As of 2013, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates indicate that at least 150,000 to 200,000 girls in the United States are at risk of being forced to undergo FGM, whether they are mutilated at home, in doctor's offices or subjected to "vacation cutting"; and this problem is steadily increasing. According to an analysis of data from the 2000 U.S. census, the number of girls and women in the United States at risk for female genital mutilation increased by 35 percent between 1990 and 2000, and can be attributed to increase in total immigration.
Jumana Nagarwala
One case in Detroit became nationwide news after a woman named Dr. Jumana Nagarwala of Northville, Michigan was charged with conspiracy, transporting minors with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, lying to a federal agent and obstructing an official proceeding and the genital mutilation of two 7 year old girls. There are thought to be many more victims, an estimated 100 more girls she mutilated. She was released on $4.5 million bail in November 2017, and will face trial in June 2018.
Prosecutors say Nagarwala pulled off this crime with the help of another doctor who let her use the Livonia clinic to carry out the procedure and helped coordinate the girls' trip to Michigan. That physician, Dr. Fakhruddin Attar, 53, was charged with the same crimes as Nagarwala. His wife, Farida Attar, 50, also was indicted for her alleged role of holding the girls' hands during the procedure and instructed at least one member of her community to lie if anyone asked questions
Dr. Nagarwala and Dr. Fakhruddin are both a part of a Muslim sect from India, the Dawoodi Bohra. Locally, most members of the sect belong to the Anjuman-e-Najmi mosque in Farmington Hills. This an excerpt from an American woman named Tasneem Raja's article in Mother Jones about her own experience with female genital mutilation or khatna within the Bohra community:
"Last week, an Indian American doctor was arrested in Michigan, charged with performing female genital cutting on two seven-year-old girls. As the story hit the local press and then the Ney York Times, and as it was shared by George Takei and Nicholas Kristof, my phone kept blowing up with breathless messages and links from childhood friends across the country.
“This story isn’t going away,” said one friend over the phone. We both grew up in the same controversial, secretive South Asian Muslim sect as the doctor, a 44-year-old emergency room physician named Jumana Nagarwala who was born in Washington, DC. “This time, the community can’t just pretend it’s not happening.” Just today, two more followers of the sect were arrested in connection with the case.
Our sect is known as the Dawoodi Bohras, a Shiite branch of Islam based in Gujarat, India, with an estimated 1.2 million followers around the world and thriving outposts across America. Some Bohras and others say the sect has veered toward a cult of personality and away from Islamic principles; it’s ruled by a well-heeled clergy of "totalitarian kings" with unusually wide-reaching control over their followers. (The Bohra clergy did not respond to Mother Jones‘ request for comment.)
Federal officials believe Nagarwala may have been clandestinely cutting girls since at least 2005. It’s the first case of its kind in the United States, where female genital cutting is a criminal sexual act and has been illegal since 1996. The practice is widely seen as an attempt to curb women’s sexuality by making sex less enjoyable, even painful. Nagarwala admits she performed a procedure on the two seven-year-old girls, but says she didn’t cut them—she merely wiped away a mucous membrane and gave the gauze to the parents, who would bury it in keeping with Bohra tradition. She told investigators she’s not aware of anyone in her community who practices cutting.
A Dawoodi Dohra girl being "cut"
As little girls, nearly all my female Bohra friends and I underwent khatna, the sect’s term for this practice. None of us remember being “wiped.” We were cut. Some of us bled and ached for days, and some walked away with lifelong physical damage. In interviews with investigators, one of the girls Nagarwala performed on said the procedure hurt so badly that she screamed in pain and "could barely walk afterwards”. She drew a picture of the room where it happened, and marked an “X” to show where she bled on an exam table. Medical examinations show that both girls’ genitals have been altered.
While news coverage and the federal case focus on Nagarwala, khatna has been a mandatory religious practice inflicted on Bohra girls all over the world for generations, often in knowing violation of local laws. Bohras are the only Muslims in India who enforce female genital cutting; it’s not a common practice among South Asians or Muslims worldwide, and it’s not mentioned in the Koran. Privately, many Bohras have been praying for the clergy to end this practice for years, even decades. More than one mother I know wept when she learned she was bearing a girl, dreading what she might have to do to her child.
