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Coming to America: FGM
I couldn’t bring myself to spell out the initials in the title: Female Genital Mutilation. In fact, I nearly didn’t write the post, the topic is so abhorrent. But given the facts, and the manner in which this crime has been reported, I felt compelled to write about it.
Just over one week ago, Jumana Nagarwala was jailed in Detroit for practicing female genital mutilation on two, seven-year old girls. Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Blanco said, “The Department of Justice is committed to stopping female genital mutilation in this country, and will use the full power of the law to ensure that no girls suffer such physical and emotional abuse.”
Nagarwala was a 44-year old emergency room physician working at Henry Ford Health System. In protesting her arrest, her attorney, Sharon Thompson, explained the following: “Nagarwala never performed female genital mutilation … The doctor merely wiped off a portion of the mucous membrane from the girls’ clitoris. A small amount was placed on a gauze pad and given to the family for burial. This is part of the culture,” Thompson told the magistrate.
Nagarwala is a member of the Dawoodi Bohra from India, a community that is based locally out of the Anjuman-e-Najmi mosque on Orchard Lake Road in Farmington Hills. It’s the only Dawoodi Bohra mosque in Michigan. At this writing, no one confirmed that her attorney’s description of the procedures she performed was accurate. At a hearing on Monday, she was held without bond while awaiting trial.
In my research I discovered that FGM is practiced by 29 African countries and also ethnic groups in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf. The Female Genital Mutilation website provides this chart:
Unicef provides the following data from 2016:
According to the data, girls 14 and younger represent 44 million of those who have been cut, with the highest prevalence of FGM among this age in Gambia at 56 per cent, Mauritania 54 per cent and Indonesia where around half of girls aged 11 and younger have undergone the practice. Countries with the highest prevalence among girls and women aged 15 to 49 are Somalia 98 per cent, Guinea 97 per cent and Djibouti 93 per cent.
In most of the countries the majority of girls were cut before reaching their fifth birthdays.
The global figure in the FGM statistical report includes nearly 70 million more girls and women than estimated in 2014.This is due to population growth in some countries and nationally representative data collected by the Government of Indonesia. As more data on the extent of FGM become available the estimate of the total number of girls and women who have undergone the practice increases.
In researching the data regarding the countries that immigrate to the US, I found the following information from Pew Research:
If you compare this chart to the previous chart, you can see that although some countries that immigrate to the US practice FGM with only a small portion of their children, it still occurs, and the numbers in those countries are increasing.
I feel obligated to point out a number of factors that counter such a devastating picture: we don’t know precisely which Muslims are actively practicing FGM in their countries of origin because complete data is hard to collect; we don’t know how many of the immigrants will maintain FGM practices if they immigrate to this country, given its illegality; we don’t know how many Muslim doctors will practice the procedure for the same reasons. There is simply a great deal we don’t know.
Regarding this topic, M. Zuhdi Jasser, at the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, reported on the crime and demanded a full investigation.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, originally from Somali, made the following points on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News:
People don’t like talking about the genitals of little girls, but we do have to describe what happens. The clitoris of the little girl is removed, and the labis is sewed shut. This is done to kill the sexual libido… and ensure virginity. Some people say they have religious reasons — it is because of Islam. Some say it is because of cultural reasons. Or a mixture of that. That can never be an excuse to harm girls in that way.
After checking the internet every day for the past week, I have only seen Dr. Jasser and Hirsi Ali speak out publicly against this travesty in Detroit.
Nagarwala’s mosque and the Muslim community in general, to my knowledge, have been silent.
Published in Culture
Here’s the latest from the ‘newspaper of record.’
Here’s some clarification.
Note even the most basic form involves removal of the clitoris
https://feministelizabethan.com/2016/02/19/female-genital-mutilation-what-is-it-and-can-it-be-reversed/
(note fairly graphic)
I hope that consensus holds, I really do.
In 1993, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was introduced by Chuck Schumer in the House and Ted Kennedy in the Senate. It passed the House unanimously, passed the Senate 97-3, and was signed into law by Bill Clinton.
Two decades later, the fact that Mike Pence as governor of Indiana signed a very similar bill into law in 2014 is cited as proof that he’s some sort of far-right anti-LGBT homophobe, and prompted a very nasty partisan fight.
The culture changes fast, and the left keeps moving the goalposts further down the field.
