Chapter 6

That Saturday, Kevin met Jeremy at the dojang for their weekly training.

“Say, Jeremy,” Kevin said as he pulled on his dobak, your mom mentioned that you’ve gotten involved with writing about social problems.”

“Oh yeah, I am,” he replied. “I think that governments and even religions have too much control over how people can treat each other, like when we were talking about honor killing—that’s a religious idea gone haywire, and also the Naked in School Program, which is a crazy government idea out of control too.”

“So you’ve gone and poked a stick into a beehive?” Kevin grinned. “I hear your opinions have annoyed some people.”

“Yeah, at my school is one place. I’ve been putting my thoughts on my Facepage and writing opinion stuff, and now I just started collecting horror stories from kids in the Program this year. That’s upset some people and wow, I even hear from people who say they’re kids’ parents and what I post is scary for them to read. Some say they’re trying to keep their kids out of having to do the Program.”

“Hey, we gotta get to work now, class is starting. Talk later?” Kevin interrupted.

“Sure.” They went into the training room.

After class was over and they were dressing, Kevin mentioned that Jeremy’s mom had suggested that he talk to Denise about what she had done with mobilizing the teacher-training students.

“That’s a super idea. When can we do that?”

“You have time now? Let me see if Denise is around.” He called her while Jeremy called his mom.

Kevin called. “Denise, can Jeremy come over now? ... She’s at the club? ... How’s she feeling? ... That bad, huh ... Yeah, using the whirlpool was a great idea ... No problem, she doesn’t have to be home; Jeremy wants to talk about the dragon-slaying you did ... ha ha ... Okay, be there soon.” He turned to Jeremy. “Okay?”

“Mum says it’s okay if Denise can,” he reported.

“It’s good then, let’s go. Your um ... bodyguard ... okay with me?”

Jeremy laughed. “Sure. Dad gave Security your and Denise’s info and photos and they’ve vetted you, sure. They probably have a whole file on you too. You were with the president, right? So you passed the security checks, no problem.”

Kevin rode with Jeremy while the embassy security person drove. “Jeremy, do you think you’ll get to learn to drive soon?” Kevin asked as they arrived at his flat.

“Gee, I hope so,” he replied. “Although I don’t need it with my executive car service, but when I start dating I don’t really want a chauffeur, you know.” They grinned at each other.

“Denise, we’re here,” Kevin announced as they came into the flat.

“Be right there. Snack’s on the table; you must be thirsty too, right? In the fridge.”

Kevin got some drinks from the refrigerator and Denise came in and hugged them both.

“Jeremy was telling me that he’s doing an anti-Program website,” Kevin told her with a wink.

“So I heard,” she said. “Jeremy, do you know about the one that the U.S. kids used? It’s inactive now since the Program in the U.S. has changed so much, but we know how to reach the archive.”

“I heard about it but it doesn’t come up in searches,” Jeremy said.

“Well, it might, but it might be pretty far down the listings because no one visits it anymore,” Kevin said as he started up his laptop’s browser.

They spent a while looking over some of the old anti-Program site’s blog pages.

“Cool; there are some great ideas here that I can write about! You think I can use them?” Jeremy asked, excited.

“I’m sure that no one involved with that site will stop you,” Denise grinned. “Anyway, your mom suggested I tell you what happened in my college a couple of weeks ago.”

After she related the story, Jeremy was even more excited.

“Man, what great ideas. You two are the coolest ever! Even the president thinks so! I can’t wait to use some of this stuff in my posts and I really love how you turned the ‘safety equipment’ into clothes! Hey, what time is it? Oh jeez, I gotta go now. Can we get together again so I can show you what I’ve been doing?”

“Sure,” Kevin said as Jeremy ran out to the waiting car.

“We didn’t get his Facepage address,” Denise mentioned after Jeremy left.

“Yeah, I’ll text him to ask.” Kevin replied.

On Monday, Amelia arrived in school early; it was chilly outside so she went to the commons area outside the lunchroom to wait for classes to begin. Her treatment session on Friday had been particularly intense; her pelvic area was still very sore and sensitive. She saw one of her new acquaintances, a girl named Darra Sekibo, sitting in a row of chairs and eased herself gingerly into the seat next to her.

