I’d like to think that I’m a good person ““
that if I was walking down the street and saw an old lady getting
mugged or someone run over by a car, that I would be that person
who runs after the mugger or calls 911. I would like to think that
if something egregiously wrong is happening that I would take the
initiative to stop it.
This was my thought when I found out that female genital
mutilation was still going on in the United States. Recently over
dinner, a friend told me that she’d heard about a woman whose
vagina had been mutilated by this sort of practice. While my
immediate reaction (of course) was to ask if she might be willing
to do an interview for a column, I was also wondering why she had
the procedure done and what I could do to help her or others if it
had happened against her will.
According to the World Health Organization, genital mutilation
encompasses all procedures involving the partial or total removal
of the external female genitalia or injury to the female genital
organs, whether for cultural or religious purposes. Genital
mutilation is illegal for girls under the age of 18 in the U.S.
unless it is a necessary medical procedure.
The majority of women who undergo or have undergone genital
mutilation live in 28 African countries. Some are in Asia and the
Middle East, but the process is increasingly spreading into Europe,
Australia, Canada and the U.S., particularly among immigrants from
countries where this practice is more common.
The World Health Organization estimates that between 100 million
and 140 million girls or women have undergone genital mutilation,
and every year an estimated 2 million more are at risk of going
through it for hygienic, aesthetic, psychosexual, sociological or
religious reasons.
Shortly after talking to my friend about genital mutilation, I
found myself on the phone with the 21-year-old woman she had
described to me. She is Muslim, and told me she belongs to a small
sect that believes they are the “purist” form of Islam.
She requested to remain anonymous to keep herself and her family
from being harassed by her community.
The woman I talked to told me that when she was 19 years old she
first realized what had been done to her while reading an article
for a class on the procedure. She went to a gynecologist at the
student health center to find out what had been taken and what was
left. She said this gynecologist was the first person to look at
her vagina since she had the procedure performed when she was 5 or
6 years old. The gynecologist told her that there was a
“remnant” of her clitoris left.
“I started sobbing, and she didn’t know what to tell
me. … It’s indescribable. I can’t verbalize what that
means to me. I was just devastated.”
She still remembers being brought to the doctor’s office
as a child with her mother and a family friend who was a doctor on
a Saturday when the clinic was closed.
“I was lying on my back, and the doctor was telling me
that she was going to remove a piece of skin. … She told me to
look at the wall, and there was alphabet wallpaper on it. She told
me to read it backwards. … Then she did it, and terrible
excruciating pain went through my body.”
Those within her community think of the procedure as
circumcision, but she doesn’t use that term ““ she calls
it mutilation. She told me that she was only supposed to get the
very tip of her clitoris removed, but the doctor who performed the
procedure had only performed it once before. The woman thought more
of her clitoris had been removed than was necessary.
Since she has discovered what happened to her, she has been
searching for answers. The woman told me that originally her
parents hadn’t wanted to get it done, but that the community
convinced her mother that it was for health reasons. Her father had
disagreed with the procedure, but had considered it a woman’s
issue and left the decision to her mother.
She explained to me that within her sect, one couldn’t
question what was law. Reasons for things, such as this procedure,
were kept secret for fear that people would take it upon themselves
to interpret them differently, which would lead to disunity.
“If I go against one thing in our religion, I’m
going against all of it,” she said.
The woman has some married cousins who have had the procedure
done and she’s shared with them what she has learned.
“When the time comes for them to do it for their
daughters, they’re going to take the information into
consideration. … It’s a start. People are questioning
it,” she said.
She has also spoken to women that were traumatized by their
experiences with vaginal mutilation. And while some say it’s
still possible to have pleasurable sex, there are those such as her
mother who have said that she gets no pleasure from sex. She
stressed how careful she has to be when discussing this subject.
It’s about faith: “I can’t condemn all my friends
and family who have a greater faith than I do.”
She plans to write a letter to the leader of her sect, not
asking to eradicate the tradition but to have it regulated. This
would mean that within her community, the doctors would be trained
to know exactly how much to remove and to make sure the girls
receive anesthesia, which she had not. If she is successful, it
would not make the procedure any more legal within the U.S., but it
would hopefully make it safer within her community. As she said to
me, “Change is possible, but honestly in my community, in our
sect, it’s not going to change.”
I was struck by how frank the woman was about her ability to
change her community and how careful she was about broaching the
subject, considering how angry she was by what had been done to
her.
I can’t help being furious for her. As hokey as it sounds,
my instinct is to run to the rescue ““ to save even one girl
from going through what she went through, but that is not my place,
and it wouldn’t be helpful in the long run.
I know I am not in a place to be able to fix the problem.
Stronger enforcement will only result in driving genital mutilation
further underground. Hopefully through discussion and education,
this community will eventually change. And it will be because of
people such as her that it will.
E-mail Loewenstein at lloewenstein@media.ucla.edu. Send
general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.