None of the articles linked in the OP suggest that happened to the victims in this particular case. Cut perhaps, but not removed.
While we’re all sitting around intellectualizing, these insidious practices are embedding their tentacles into the fabric of our society every day that goes by. There should be no need for questioning or defending or further discussion. I don’t care if it’s religious or cultural. We have a culture here too, and it was already in full swing when you medieval barbarians arrived, and we do not allow children to be mutilated, and we don’t care why you’re doing it, you have to stop it right now.
This was an interesting interview.
Khazan: I also read that in surveys, large numbers of women and men no longer favor the practice, but they have their daughters cut regardless. Why do they keep doing it?
Shell-Duncan: This is not an individual behavior. For example, if I decide I want to lose weight, and that I’m going to start exercising on a daily basis, I can decide that all by myself. If I decide I don’t want to circumcise my daughter, that’s not an individual behavior. I would have to answer to my husband, to my mother-in-law, my mother-in-law would have to answer to her friends throughout the community, my father-in-law would have to answer to people in the community, so there’s societal pressure. So understanding what is a collective decision versus individual is really important. You can go and tell an individual mother what the health risks are and she can believe you, but it doesn’t mean, first of all, that she has the power to make that decision, or even that she has the authority to impart that information to her mother-in-law and other senior people in the society who are the decision-makers. Who wants to be the first one to change? Who wants to be the odd man out?
Khazan: What seems like an eradication strategy that might work, given those pressures?
Shell-Duncan: What we’re coming to realize is that programs that target individual mothers are completely ineffective. Mothers are not solely in charge of the decisions for their daughters. We need to be targeting people who are in the extended family, and we know that we need to figure out who are the figures of authority in these families, and who are the influences on them in the community. We need to do male elders, but also female elders.
Khazan: And what do you tell them?
Shell-Duncan: This is part of what our research project is about. First and foremost, what we need to understand is that people are doing this because they want to assure the future for their girls, like every parent everywhere. They want to make sure their children are going to be okay moving forward. When they come to Europe or the U.S., a lot of the refugees very quickly realize that the well-being of their girls is not best assured by continuing female circumcision, that it doesn’t make any sense in that setting. They want them to go to college.
It’s about a conversation about, What is the best way to secure the future for your children? The future for their girls might not be best secured by being circumcised any longer.
That’s kind of insulting to lots of medieval peoples. Barbarous and otherwise.
Haha. Wouldn’t want to offend the Visigoths.
I have long said that there are many of the worst aspects of the culture in question for which the concept of “Medieval” should be aspirational. Medieval would be a huge improvement.
Even “Stone Age” would be an improvement for some of them.
From your, uh, keyboard to SCOTUS’ ears…
Hear, hear. I’ve thought this for years as I watched the Left change terminology to remove the stigma from bad behaviors in their never-ending misplaced campaigns for self-esteem. (“The Homeless” used to be called “bums.”) The trouble is that when you remove the stigma from bad behaviors, you get more of the bad behaviors.
Perfectly reasonable place to start from a moral perspective, but the next question is: should it be illegal?
For instance, traditional Christian morality has consistently taught that homosexual acts are a grave sin. In most states, sodomy was a criminal offense until quite recently. Should the law enforce traditional American values?
But then we have a competing tradition of liberty and religious freedom that says everyone should be left to live according to their own conscience and beliefs and the government has no business telling us how to live our lives.
No they won’t, as long as the Left genuflect s at the altar of multiculturalism. If they want to insist that immigrants from these benighted nations have the right to keep on conducting their lives exclusively in their own languages, and their women have the right to conceal their faces, and they have the right to enforce celebration of their religious holidays on the rest of us, and to force employers to allow lengthy prayer breaks during business hours, and to force fashion clothing stores to hire clerks who insist on dressing in shapeless fustian–
then they’ll come around to FGM, too. In my humble opinion, of course.
Of course we aren’t responsible for the entire planet. Just don’t get on a high horse and feign great compassion for the victims if the only solution you have to offer is to slam the door in their face when they try to seek refuge in a country where mutilation is illegal.
The freedom of religion thing is indeed one of the big problems. I think that we should just be unapologetic about the fact that the country was founded on the precepts and tenets of Judeo-Christian morality, and that the basis for our freedom of religion clause was the desire to avoid a state-sanctioned religion such as the Church of England. The intent was not to allow any and every weird religious practice that conflicts with our laws and our cultural values. I mean would we allow human sacrifice if someone claimed to be an Aztec? No. Let’s just have some common sense here. And I submit that if the practitioners of FGU were a bunch of blond Norwegians, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation or twisting ourselves into pretzels to avoid offending them.
