The UFO sect campaigning against female genital mutilation

Each year about 3 million girls – mostly in rural Africa and Asia, are forced to have part of their genitalia sliced off. Photograph: Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters

On a blisteringly hot afternoon this month, an unusual gathering took place in the city of Bobo-Dioulasso in the west African country of Burkina Faso. Shaded by red and green striped canopies, a couple of hundred people stood in reverential silence around a laptop. On screen, a man with a carefully clipped beard, dressed head-to-toe in white, addressed them via Skype from Japan.
The speaker was a spiritual leader known as Rael, the founder of one of the world's largest UFO sects, and he was online to announce the arrival of the first clitoral repair hospital in Africa.
Rael preaches that humans were created by extraterrestrials to enjoy untrammelled sexual pleasure – a belief that has led the group to campaign against female genital mutilation (FGM), and to advocate surgery to improve sexual feeling to FGM victims.read more