Circumcised at eight. Raped by wandering militiamen at twelve. Fully infibulated again at thirteen, and then married off to a fifty-year-old man who regularly beat her; Ifrah Ahmed runs away to a place she had once known as home in war torn Mogadishu to find it had become the kind of battleground now known as ‘Black Hawk Down’.

Ifrah makes the extraordinary journey out of war-torn Somalia and arrives not in Minnesota, USA, as she had been lead to believe, but Dublin, Ireland. Finally finding some sense of safety, her fears begin to subside and her traumatic days, she thinks, are behind her, until a routine medical smear test elicits such looks of horror on the faces of her Irish doctors that she suffers a profound sense of shame. They say that anger is the flip side of shame.

Channelling the feelings on both sides of that coin, she reacts incredibly quickly, learns English at break-neck speed and unearths an enviable technical talent for harnessing social media. Within months she is campaigning for better conditions for asylum-seekers arriving in Ireland. She quickly becomes a leading activist against gender-based violence and fights through her campaign work for the abandonment of FGM world-wide.

As an Irish citizen, she presents her testimony on behalf of Ireland’s MEPs on the occasion of the ratification of the UN Convention against FGM/C at the European Parliament and it is passed unanimously. Thus commences her now lauded professional career as an international activist.