The underground world of home-made circumcisions in Italy
The bell rings. There is a man outside the door, a blue bag in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Inside the bag, there are scissors, scalpels, tissues and a bottle of disinfectant. It’s the bag of a surgeon, but he is not one. The man outside this door is a fake doctor who practices circumcisions at home. Once he gets in the house, he pulls out all the instruments and start preparing the kitchen table, ready to cut open a one-year old baby on it.
All of this is taking place in Italy, where at-home circumcisions are illegal. However, this man is not going to run out of business any time soon.
“I did almost 3000 of them in my career” he says. “They call me from all regions of Italy. But I would only go to, say, Rome if I have at least 5 children to do.”
The reason why this “wannabe surgeon” is so popular in Italy is that the national health system here doesn’t cover ritual circumcisions, forcing many foreigners and immigrants to find cheaper solutions. While circumcision for medical issues is covered by NHS and is free of charge, ritual circumcisions can cost from €400 (in the public hospitals) to €4000 (in private clinics). A sky high cost that forces many parents to turn to people like this “doctor”.
“I take €150 to do it in Milan, €200 out of Milan.”
Lower price and a quick home delivery service that appeal to many parents who don’t have the meanings to pay the hospital bill. No surprises if in Italy 35% of the 5000 kids circumcised every year do the surgery at home, illegally.
As did one father who wanted to stay anonymous and who told us they had this “doctor” circumcise their son when he was only two years old. He suffered severe bleeding after the surgery and they had to bring the child to the hospital. Once there, the real doctors had to re-construct the skin that was almost butchered.
“He used a dirty scissor and a hard blade. With the hard blade he kept cutting and cutting… After that, my son kept bleeding. I called him and said that my son had a problem, that I wanted to go to the hospital. He said I didn’t need to call the hospital, that he would have taken care of everything.”
Luckily for him, he decided instead to go to the hospital, where they saved his kid. But many children who get circumcised at home in Italy are not so lucky to get to the hospital in time. Just recently, a baby twin died in Rome after his father circumcised him and his brother. And a couple of months ago, a one-month old baby died in Genua after the surgery was done at home by a spiritual guru. Both him and the mother are now in jail for involuntary manslaughter. Which is one of the main reasons why parents who decide to do this don’t want to bring their children to the hospital and don’t want to denounce the “doctors”.
“I didn’t denounce him because I was afraid they would put me in jail”, the anonymous father told us. “But I have been telling anyone who he is and what he does, hoping that nobody will call him again.”
Well, we did. And we were able to find his phone number pretty easily. Many people in the muslim community actually recommended him to us, saying he was a professional.
Indeed, going on his Facebook profile you can see he studied medicine at one of the biggest university in Egypt, his motherland. He also claims to be an expert neurosurgeon in a public hospital outside Milan. Sadly, that is a lie. To be a surgeon in Italy you need to have a recognised Italian degree and you need to be on the Italian Doctors Register. His name is not on it. Also, we called the hospital he claimed he’d be working for, and nobody there knew his name.
Anyway, we decided to contact him and judge for ourselves. We asked him to circumcise our imaginary nephew at home. He agreed immediately to meet on Thursday at 5 pm.
And there he is, at 5 pm, waiting in front of the house with his blue bag. As soon as he gets in the living room he starts reassuring us that circumcision is a really simple surgery, nothing can go wrong.
“It only takes five minutes. You hold him for his legs. I will use these pliers to keep the skin down, and then with the blade I will just cut his skin. Like that. Tac. Five minutes”
So far so good. This is indeed one of the possible procedures, although according to doctor Najati Alrabi, urologist and expert in traditional circumcisions, it is not the standard surgery here in Italy.
“He knows what he’s doing. The fact that he uses the pliers means he doesn’t want to accidentally cut the glans, which happens quite frequently during home-made surgery. But still, this is not a standard procedure in Italy.”
We asked him if he sutures the cut.
“No, there is no need for that. Only if the child bleed too much. But otherwise we just put a bandage on it. Then tomorrow, we put him in the water and we take the bandage off him.”
And this is the first troubling sign. According to doctor Alrabi, you always need to suture the skin after the surgery.
“Otherwise the child can bleed a lot. And the fact that he doesn’t put stitches means that even the following days the child can bleed quite massively. And naturally, he can be exposed to all kind of infections.”
So, no suturing is one of the first big risks in home-made surgeries. And we soon find out which is the second one.
“I don’t anaesthetise the child. We only put a spray to numb his parts. That’s it. But don’t worry, he won’t feel a thing. We will be done before he says wha wha.”
And this is the second big risk. Doing any surgery without any form of anaesthetics means to put the child through a terrible pain. A pain that could cause psychological trauma or even worse, it could cause him to move and kick during the procedure. Putting the child in even more danger. But it gets worse
“We are going to do this on the table here. It’s no problem at all. I just need to clean the instruments. I don’t need to wash them with water, just with this disinfectant.”
At this point he starts to clean the instruments and put them back on the dirty table where he just finished smoking on.
And here is the most troubling and disgusting issue: disinfection. This man in front of us is ready to circumcise our one-year old nephew on our table kitchen, without washing his hands or instruments.
He explained all of this to us frankly, while smoking a cigarette and holding the instruments in his hands at the same time.
“His knowledge of disinfection is medieval”, says doctor Alrabi. “The child can be exposed to any kind of infection if he does this on the kitchen table. After he just smoke a cigarette on it.”
Luckily, the child this time is not real. But there were many others, at least 3000 according to him, who were more than real. And all of them actually went through his procedures, risking their lives.
According to Foad Aodi, head of the Foreign Doctors in Italy Association, the only way to fight this phenomenon is to make ritual circumcision more accessible.
“We are now in touch with the Ministry of Health, Giulia Grillo to solve this issue of home-made circumcisions. We want for ritual circumcisions to get recognised as surgery in the NHS system, so that it will be free of charges for all those parents who can’t afford it.”
It is now up to the Ministry to open up the Italian NHS system to help these families in need and to put fake doctors like this one out of business.
Click here to watch the TV investigation I did for Le Iene: https://www.iene.mediaset.it/video/circoncisione-abusiva-bambini-medico-finto-clinica-bambini_394365.shtml
