With her mother and aunts restraining her efforts to escape, a young girl struggles to free herself from the horror that is about to occur. As the village midwife reaches with her dirty razor to make the first vaginal cut, the girl lets out a gut-wrenching cry that seems to echo throughout the village.

This is the scene from "Fire Eyes," a documentary on Female Genital Mutilation. And it is reality. Two million girls each year are at risk of mutilation—that’s about 6,000 per day.

I sat to tea with former UN consultant Anab Abdulkadir to shed light on the widely-practiced yet secretive custom.

"Every single woman who goes through it will suffer for the rest of her life. It is a real torture that no girl should have to go through," said Abdulkadir.

It is incredibly common among young girls, regardless of whether they are educated or not, she said. "I remember I was the one who said I wanted to have it done. Everyone pays attention to you, and you get a nice gift afterwards.

"The little girls are the ones who are insistent on getting it [FGM] done," said Abdulkadir. All the girls talk about it, and one who hasn’t undergone circumcision feels peer pressure.

Abdulkadir was about 8 years old when she underwent the agonizing procedure.

"The sound of cutting...it will echo in your mind and will haunt you for the rest of your life," she said. She is now 50 years old.

Women are the property of men, and men want to protect and oversee their property. "It boils down to securing purity of woman for men," said Abdulkadir. "It is a form of insurance, for instance when a man returns from a war."

"FGM is a form of social control over female and male relations," she said. "Nobody benefits from it. Not man nor woman," said Abdulkadir.

"FGM is a cultural practice, not one endorsed by Islam," said Abdulkadir. There are no sayings or versus in the Qu’ran or Hadith that justify female circumcision.

Education and development

Community-based strategy: Anti-FGM campaigns headed by circumsied women

Implementing techniques used to end foot binding in China:
-Modern education campaign
-New information about adverse health consequences of FGM
-Natural women societies: members publicly pledge not to mutilate their daughters nor to let their sons marry circumsized women

Find out more on the community-based solution in Gerry Mackie’s A Way to End Female Genital Cutting.