An American Atrocity

While activists fight to end the gruesome ritual of female circumcision overseas, it's being ignored right here in the United States. Why aren't authorities cracking down?

Fortunate adem told her story in a soft voice that made her sound as if she weren't much older than the toddler whose custody she was fighting for. "We had just finished celebrating her third birthday party," she said last August, on the stand at her divorce hearing in a Georgia courtroom.

It was September 2002, she testified; the Adems were living in an apartment in Duluth, a middle-class suburb of Atlanta, when Khalid Adem, an Ethiopian immigrant, told his wife he wanted their daughter to be circumcised. This ancient and excruciating rite of passage is common in his homeland.

Fortunate balked. A native of South Africa, she had lived in the United States since she was 6 years old; female circumcision wasn't part of her world. "I thought he was sick," she said. They argued. Then she became paranoid. No way was she letting Khalid near their little girl.

The couple split up. But four months later, Khalid called. His mother was visiting. Could they spend some time with the child? Haunted by their argument, Fortunate said no: She was afraid he would mutilate the girl. According to her testimony on the stand, Khalid laughed at her. "You're so stupid," she recalled him saying. "What makes you think I haven't already done it?"

Fortunate took the girl to the doctor. Months earlier, the pediatrician had diagnosed her with a severe diaper rash; she squirmed and cried whenever anyone tried to examine her too closely. Now the doctor called in a specialist in child abuse, who confirmed Fortunate's greatest fear: Her daughter's clitoris had been removed.

Like Fortunate Adem, most Americans have only heard of female genital mutilation (FGM) in news reports, as something that happens halfway across the world in at least 28 African countries and pockets of the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Yet as her experience suggests, this deeply rooted tradition—which doctors compare not to male circumcision but rather to removing most or all of a man's penis—has quietly migrated to the United States as the population of refugees from these regions has grown considerably. In 1997, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta estimated that 168,000 women and girls living in the United States have had their genitals cut or are at risk of suffering procedures variously known as female circumcision, female genital cutting and FGM.

While American activists have successfully persuaded some communities abroad to put an end to the practice, little has been done to address the threat at home. CDC officials told SELF they have not tracked the problem since the 1997 estimate because they have no mandate or funding to do so. And in the eight years since Congress banned FGM here, no one has ever been prosecuted for the crime. Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who spearheaded passage of the FGM ban, says he is disappointed no action has been taken. "If ever there was an example of brutality to women, this is it," Reid says. "We need to send a message to immigrant communities that you can't do these things to little girls in America."

Anti-fgm activists are looking to georgia to sound the alarm. It is there that court testimony alleges Khalid Adem, a 28-year-old gas station cashier who moved to the United States around 1991, cut out his daughter's clitoris with scissors as another man held her down. After Fortunate called the police, they speculated in the arrest warrant that the mutilation had occurred in the fall of 2001, long before she says Khalid mentioned the idea. (The girl's pediatrician, Rose Badaruddin, M.D., testified there are reasons to think Fortunate would not have noticed the removal of her daughter's clitoris. It is not always visible on a toddler, she said, and most girls resist being scrutinized to that degree.)

At the August divorce hearing, Khalid denied any part in the mutilation, contradicting Fortunate's account of his actions and beliefs. "I did not cause anybody to do this on my own daughter. I do not want anybody to do this," he testified. His lower lip trembling, he began to cry, and his nose grew red. "It is killing me to know that my child is mutilated in the United States of America."