Oh and a cursory look at the statute @snirtler mentions prohibiting “vacation cutting”– it’s from 1996! That halcyon era before 2001, before we started bending over backwards to accommodate the members of a religion who had just murdered 3000+ of us! Why, we couldnt let them think we don’t realize that was our fault, not theirs! By 2017 we’ve been bent over backwards so long we can no longer see straight.
Personally I think it is equally likely that they will adopt the view that male circumcision is barbaric and should be banned as well, but either way the “hypocrisy” (in their view) of permitting one and banning the other will drive them nuts until they resolve it one way or the other.
Fair point. It’s why I’m with you on your earlier comment that we conservative opponents of FGM should have compelling arguments why FGM is dissimilar.
No-no-no-no! We are not going to be politically correct!! There are different levels of severity for female genital mutilation, but they are all FGM, and to sidestep a term that is offensive completely misses the point! We want people to be offended by it. To call it genital cutting is a crock. Thanks for getting me all worked up, She. Just kidding. Well, not kidding, and thank you for letting us know. Sheesh.
Further research shows that federal law against FGM–banning the practice on US soil–indeed goes back to 1996. The 2012 law I cited earlier was to close a loophole that because FGM was criminal in the US, adults would take girls abroad to have them undergo it there instead.
In Feb 2015, Crowley introduced a new bill “Zero Tolerance for FGM” that:
That suggests the consensus with Democrats against FGM remains, but you are all right that we want to ensure the consensus endures into the future.
Sorry to be absent for a while. Life called. But I’ve been mulling over some thoughts to get clarification. Please keep in mind that is REALLY RAW and new for me to explore, and I invite everyone’s input.
I am working from the premise that we live in the United States of America which was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, which are woven through our founding documents. We chose to honor those values and principles. In establishing the separation of church and state, which (I think) Joseph pointed out, it was intended ONLY to prevent a state religion from being established.
I think we have to fight for our traditional values, regarding the modification or mutilation (pick your favorite word) of the human body, whether a person argues it is a cultural or religious issue. So male circumcision, which is part of the Jewish religion, has been an accepted practice for thousands of years and as long as this country has been established. It is both cultural and religious, but primarily the latter. It is a demonstrated covenant with G-d.
I believe that all the other kinds of bodily mutilation and genital mutilation is not part of the CULTURE OR RELIGIOUS ORIGINS OF THE UNITED STATES. It is not a religious act by any culture or people. I think we would be wise (hold your seat) to pass legislation that states that no one can consent to any kind of physical mutilation, or have it practiced on them, until he or she reaches the age of consent. Unless there is an identifiable medically-related or justified issue, DO NOT TOUCH. This would apply to any kind of FGM, no matter how minor, and to any other gender-related surgeries. I’d be happy to have it illegal, period, even after 18, but I don’t think we’d be able to do so. We could also consider having gender-changing surgeries illegal even if they are performed in other countries. Maybe this is simply not possible, but I am tired to bowing to the moral relativism and multiculturalism of our times. We are destroying this country.
Feel free to criticize or build on this proposal.
I don’t think so for several reasons. (1) Male circumcision has been performed in this country routinely for decades. (2) It’s a Biblical practice and at least right now Judaic practices are still seen as integral to American/western culture. (3) Male circumcision is only a superficial alteration to a skin covering, not an integral part of a sexual organ. (4) Male circumcision provides numerous health benefits. I’m on my iPhone and I can’t easily provide links but if you google it you will find reduced risks for AIDS and venereal diseases.
And I speak as someone who decided not to have my son circumcised. But there are benefits to it.
I agree that mutilation of minors is a bad thing and it should be illegal. Immigrants or refugees who continue this barbarism should be shipped back to their home country. I know that it is cruel to the daughters of barbarians but the daughters of barbarians usually become barbaric themselves. (Almost always it is women who perform FGM on girls.) The most important thing we need to do is keep America decent. That demands who do not in any tolerate FGM on our shores.
Additionally, it should also be a felony to take a minor overseas to perform this operation and violators should be aggressively prosecuted. We ought to do better than Britain,
The American Association of Pediatrics once advised American Doctors to offer a lighter form of FGM for immigrants so they wouldn’t seek more extreme methods. They had to reverse there advice because of a the outrage that followed. Ayan Hirsi Ali is skeptical that this will work.