“Maybe this is the case that finally scares them into stopping it,” another friend messaged me. Her khatna happened during a family vacation in India. Mine took place in the bedroom of a family acquaintance in New Jersey in the late ’80s.
I buried the memory until I was 13, when my freshman year social-studies teacher put on a video about female genital mutilation in Africa. As I watched a young girl, dark-skinned like me, being prepared by village elders for her mutilation, I suddenly flashed back to a dim, chilly house my mother took me to when I was about seven. Two Indian aunties I had never seen before held me down on a mattress and pulled down my underwear as I squirmed to get free. One of them held a small pair of silver scissors, like the ones my dad used to keep his beard trimmed. Then, the sudden sensation of a tight, mean little pinch between my legs.
The memory exploded in my head in the dark, quiet classroom, and suddenly, a recurring nightmare I’d had for years made sense. In those dreams, the lower half of my body was made of kid’s construction toys, and pieces kept breaking off as I frantically tried to keep myself together. I began sobbing at my desk. The teacher kindly told me to catch my breath in the hallway; she thought I was upset over the images I was seeing in the video. Later, at lunch, my white girlfriends talked about being relieved that sort of thing doesn’t happen in America.
But it does. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that (at least) half a million girls in the United States were affected by or at risk for mutilation in 2012. I know of dozens of Bohra women whose parents had them cut in America over the last 30 years, from New York City to Houston to Chicago. Others were taken out of country to have the procedure done, a practice called “vacation cutting” that’s now also illegal in the United States.
We’re the first generation of Bohras born in America. Our parents began settling here after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which brought a wave of South Asian engineers, doctors, and other professionals to America. In our teens and 20s, my friends and I who underwent khatna assured each other the practice would die out as Bohras assimilated. We’re now in our 30s, and it hasn’t stopped. Some women our age and younger are still arranging or considering khatna for their own daughters...."
Please read the rest of her extremely insightful article here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/04/genital-cutting-indian-doctor-women-khatna/
Female genital mutilation by type
I have seen article after article of predominately non-religious journalists reporting that religion has absolutely nothing to do with female genital mutilation, and this is absolutely not true, and to spread those lies only harms the religious women of our population.
Somalia is the country with the highest estimated rate of girls enduring female genital mutilation as of 2013, with up to 98% of girls and women aged 15 to 49 having to endure the procedure. It is also a county with a 93.3% to 99.9% Muslim population, with a tiny, uncountable portion of other religions.
Guinea is a country with religious population percentages at 85% Muslims , 8% Christians, and 7% indigenous believers in 2010. In 2013, 99% of Muslim women and girls were being mutilated, 90% of Animists/other religion, and 70% of Christians. In same year, of the Guinean women aged 15 to 49, 97% of them will have undergone the "cut", and 92% believe that a partner is justified in hitting/beating his wife under certain circumstances.
Djibouti's religious population consists of an estimated 94% Muslims and 6% of Christians, with 93% of woman undergoing female genital mutilation, and 30% are survivors of infibulation (the most severe form of mutilation). However, only 51% percent of Djibouti women believe the practice should be stopped, which fits the statistic of 49% of women and girls with at least one living daughter who has undergone the procedure.
In Mali, 89% of women and girls aged 15 to 49 undergo mutilation, 89% of Muslims, 88% of no religion, 86% of Animists, and 84% of Christians. Mali's religious population is made up of 90% Muslims, 1% Christians, and 9% indigenous believers. In 2012 imposition of Sharia rule began in northern parts of the country, including laws like the banning of music, cutting off of hands or feet of thieves, stoning of adulterers, public whipping of smokers, alcohol drinkers, women who are not properly dressed and the persecution of Christians in the north.
