Swedish airport advises girls to tuck a spoon in their underwear
Girls in
Sweden who are at risk of being taken abroad for forced marriage or female
genital mutilation (FGM) have been advised to tuck a spoon into their underwear
as a last-ditch method of alerting authorities to their plight.
The hope
is that if a girl hides a spoon in her underwear, she’ll set off the metal
detectors and be pulled aside by authorities, at which point she will be able
to speak to someone privately. Per Reuters, Gothenburg, the second largest city
in Sweden, made headlines this week when it recommended the practice.
Karma
Nirvana, the leading British charity fighting honor killings and forced
marriages, is the organization who came up with the tactic.
“The
spoon in the underwear is literally a last resort,” Natasha Manota, the head of
development and learning for Karma Nirvana, told A Plus. “We wouldn’t be
expecting people to do that in the main, we’d be expecting them to obviously
hear the story, hear the noise we’re creating about forced marriage and learn
about services like ours that exist so they can get help before it got to the
stage of them being taken out of the country.”
“If the
staff at the security check at the airport spot a girl with a spoon in her
pants, they take her aside and talk to her in a separate room,” Katarina
Idegård, who works as a coordinator against honor-based violence in Gothenburg,
told A Plus in an email. “They contact the police since it’s a crime to prepare
for FGM and the social services to take care of the girl. If there is an acute
actual risk of FGM for the girl, we have a law that makes it possible to take
the child away from the parents temporarily and give the child the care it
needs somewhere else than at home.”
Karma
Nirvana also conducts training sessions for airport security officers to keep
an eye out for the “spoon technique,” as Manota calls it, along with other
signs that a girl in transit might be leaving the country for a forced marriage
or FGM. Both FGM and forced marriages are illegal and punishable by prison
sentences in Sweden.
Idegard
said a 2015 study found that 38,000 girls living in Sweden may have undergone
FGM. The victims included women born in Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Gambia.
One
well-known case of FGM was that of Yemeni former child bride Nujood Mohammed
Ali, pictured top.
She who
was granted a divorce in 2008 at the age of eight after her unemployed father
forced her into marriage with a man twenty years her senior. She is now a
central figure in Yemen’s movement against forced marriage and child marriage.