I’d go for a zero tolerance policy.
I think of the Bernie Bros I know around my city. I can’t imagine them in anyway tolerating FGM. I think post-modernism is on it’s way out. I don’t really hear the idea that all cultural practices are equal anymore. That being said, I do notice how leftists ignore non-Western cultures that are rife with sexism, homophobia and religious and political oppression. (They are all quite common throughout human history) My fear isn’t leftists justifying FGM it is them ignoring it outright like they ignore the unusually high rate of domestic violence of South East Asians or the high rates of rape on Native-American reservations. I don’t know if they are comfortable talking about non-white men hurting women. (Please check out this link.)
About @susanquinn‘s point that it’s important to distinguish between a cultural or religious practice, to the extent that FGM is cultural, rather than a requirement of religious worship or observance, it facilitates public laws against FGM. Such laws may be a cultural burden, but not a religious burden in a country built on religious freedom.
If merely cultural, one can harness @rightangles‘s point that there is recourse to common sense. The physical harm done to girls is plain. It is the common sense of Americans and in America not to tolerate such harm, whatever the cultural mores immigrants may have brought from their countries of origin.
An article on the subject in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Law states that FGM is cross-cultural and practiced by adherents of different religions; in Kenya, for example, FGM is more common among Christians (38%) than among Muslims (28%).
Among Muslims, the article above also says that FGM predates Islam and is not mentioned in the Koran, but mentioned in traditional literature (hadith). Among classical schools of Islamic law, it was considered ennobling, but not required. “The Shāfiʿī school alone considers it a requirement. In addition, some ḥadīth reports emphasize the need for moderation …” Many modern jurists have issued fatwas against FGM. Finally, in many countries with large Muslim populations, the practice is banned by law, including in several countries listed in the graphic in the OP (see here).
@susanquinn, re your comment 112: you want a policy based on the “culture and religious origins of the United States”. Yay! But since we’re a democracy, policIes can be changed if the people change their minds. So, this all gets back to immigration. If you have a country where everyone operates with basically the same set of paradigms, then you can have a coherent policy that will be generally agreed upon.
We do not need immigration. And we are not a “nation of Immigrants” any more than any other modern nation is. Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard Mark Cuban et al bleating about how we wanna get the “smart people”– but since we have the best universities in the world, we oughta be able to produce smart Americans. Why let foreigners compete for those places? Most of the people we’re letting in are not a benefit to the US–and yo your point, they water down our cultural, religious and civic cohesion. We’re becoming a polyglot holding pen. All the Western nations are.
Could you have imagined in, say, 1985, that in the US we would ever have to be concerned with FGM, honor killings, etc.? How did these things come to our shores? Just like revenant bedbugs: with foreigners.
So as long as that invasion continues , it will not be possible to have a policy about FGM, or anything else, based on the “culture and religious origins of the United States”, because a considerable number of the people presently camping out here neither know nor care what those are.
This is wonderful data, Snirtler. Thank you! It validates again the cultural origins of the practice. I think there is enough evidence to support banning the practice from Islam overall. If people feel it’s important, they can live somewhere else, I guess.
When I talk about the cultural and religious origins, packed into those are our values. Policies may change like crazy, but values change slowly, if at all. I wouldn’t have a problem re-evaluating our immigration policies, but we will still have a lot of people here who are Muslim and want to practice FGM, and other people in general who still want to pursue gender re-identification. People in this country who are Muslims need to be educated by their mosques and religious leaders about the illegality and unacceptability of FGM, not as a passing thought but as a serious issue. This is already starting to happen. It will be difficult but we also need to educate people on the violation of values when they mutilate their bodies in other ways. There must be something in the old or new testament in this regard.
Okay – here is what you are talking about. Insight is a television program in Australia where the host interviews one, or several, people about an issue that’s big in their lives (adoption, post-traumatic stress disorder, growing up deaf, MS, etc) – and, with the studio audience, asks questions. It’s actually often quite good, though I admit the subjects can be a bit yawn.
Not this time. Here is Insight’s Jenny Brockie interviewing two women who underwent FGM – or female circumcision as one of them might call it – one as a child, and one of her own volition as an adult. It’s 52 minutes, but it’s worth a look.