Her friend looked at her with concern. “Are you hurt?” she asked.

Amelia looked at her. “Pretty sore. I had some therapy Friday for an old injury. It was gross. I’m still achy there. I had to stand on the bus! The bouncing hurt.”

“Ooooo ... What happened? Your bottom got hurt? In privates? Um, I know how that must feel because I was hurt in my privates when I was younger in a religious rite.”

“Oh my,” Amelia exclaimed, “You mean you were cut in your privates?”

“Errr, yes, that’s so ... I was um ... eight,” Darra said softly. “I don’t remember that much about it except that it hurt a lot.”

Amelia went on. “You came from Nigeria, you told me. Are you a Muslim?”

She nodded. “Huh uh.”

“Are there a lot of Muslims there?”

“Oh yes, I think maybe half the Nigerian people are Muslim,” Darra answered.

“I wanted to ask—I thought people in Africa had very dark skin but your skin is pretty light,” Amelia commented.

“I’m a Hausa and most of us have light skin. Actually there are a number of ethnic groups in West Africa that have light-skinned members, like the Igbos—about half of them are very light. But you said you had old injury to your bottom—umm, Amelia, your name is Hadad; isn’t that Arabic? Are you a Muslim too? Is ... oh dear ... is that why you’re sore?”

“Oh Darra, it’s complicated ... my mum’s extended family’s Muslim but my papa and I don’t practice. My mum was Muslim and her family was very observant but she wasn’t. And yes, my injury was getting cut in my fanny a few years ago; my auntie kind of kidnapped me...”

She very briefly related her tale, culminating with her current medical treatments. Just as Darra began to ask her further questions, the first bell rang.

“Amelia, let’s talk more at lunch, okay?” Darra said as they left for their rooms.

When lunch period began, Amelia got her food and looked for Darra; she found her with a few other girls at a table in a corner. Amelia had seen those girls around the school but had never spoken to any of them. When she joined them, Darra went to her.

“I got us a mostly private table,” she indicated its isolation. “My friends here—I don’t think you met them yet—are also Muslim and they were all cut too,” she whispered. Louder, she continued, “This is Estelle, Mariama, Tisa, and Fayola. And this is Amelia.”

The four girls greeted Amelia shyly; Mariama and Fayola were wearing hijabs.

Then Darra spoke to the group. “Before school started today Amelia and I talked about being cut—isa aru my people call it—and she told me that she was cut only three years ago.”

The others gasped and told Amelia that they were younger than eight and two were babies when they had the FGM procedure done to them.

Darra went on. “In Nigeria FGM is banned now. I’m sure it must continue in places, but I heard that many imams agreed it isn’t part of the Islamic laws. And my mum told me when isa aru was done to me, there were a lot of girls done at that same time. And she told me that she had heard that until pretty recently, something like 20 percent of the girls from my little province died afterward!”

Mariama spoke in agreement. “Yes, I heard that too from my villages. I’m from Côte d’Ivoire and a Voltaïque. I was cut when I was two, I think. I came from the north. They didn’t use sanitary conditions and rubbed ashes and herbs on the cuts after and many kids were poor and malnourished. When they got infected, lots died.”

Fayola offered more information. “I also heard that babies born to girls who were cut have a greater chance of dying after birth.” The others nodded that they had heard that fact.

Then they began to discuss some of the medical problems they had experienced. They all had some scarring and keloid formation. Darra said her cutting was only of her clitoral prepuce and it turned out that none of the girls had had the most radical form of FGM which included the excision of the clitoris, removal of all of the vulval lips, and sewing up of the remaining area, leaving only a small opening for the passage of urine and menstrual flow.

“Ugh,” Estelle commented. “I heard they do that in Somalia!”

Darra said, “Not only there; other places too, my mum says. Amelia, what are your doctors doing for you now?”

Amelia told them how they were working on breaking up her scar tissue and then trying to repair the damaged nerves.

