Every day, an estimated 8,000 girls worldwide are cut and marred in a debilitating process known as female genital mutilation, or FGM.
But survivors and experts stress that this is not a faraway human rights violation. A portion of it is happening right here in the United States of America.
“Not a day goes by where I am not contacted by a girl who has been cut in this country, or forced to visit another country to have it done,” Jaha Dukureh, an infant FGM survivor, activist and founder of the support and educational foundation Safe Hands for Girls, told Fox News. “Sometimes, it is doctors performing it under the guise of plastic or vaginoplasty procedures, or in quiet and underground settings.”
Jaha Dukureh, FGM survivor, activist and founder of "Safe Hands for Girls" campaigns for U.S lawmakers to do more to end the inhumane practice.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, more than half a million girls in the United States have endured, or remain at risk, of suffering FGM – a threefold uptick from their 1990 projection. FGM is considered a cultural practice that ensures “a girl’s purity and eligibility for marriage,” and typically involves the partial or complete extraction of the external female genitalia.
“There are many who are secretly doing it here in the USA,” noted Wahid Boctor, an Egyptian-American and former Director of Arab-American Television. “It is done very secretly and mostly women who do to their kids or grand kids.”
Beyond the brutality of the ritual procedure itself and the chance of death, FGM has a string of long-term consequences – from the physical to the psychological. Complications include sexual dysfunction, incontinence and increased risk of HIV transmission.
