Posted on 05/19/2014 10:21:21 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Campaign groups and survivors warn that despite legislation against FGM, thousands of American girls are still at risk
Like many teens coming up to summer break, Leyla was excited about her vacation. Born and raised in the midwest, her parents told her that for a special treat she was going to fly with them to Somalia to meet her grandparents and extended family.
“Even though I’m one of four girls I was the one they picked to go.I felt like I really was the lucky one,” she says. But when she got there, instead of practicing Somali and hanging out with her cousins, she discovered the reason for the trip was quite different.
She was driven to a remote village and told she was going to have her clitoris removed. “I just felt like she had ambushed me. I felt scared but I also felt like I had no choice [...] I felt mad and scared but I didn’t know what to do. I felt so powerless.”
Campaign groups and survivors of FGM warn that despite legislation against female genital mutilation – which involves removing part or all of a girls outer sexual organs and can result in physical complications, death in childbirth and lifelong trauma – American girls are being taken out of the country to be cut, and may be subjected to mutilation on US soil.
A lack of widespread knowledge and information about FGM put girls like Leyla at risk, says Shelby Quast, policy advisor at the campaign group Equality Now. “One of our biggest concerns is that girls are being taken out of the country for vacation cutting during school vacations,” she says. “We look at the various diaspora communities and as they grow, the number of girls at risk grows as well.”
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Let me get this right. To save their dear lives, these people flee their country because of all the violence as well as the culture that leads to all sorts of social tension and misery. They arrive in a Western country where they are given a refugee status, and they routinely go back to the place where they seem to belong, to do what they have always done, and then come back to the place where everyone disapproves of this senseless torture, and expect us to .... Hang on, I thought Somalia was such a dangerous place that people can’t be sent back there.
I don’t get it.
Well Done, Bravo Sir.
The practice predates Islam but it appears Islam has whole heartedly adopted it.
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