“And it really hurts!” she exclaimed. “They have to press deep into my skin there and rub it around...” the others winced, “ ... and then I’m sore for a few days after. But it’s helping, I can feel it. They also warned me I have to keep myself very clean or I’ll get a urinary infection.”

“Oh yes!” Darra said. “That’s a constant problem I have, I get them lots and I do keep myself clean there, but it keeps happening.”

The other girls said they had repeated infections too. And then they compared how much sensitivity they had and most girls, while not experiencing intense pain, said that the feelings in their vulvas was mostly discomfort and could even be painful when the area was rubbed.

Tisa grimaced. “In PE, Carley, that blonde girl in year eleven with the big titties, was giggling to her friends about getting herself off by tickling her fanny,” she said. “I can’t imagine what it would feel like to have that kind of feeling from there. It hurts if I press there when I wash myself.”

“You know, we should try to do something,” Amelia ventured. “Like a blog? Write about how awful that cutting is to happen to girls? There are five of us here and there must be more girls at our school who are cut ‘cuz so many come from Africa and the Middle East too. Maybe we can have girls tell us their stories and we can put them on the web and if enough people see them, they’ll see how bad it is for girls and maybe make the practice against the law.”

“That’s a really good idea, Amelia,” Darra said. “But I only know how to post on Facepage. We’ll also need help if we have a blog. Those look hard to do.”

Estelle smiled. “Maybe I can get help. My uncle knows about those things, I think. I’ll ask him how to make a blog for us.”

That evening at home, Kevin told Denise that Jeremy had given him his Facepage address.

“He’s made it open to everyone, not like a personal page, Denise. Ha, like a music group, I guess. He’s got links to news items on school problems that could be related to the Program here, see? Wow, there isn’t anything like the censorship we had when the Program was in the States.”

“Oh look, Kevin—here’s a link to that blog that Amelia mentioned,” Denise pointed. “In the recommended sites. Where it says ‘Visit the human rights and dignity blog by The Realist.’ Click there, sweetie.”

Kevin did. The blog opened and the current article was titled, “The Program: Human Rights Abuses Coming to a School Near You.” There was an introductory paragraph which discussed various government-sanctioned torture methods—or what some governments called “enhanced interrogation techniques”—like sleep deprivation, binding the victim into contorted positions, water-boarding, and exposure to prolonged extreme cold and heat. It then mentioned how most people believed all forms of torture, no matter the justification, to be morally repugnant.

The blog article continued, “We’ve all heard of these acts of abuse from media reports and know that they have been perpetrated on people, usually with the justification that the information the torturers seek is supposed to save lives. But the public is totally unaware of the abuses, actually they are tortures, committed on our own children in our own schools every day, by the people who we have entrusted to protect them. The following is a first-hand account of such a human rights crime, written just this week by a girl in year eleven in a school 30 kilometers north of London.”

Yesterday I learned I was in the [Naked in School] Program and today I had to be a subject in Health class. The teacher saw me come into class naked and decided to cover sexual response, even though the lessons didn’t cover that until later this year.

She told me to lay down on the front table so the class could see between my legs. I’ll write down what she said as best as I can recall.

“Class, you know that pupils in the Program have to allow Reasonable Requests, but in class lessons, teachers can exceed the limits of what the pupils normally must permit. I think the only limit we have is that we can’t force a pupil to have sexual intercourse.”

I was totally shocked; I’m a virgin.

“The most effective way of obtaining sexual arousal in boys and girls is by oral sex and since we have a subject to practice on, this is a perfect time for everyone to learn how to do it with a girl.”

I tried to jump up but she was holding my shoulders down. Then she asked for a volunteer to go first and I saw almost every boy in the class raise their hand—even some of the girls did too!

She called a boy up and he began pushing his fingers into my crotch to open my lips and I cried in pain.

“Not so rough,” the teacher warned him. “You want to be gentle. Remember, your goal is to give her an orgasm. We want everyone to see what it’s like to do that.”