Egypt's mutilation rate stands at a total of 87% of women and girls aged 15 to 49 having undergone "the cut", with the highest prevalence in the poorest communities (93%) and lowest in the richest (70%). 46% of Egyptian women and girls believe female genital mutilation is required by their religion, as well as 60% of Egyptian men and boys. Egypt's religious population consists of Muslims (mostly Sunni) 90%, Coptics 9% and 1% other Christians.
Young child enduring mutilation torture
In recent years the increase in immigration for individuals from countries which practice mutilation, has led to the introduction of the torture in European and North American societies. However, the prevalence rate has been difficult to quantify among immigrants to European countries. A case study which investigated mutilation in groups of migrant women from Northern Africa to European regions like Scandinavia, noted that a majority of these women had been mutilated before their migration to Europe. Most of the women and girls mutilated in Westernized countries are immigrants or children of immigrants of countries where such atrocities are performed, or have already survived the procedure. However in Sweden, a study by Karolinska Institute concluded that about a third of families migrated from countries with a mutilation culture wanted to continue mutilating in their new countries.
The most recent German statistics (unknown time range) show there are 25,000 victims in Germany and a further 2,500 are under threat of becoming mutilated. That is 0.03% of women and girls, without adjustment for immigration. An estimate made in 2015 during the mass migration of refugees calculated that there are 4.4 to 4.7 million Muslims in Germany (5.4–5.7% of the population). Of these, 1.9 million are German citizens (2.4%).
In Russia, a study on female genital mutilation practiced in Dagestan was made public in 2016 by Legal Initiative for Russia, revealing that mutilation is widespread in Dagestan. he practice has been publicly approved in the predominantly Muslim region of Dagestan by religious leaders such as Mufti Ismail BerdiyevLater, an Orthodox Christian priest also backed the cleric. These girls undergo mutilation in early age, up to three years old.
According to a British report by Equality Now and City University in 2015, an estimated 103,000 women and girls aged 15–49 were thought to be living with mutilation in England and Wales as of 2011. Additionally, approximately 10,000 girls aged under 15 and 24,000 women over 50, who have migrated to England and Wales, are likely to have undergone "the cut".
Indian doctor shows cutting technique
As mentioned in Tasneem's article, many families return to their country of origin to perform the "cutting", while a percentage stay in there residential country and the procedures are performed by chosen traditional practitioners. The fact is every one of the 30 countries with the highest prevalence of mutilation, with the exceptions of Ghana and Uganda, are Muslim majority or Muslim/Indigenous religion majority countries. The fact is most women who immigrated into Western cultures were either victims from these areas, or will be continue to be subjected to this torture in there new country by the believers around her and her children. To deny this, is to deny the systematic torture face by mostly Muslim women.
I have shared this opinion before and I will continue to share it; we, as Westerners blessed to live where we do, need to stop over-sympathizing with victims to the point of equating extremely rare atrocities to commonly held practices endured by people living in horrific situations daily. This torture endured by up to 98% of women and girls in some countries is incomparable to the estimated 0.05% of Americans who have undergone or will undergo the procedure, but does this mean we should wait until genital mutilation is prevalent before it is stopped? With strong evidence from many sources, human rights organizations, current victims of Islam, past victims of Islam, and even those devoted to the religion stating they would like to apply the law to other countries (ie. Sweden), or that over half of Egyptian men believe that mutilation is a religious requirement, what will it take for people to listen to the victims? Do the victims have less of a right to say what the religion is then American citizens or politicians?
I trust Muslim women under oppression to make there own statements and conclusions about what they see happening to them and their children in their own religion. I will never believe a woman such as Linda Sarsour, an American woman who advocates for Sharia Law, but who has never had to survive under the oppression of it.
Type 3, complete closure infibulation
Who claims to be an advocate for Muslim women's rights in one breath , while telling an ex-Muslim woman who was brave enough to leave the religion, she should have her "vagina cut off" for having the courage to stand up for Muslim victims (when in fact, the woman she said this to was a survivor of mutilation herself) in another.
I have a deep spiritual love for every living creature on this planet, but to allow systemic torture of woman and girls in the name of defending political correctness or for fear offending the fake believers and non-believers of this religion is a fast march into hell on earth.
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