A shocking court case spurs a wave of action on female genital mutilation
Two of the victims are seven-year-old girls
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Abigail Hauslohner.
Female genital mutilation has been a federal crime in the United States for more than two decades. It carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
In April, federal prosecutors charged a Michigan doctor and his wife in connection with performing the procedure on two 7-year-old Minnesota girls. Dr. Fakhruddin Attar and Farida Attar had been in jail awaiting trial until early June, when a judge granted them bond. Defense lawyers for the Attars deny the charges and say a religious ritual was performed.
Another Michigan doctor, Jumana Nagarwala of Detroit, is at the center of the case. Nagarwala is accused of cutting the girls and remains in jail. This week, a fourth person was charged.
Before U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman granted the Attars bond, the government’s prosecution told the court they believe the defendants have subjected as many as 100 victims to the procedure.
The parents of one girl — believed to have been involved in arranging the procedure — lost custody “for a whopping 72 hours,” Minnesota state Rep. Mary Franson told lawmakers.
Although the practice has been illegal in Minnesota since 1994, Franson wants the state to pass a bill that would send perpetrators to prison for up to 20 years. On May 15, State representatives voted 124 to 4 in favor of expanding the penalties, which would target parents as well as doctors. The bill will go to the state Senate for consideration, but it will probably be signed into law before the fall.
“We’re saying that if you harm your child in this way, you’re going to be held responsible,” Franson said.
The case has set off a flurry of new bills across the country, with a growing number of states moving to extend penalties to the parents and hit them with lengthy prison terms:
- House lawmakers in Maine recently voted against creating a new crime of female genital mutilation. They agreed to make an education and outreach program to prevent it.
- Michigan and Texas voted for harsher punishments.
- Activists say Massachusetts is also weighing legislative action.
Female genital mutilation has been a lightning rod in right-wing political circles for years, with anti-Muslim and anti-immigration activists linking it explicitly to Islam. There is no mention of female genital mutilation in the Koran, and the procedure is rare in most Muslim countries.
Female genital mutilation (FGM), sometimes called female genital cutting or circumcision, refers to the ancient, ritual practice of cutting off parts of a girl’s genitalia, and sometimes sewing shut the vaginal opening. It has no health benefits and can result in serious complications, including hemorrhaging and death, the lifelong loss of sexual pleasure, painful intercourse, and chronic infections.
The World Health Organization says more than 200 million women and girls living in 30 countries have experienced FGM. Most of those countries are in Africa.
The practice spans an array of ethnic and religious groups despite nearly universal national bans. Although the rationale for the practice varies, experts say it is often driven by social pressures to control women’s sexuality and ensure girls’ virginity before marriage. Some practitioners also believe that it serves a religious mandate, although the practice has no root in religious doctrine.
Some Muslim clerics have endorsed the practice, but a number of major Muslim leaders have condemned it. The Michigan doctors in question and the girls whom investigators say they cut are from the tiny Dawoodi Bohra sect of Shiite Islam, in which the practice is common and clerics are said to endorse it.
There’s no reliable data on how common the practice is in the U.S., according to the authors of a 2016 Government Accountability Office report. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 513,000 women and girls in the U.S. either had the procedure or are at risk of experiencing it in the future, based on immigrant populations from countries where the practice is prevalent, including Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan.
The Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for criminal investigations under the federal ban, is launching a pilot program that aims primarily to reduce FGM abroad by warning travelers of its illegality. The practice of taking girls abroad to be cut, sometimes called “vacation cutting,” was banned in 2013.
The fresh wave of attention has been bittersweet for the U.S.-based activists who have spent years campaigning to end a practice that they say is poorly understood and generally ignored.
“When things like this happen, people just want to focus on getting all states to penalize it. But there’s a bigger picture out here that we’re not focusing on,” said Jaha Dukureh, the founder of the Atlanta-based Safe Hands for Girls, a leading advocacy group against FGM.
