Sada Mire: We won’t eradicate FGM if we keep misunderstanding its history

Despite a century of campaigning the practice persists. But in my work as an archaeologist, I’ve learned how we can end it.

This year marks a hundred years of official campaigning against female genital mutilation, a movement which began with an international conference in Egypt in 1920. Yet the practice is still going strong: according to Unicef, 200 million women alive today are affected by it and it is still practised in almost 30 African countries. After so much campaigning, we have to ask: why is FGM not eradicated?

Read the rest of this article in the Guardian newspaper here.