meant legal consequences, not just social shame. Where her mother could choose to protect her without losing her place in her community. Where her own future daughter would not face the same choice her mother faced.

This is not a choice between Garissa and the rest of the world. It is a choice between two versions of Garissa, one where girls are protected and one where they are hidden.

The question is not abstract. It is about whether a girl who is twelve today will face cutting or protection. Whether a mother will feel she has a choice. Whether a teacher will have the courage to act. Whether the system will see what is happening or choose blindness.

This choice belongs to Garissa’s leadership to the county commissioner, to chiefs, to religious leaders, to police commanders, to health workers, to teachers, to mothers.

We cannot celebrate declining numbers while knowing the true prevalence is 88 per cent. We cannot call ourselves protectors while operating a system that succeeds by not seeing. We cannot claim to care about girls while accepting their silence as evidence of safety.

In three months, when Garissa reports on its five cases, the numbers will matter. But they will matter only if they are real. Only if they represent girls who were actually identified, protected, supported. Only if they mean something changed for those girls and their communities.

Amina is waiting to see which version of Garissa’s future she will inherit.