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“Real Housewives of Dubai” star Chanel Ayan is opening up about her traumatic experience with genital mutilation in hope of spreading awareness.
The Bravolebrity, who is of Somali and Ethiopian descent, revealed Wednesday that she was forced to undergo female circumcision when she was just 5 years old to keep her a virgin until marriage.
“I’m a survivor,” Ayan told E! News after candidly discussing the procedure on this week’s episode of her reality show. “I felt that I was utterly betrayed by my culture and my family. This is just a barbaric practice, and it shouldn’t be happening to young girls.
“It happened to me 35 years ago, and I’ve never gotten over it.”
Ayan’s mutilation occurred when her aunt and grandmother brought her and her sister to a stranger’s house, where a man “sewed” up their genitals.
“Everybody’s a virgin in my culture because of this,” Ayan, 44, explained. “Because how are you going to have sex when you’re sewn as a girl until you get married? It’s a way to keep men satisfied.”
The fashion designer said that in addition to the physical pain she experienced from the mutilation, she also still suffers from emotional pain.
“I think the trauma is something that I will live with for the rest of my life,” she told the outlet. “This is why I want to talk about it because I honestly don’t want this to happen to anyone, because I know exactly how it feels and it’s not good. A lot of girls get depressed, hormones are imbalanced, a lot of young girls die.”
Ayan is launching a makeup line, Ayan Beauty, to raise proceeds toward ending the harmful practice that still takes place.
“I just feel like after opening [up about] it, I was taking my power away from the people that did this to me that I trusted the most because I was 5 years old and I did not know what was happening to me. I didn’t even know what was going on,” she shared.
“As long as I use my platform to bring awareness to stop this — if I can save 20 girls, 100 girls, 500 girls, I feel like that’s the purpose I have. It’s child abuse. And a lot of girls just die for no reason.”
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