A Movement Carved from Pain

"If you care about humanity, you believe in the power of humanity. We are the same," says Ubah Ali who fights against a traditional practice.

By Pomy Hailu

Updated 01:19 pm EDT, April 16, 2025

Published 10:04 am EDT, April 15, 2025

Photo Credits

MODEL: Natalia Kuptcova
Special thanks: James Kuptcov
Photographer: Flávio Iryoda

When Ubah Ali was six years old, she was led into a room where tradition and violence sat side by side. There was no warning, no consent, no explanation her young mind could understand, just hands holding her down and a blade cutting into her. In Somalia, where 98% of women and girls are subjected to Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), it wasn’t seen as cruelty. It was seen as culture. As protection. As preparation for marriage. But even as a child, Ubah questioned it. Why does it have to be like this? Why does becoming a woman feel like punishment?

Years later, when a doctor came to her high school to talk about the dangers of FGM, something clicked. For the first time, there was a word for the pain. Mutilation. To learn more, Ubah did what every curious, defiant girl does; she opened Google. What she found explained everything. FGM was not a religious requirement.

It was never written in any holy book, despite what community elders whispered and preachers affirmed. It was about control, cutting away pleasure, and shrinking girls into obedient wives before they even knew their own bodies. And yet, in her community, to speak against it was to be branded a traitor, a puppet of Western ideals, an enemy of her own culture. But Ubah didn’t stop there.

In 2018, she co-founded Solace for Somaliland Girls Foundation, a grassroots movement rooted in the stubborn belief that change, real, trembling, impossible change, begins at home. They spoke to parents, gathered girls in school clubs, and held forums where important conversations were made. They sat with religious leaders and doctors, patiently unpacking the myths and unlearning the lies.

They brought facts, stories, and science to the same tables where fear and tradition had always been presented alone. It wasn’t easy. “When you are young and loud and female in Somalia, every word feels like a fight. People said we were Western agents trying to destroy Somali culture,” Ubah says.

The irony isn’t lost on her, that her love for her people, her refusal to accept their suffering, is twisted into proof that she is an outsider. Even when the fight leaves her drained, even when her own community calls her a traitor, she holds on to one thing, saving just one girl is worth it. She’s done it before.

Her own mother once prepared to circumcise a five-year-old girl in the family. Ubah spent a year, twelve full months of careful conversation, late-night arguments, and exhausted silence, until her mother changed her mind. “If it takes that long to convince my own family,” Ubah says, “imagine how long it takes to change a whole community.” But the hardest truth of all? FGM is still legal in Somalia.

In 2025, it is still perfectly legal to take a girl, whether she’s five, ten, or fourteen, and cut and stitch her. There is no law protecting her body. No punishment for the cutter. No consequence for the parents who make the call. Not in Somaliland. Not in Mogadishu. Not anywhere in Somalia. A girl’s body is public property, carved up to preserve family honor. Even doctors and nurses, the very people who should know better, will do it if the price is right.

That reality is both infuriating and exhausting. Ubah knows it firsthand. She’s not an activist because it’s trendy or because anyone asked her to be. She’s in this fight because her own body carries the scars. Because even now, she remembers being six years old, small and scared, with no one to explain why pain was the price of being a girl and she refuses to let another child grow up believing her worth is something that has to be carved into her skin.

In Somaliland, the cutting starts young, usually between the ages of 6 and 14, but some girls are cut at five, even younger. The most extreme form, Type 4, where everything is removed, happens more often in rural areas. In the capital, girls might endure Type 2 or Type 3, where the vaginal opening is narrowed to a pinhole, leaving just enough space for urine and menstrual blood. The damage is lifelong. Women die during childbirth. Infections linger for years. Even sex, if it ever happens, is a reminder of the pain they were never allowed to forget.

But Ubah’s fight isn’t only about anatomy. It’s about power, who holds it, who’s excluded from it, and who gets to decide what happens to girls’ bodies and futures. In Somalia, women are almost entirely absent from positions of power. They’re not just at the bottom of decision-making tables, most of the time, they aren’t even in the room. There are no women leading the government, no women shaping the policies that could protect girls from the blade.

That’s why part of Ubah’s work, beyond education and advocacy, is pushing for more women in leadership, women who understand what it feels like to grow up in fear of your own culture. She believes the fight against FGM can’t be separated from the fight for political power, because when women lead, policies change and hopefully her daughters or her granddaughters won’t even have to ask what FGM is.

Pomy Hailu

Editor, Culture | Website

A tireless seeker of knowledge, an ambivert, a feminist, and, coincidentally, a writer. She is a psychology graduate pursuing her writing passion by working as a communication manager in Ethiopia. Writing is a wall she built around herself to hide her other personalities, and words. When not writing, Pomy loves to sit alone and wander in her imaginative mind.

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