Interview met Zahra Naleie over Zero Tolerance Day 2025

- met Zahra Naleie een senior programma manager

Achterlating – met mevrouw Ikhlaas, een actieve sleutelpersoon en ervaringsdeskundige.

Dit gaat over Huiselijk geweld met René Haring, ervaringsdeskundige en oprichter van "Agressie en daarna."

Dit gaat over Vrouwelijke Genitale Verminking (VGV) – met Babah Tarawally, schrijver, columnist en activist uit Sierra Leone.

Eergerelateerd geweld – met Ebru Arslan, expert bij Sterk Thuis.

After FGM, victims may suffer a range of effects from the violence perpetrated against them. This may vary from physical and health-related, to psychological and social impact associated with the experience. As part of collaborative media campaign work with FSAN, we are having this engagement with field professionals to understand the extent of this impact on victims. In this programme we will be walking our listeners through the various ways FGM impacts the lives of its victims. To help us make sense of it all today in this call, we have Dr. Heleen Margriet Koudijs, who is a Senior Advisor, Project lead and MD of Global Health & Tropical Medicine at Pharos, a health-related organization based in Utrecht. Ms. Aminata Bah is a Social Worker and FGM/C Health Advocate working with NHS England. She is also an Ambassador with the End FGM EU Network while supporting other NGOS to end violence against women and girls. Based in London (United Kingdom), Aminata is an End FGM/C (Female Genital Mutilations/Cutting) advocate from Guinea (West Africa), the second country with the highest FGM prevalence in the world (97% according to WHO).

Honor-related crimes are still being committed all around us, and not everyone does recognize when it is happening.

It comprises actions or activities aimed at either upholding or restoring a perceived damage to a family’s honor or reputation. These actions or activities may take on one of these forms: threats, assault, forced marriages, kidnappings, and even killings. Thus, honor-related violence may be physically or mentally perpetuated against potential victims. These kinds of reprisals often take place in closed communities.

There are families which believe any misconduct by a member brings shame, and they are therefore usually driven to either punish or isolate the offender or the entire family.

In our next program, we will be looking into reasons for these honor-related crimes and how these may be spotted and prevented.

Every year it is estimated that between 150 and 800 young people from a migrant background are left behind abroad by parents or custodians (source: www.huiselijkgeweld.nl).

Although the phenomenon of abandonment has been around for a much longer time, professionals and authorities have only really noticed its seriousness in recent years, according to KIS researcher Eliane Smits van Waesberghe. This practice is considered child abuse in the Netherlands because of the disruption it introduces into a child’s life after they have been left aboard with a relative and often, in unfamiliar surroundings.

This program is in collaboration with FSAN, and we will be exploring (among other things) what are the early indications of this phenomenon and how it can be stopped before it actually happens.

On a global scale, 12 million girls are forced into marriage every year before the age of 18; this figure boils down to 28 girls per minute (source: UN OHCHR).

Exacerbating this problem is the increased trend in global human trafficking, and this calls for everyone to become more aware and also involved, in helping to end this abuse.

Here in the Netherlands, the summer holidays have become an uneasy period for some young people, who are at an extra high risk of either forced marriage, abandonment, or even FGM. For this reason, the government and local authorities tend to focus on preventive campaign measures.

In this program we will spotlight forced marriages, engaging relevant subject-matter experts and stakeholders within the migrant community to discuss the issue.