I shuddered. Did she mean that she was going to have EVERYONE in the class try to make me come? I’ll be a total mess! How will I be able to walk to my next lesson? Anyway, I felt icky from the first boy’s having his tongue in my fanny; it was disgusting and his fumblings did nothing for me. I also felt nothing but revulsion with the next few boys too, except now I was getting sore. The teacher was sounding annoyed, probably because I wasn’t getting aroused, and sent the sixth boy back to his seat. How could I feel aroused if all I felt was pain and disgust? Then she alarmed me with her next comment.

“Our subject seems unresponsive, so perhaps she needs manual stimulation too. Sometimes stroking one or two fingers into a girl’s vagina helps their arousal.”

I twisted around and yelled, “I’m a virgin! You can’t put anything in me!”

She had two boys come up to hold me down and called another boy up.

“Try licking her clitoris while you slide your finger in her vagina.”

He put his finger there and pushed. I was dry and it hurt. I screamed!

“Oh, is she too dry?” the teacher asked. “Lick your finger and try again.”

I yelled for him to stop, but he shoved two fingers in and the pain was awful and I must have passed out because next I knew I was in the nurse’s office with a bloody pad over my fanny. And my poor hymen was torn to shreds.

Of course I will have to face more of this abuse tomorrow since I was told I have to stay in the Program in spite of the abuse. My parents are livid but there’s nothing they can do. I think that the Health class wasn’t a demonstration of sex, it was a demonstration of torture.

“Oh crap, Kevin, it’s just like we saw on our old website,” Denise groaned. “Abusive teachers were almost always the biggest problem.”

“Yeah. There are more stories like this one in the blog’s archives,” Kevin observed. “Whoever this blogger is—wow, I think it must be a solo project. Hey, didn’t Amelia say she heard someone in her school was the Realist blogger? Maybe she knows something.”

“She’s studying at a friend’s place till ... oh, that must be her now...”

“Hi, I’m home!” Amelia called as she opened the door.

“Hi there! Amelia, honey, does anyone know who writes that ‘Realist’ blog?” Denise asked.

“Hi Denise, no; I haven’t heard, but that stuff posted on it is really scary. The kids in those schools must be terrified of the Program.”

“It’s very bad when the teachers use the Program as an excuse to mistreat or humiliate the kids like some of these stories tell about,” Denise said. “I know of cases where some kids liked the Program and I’ve even spoken to some of them, but since those kids aren’t outraged or hurt by what they experienced, most don’t write anything about it like the Realist does.”

Kevin looked at Denise. “Say, sweetie, looks like they don’t censor Facepage here. I wonder if kids tell of any good experiences on their personal pages. But I wonder how we’d find any instances if someone isn’t in their group of followers.”

“I can put up a question on a couple of music groups’ pages, ones that high school kids follow,” suggested Amelia. “Even if they take it down, the word might spread and we’d see if anyone answers.”

“Good thinking, honey, but do you want to use your own Facepage persona for that?” Kevin asked.

“Oops ... um ... no; that’s not such a good idea then...”

“Well, we could set up an anonymous page—that’s not really legal and we could get trouble if it got traced. Ah, I know. Let’s use one of the shell companies we used to register our anti-Program website. Those empty offices are still paid for, Denise. I think I have the records for the names and addresses on my laptop. Let’s see ... yes I do. Okay, we can set up a new account with this name and address. Next, Amelia, don’t connect to the new account on Facepage with your usual browser. Your internet address is probably saved in the Facepage logs and could be traced back to us. We’ll set you up with the Tor browser—always connect with Tor and no one can trace your connection back to you.”

“How does that work?” Amelia asked.

“It uses relays—several different computers that the connection hops through—and hides the message and destination in encrypted layers so each relay can’t be traced back. It’s pretty complicated but it works well and my activist friends swear by it,” Kevin explained.

“Um, I should tell you this, I guess,” Amelia said, “I’ve been talking with a group of girls at school. They all had the FGM done to them when they were a lot younger than me...”

Denise looked at her in alarm. “Are they okay now? Do they need medical care?”

“Oh, no, Denise. They all do have problems but we looked their problems up on line and looks like they aren’t unusual for FGM victims. No one has their pain as bad as mine but they get urinary infections and only have pain when their, um, fannies? are rubbed.”