British actress Zawe Ashton and Agnes Pareyio, who underwent female genital mutilation as a girl in Kenya, are two of the activists featured in “Stop Cutting Our Girls,” a documentary opposing the practice.
Pontso Mafethe/Courtesy of Pontso Mafethe
Female Genital Mutilation Is A U.S. Problem, Too
Female genital mutilation seems like something that happens over there. Not in the United States. But in Africa, in the Middle East, in Asia.
That’s not the case.
More than half a million girls now living in the U.S. are considered at risk for female genital mutilation. The procedure can range in severity from removing or cutting the clitoris — a sexual organ primarily responsible for female sexual pleasure — to sewing the vagina shut.
“It can be extraordinarily severe,” says Shelby Quast, policy director of Equality Now, a women’s rights advocacy group. “There are lifelong implications for health, both emotional and physical.” The estimated number of girls at risk is based on the number of daughters of immigrants from countries, mostly in Africa and from some communities in Asia, living in the U.S.
“It’s against the law in the U.S. to perform FGM, or to take the woman outside the country to perform the procedure,” says Quast. In 1996, a federal law was passed outlawing the procedure in the U.S., and in 2013 it became illegal to send a girl to another country — so-called “vacation cutting.”
But 26 states do not have their own laws criminalizing the procedure, and state laws could increase protection. “It’s important because states are where people live,” says Quast. “When women are looking to get services, or a girl is scared that this is going to happen to her, it’s important to have those services and laws available at the local level.”
(More on NPR- Goats and Soda: Stories of Life in a Changing World)
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário