Standing Against Harmful Rites

In parts of the world, the death of a husband is the beginning of a second loss. A woman may be stripped of her home, her land, her children, and her standing in the community through traditional rites that dehumanize her in the name of custom. She is accused, isolated, and impoverished, often with the quiet blessing of those around her. The rites are not ancient relics. They are living practices, and the women they harm are our sisters, our members, and the women we are sworn to serve. We do not speak of them in the abstract. We speak of them because we have held the women who have survived them, and we cannot unhear what we have heard.

Our advocacy against harmful traditional rites is among the hardest and most necessary work we do. Through our international branches in Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania, we stand with women facing these practices, providing legal advocacy, economic self-reliance kits, and the spiritual restoration that reminds them they are not alone and they are not without rights. The work is dangerous, culturally complex, and slow, and we do it because the alternative is to abandon women to practices that destroy them, and we will not abandon them. The standing is the work, and the work is what the standing makes possible.

We do not impose. We partner with local leaders, legal advocates, and faith communities who understand the cultural landscape and who believe, as we do, that no tradition is worth the dignity of a woman. Change must come from within, but it comes faster when women know they have allies beyond their village. The partnership is the method, because we have learned that advocacy imposed from outside is rejected and advocacy partnered from within is received. We do not arrive with answers. We arrive in relationship, and the relationship is what allows the answers to be heard. The patience this requires is immense, and we give it, because the women we serve deserve nothing less.

The legal advocacy is essential, because the rights of a woman facing harmful rites are often protected on paper and violated in practice. We work with local lawyers to ensure that the protections that exist are enforced, that a woman's claim to her land is recognized, that her right to her children is upheld, that her standing in the community is restored. The enforcement is the gap between the law and the life, and we work in that gap, because a right that is not enforced is not a right, and the women we serve need rights that are real, not rights that are rhetorical.

The economic self-reliance kits are the practical foundation of the advocacy, because a woman who depends economically on the very community that is harming her cannot resist the harm. We provide the tools, the training, and the small grants that allow a woman to support herself, and the self-support is what gives her the freedom to assert her rights without fear of starvation. The economics and the advocacy are inseparable, and we have learned that the legal advocacy that is not accompanied by economic empowerment is advocacy that the woman cannot afford to use. We provide both, because both are needed, and because the woman deserves the whole of what will set her free.

One woman we supported had lost her home and her farmland after her husband's death. With legal advocacy and a small self-reliance grant, she reclaimed a portion of her land and started a market stall. She told us the advocacy gave her back not only her property but her personhood. That is what we defend. Not only rights, but the right to be recognized as fully human. The personhood is the deeper thing, and the restoration of it is the deepest gift the advocacy provides. A woman who has been treated as less than human, and who is then treated as fully human, carries the contrast for the rest of her life, and the carrying is what makes her an advocate for the next woman.

We are honest about the limits of our reach. We cannot be in every village. We cannot protect every woman. The practices are widespread and the resources are finite, and the gap between the need and the response is a grief we carry. We do not pretend the gap does not exist. We name it, we grieve it, and we do what we can, knowing that what we can do is not always enough but that it is always something, and that the something, for the woman who receives it, is everything. The honesty about the limits is what keeps us from despair and from triumphalism, and both are enemies of the sustained, patient work this advocacy requires.

We also work to change the practices themselves, not only to protect the women who face them. We partner with faith leaders, with elders, with the men and women of influence within the communities where the practices persist, to build a new consensus that no tradition is worth the dignity of a woman. The cultural change is the longest and the hardest work, and it is the work that will, eventually, make the emergency advocacy unnecessary. We invest in it because we believe in a future in which no woman faces these rites, and we believe that the future is built by the patient, respectful, persistent work of changing minds and hearts, one conversation at a time.

The spiritual restoration is the dimension of this work that is hardest to describe and most essential to provide. A woman who has been treated as less than human by her community, in the name of tradition, often loses her sense of her own sacred worth. We remind her, in prayer and in presence, that she is known, loved, and valued by a power greater than the tradition that harmed her, and the reminder is what restores, over time, the inner foundation that the rites tried to destroy. The restoration is not a substitute for the legal and economic work. It is the ground on which both stand, and we tend it with the care it deserves.

If you are a woman who has faced these practices, or who fears you will, we want you to know that you are not alone, that your dignity is intact no matter what has been done to you, and that there are people, across oceans, who are standing for you and who will not stop. The traditions that harm you are not stronger than the sisterhood that holds you. Your rights are real. Your personhood is sacred. Your future is not determined by the rite that threatened it. Reach out, through any of our branches, and let us stand with you. The standing is the work, and the work is yours to claim.

There is a dimension of this advocacy that we have come to see as the most strategic, and it is the work with the men of the communities where these practices persist. We have learned that advocacy that engages only women, however empowering, cannot change a practice that is enforced by men. We build relationships with the chiefs, the elders, the religious leaders, and the young men who will one day hold the power, and we carry, with respect and with persistence, the message that a tradition that destroys a woman destroys the community that permits it. The conversations are difficult, and they are essential, because a practice that is sustained by men can only be ended by men, and the men who end it become the most credible advocates for its ending, because they speak from within the tradition rather than against it. We invest in these relationships because we have learned that the liberation of the women is inseparable from the transformation of the men, and the transformation, however slow, is the only path to a future in which the advocacy is no longer needed.

We have also learned that the women who survive these rites and are restored through our advocacy become the most powerful advocates for the women who follow them, because they carry the authority of experience that no external advocate can claim. A woman who has been stripped of her land and has won it back, who has been accused and has been cleared, who has been broken and has been restored, speaks with a credibility that changes the conversation in her village in ways that no outsider ever could. We nurture these advocates, we train them, we connect them to one another, and we watch them become the leadership of a movement that we could never have built from the outside. The advocacy that produces its own advocates is the advocacy that will outlast us, and the outlasting is the deepest measure of the work.

There is a particular kind of support we provide that is rarely discussed and that we consider among the most sacred, and it is the support for the children of the women we serve. A woman who has been stripped of her property is often stripped, in practice, of the ability to keep her children in school, and the children become the secondary victims of the rites that harmed their mother. We provide school fees, uniforms, and supplies for the children of the women in our program, because we believe that the cycle of vulnerability that the rites exploit can only be broken if the next generation is educated, and the education is the long-term advocacy that no legal victory alone can provide. The children who stay in school because of this support are the ones who will, in twenty years, be the leaders who end the practices that harmed their mothers, and the ending, when it comes, will have begun in the school fees we paid and the women we stood beside and the refusal, sustained across decades, to let the rites have the last word.

We measure the success of this work in the women who reclaim their land, the children who stay in school, the communities that begin to question their traditions, and the advocates who emerge from the women we have served. The measurement is slow, because the change is slow, but the measurement is real, and the real is what sustains us through the years of patient, dangerous, necessary work. We will keep standing, one woman, one village, one conversation at a time, for as long as there are rites that harm and women who deserve better, because the standing is the justice, and the justice is the work we were made for, and the work is the honor we will never set down, for as long as there is a woman anywhere in the world who is told that a tradition is worth more than her dignity.

Written by

CAVIWO Advocacy Team

Contributor to the CAVIWO community sharing stories of hope, resilience, and advocacy.