Free Republic

LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. -- It has happened to 130 million women and girls around the world, the State Department has estimated, but Wednesday may have been the first time a U.S. court was called on to exact justice for one of them. The victim, now 7, was just 2 when her genitals were cut, but she remembered the horrific act well enough to testify at her father's trial. He "cut me on my private part," she said, clutching a teddy bear in her videotaped testimony. Khalid Adem was convicted Wednesday of aggravated battery and cruelty to children, though he had insisted...

LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. - A jury Wednesday found an Ethiopian immigrant guilty of the genital mutilation of his 2-year-old daughter in what was believed to be the first criminal case in the United States involving the ancient African tradition. Khalid Adem, 30, was convicted of aggravated battery and cruelty to children. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Prosecutors said Adem used scissors to remove his daughter’s clitoris in his family’s Atlanta-area apartment in 2001. The child’s mother, Fortunate Adem, said she did not discover it until more than a year later.

A GEORGIA court today found a man guilty of sexually mutilating his two-year-old daughter with a pair of scissors, the first proven case of female genital mutilation in the US. AKhalid Adem, a 31-year-old Ethiopian immigrant, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for aggravated battery and cruelty to children for the 2001 crime, which the mother said she did not discover until two years later when she took her daughter to the doctor. Adem had faced a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison. Before the sentencing, Fortunate Adem, the mother of the girl who now is seven years...