International Day of Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation is a UN-sponsored awareness day that takes place February 6 each year.
It is an effort to make the world aware of female genital mutilation (also called female genital mutilation or FGM) and to promote its eradication.
First, on February 6, 2003, Stella Obasanjo, the First Lady of Nigeria and spokesperson for the Campaign Against Female Genital Mutilation, made the official declaration on "Zero Tolerance to FGM" in Africa during a conference organized by the Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children (IAC). Then the UN Sub-Commission on Human Rights adopted this day as an international awareness day.
Famous quotes containing the words day, tolerance, female and/or mutilation:
“Simonides. And she is fair too, is she not?
Pericles. As a fair day in summer, wondrous fair.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Children who begin life with an eagerness to please, need to know that not pleasing is also all right now and then. They learn tolerance for others’ faults through our tolerance of their own.”
—Cathy Rindner Tempelsman (20th century)
“What I expect from my male friends is that they are polite and clean. What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, the ability to finish my sentences for me when I am sobbing, a complete and total willingness to pour their hearts out to me, and the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn’t supposed to touch the bone.”
—Anna Quindlen (20th century)
“Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country—it had all been done in our name.... The French city ... had represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans had begun the heroin phase.”
—James Fenton (b. 1949)