Death threats
“They said I would die because I spoke about a thing I had no business talking about.”
Liberia 🇱🇷 "I wrote an article called Growing Pains about the practice of Female Genital Cutting in my country- why women are circumcised. Nobody was willing to talk about it, so I decided to bring it out in the open to become an open discussion and what I wanted to happen happened because it was discussed openly for three weeks, almost a month. My people got angry. The women. They said I shouldn’t have spoken. The threats started. They threatened my editor, they threatened my managing editor, they threatened me, they threatened my friends, they said I would die because I spoke about a thing I had no business talking about. Going in to hiding was my only option while the article spread across the internet and tempers flared even more. I was awarded the International Press Freedom Award by the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression and the Committee to Protect Journalists. Although the awards are not recognised in Liberia, I will never regret what I have done because I exposed a practice that needs to be outlawed.”
