Photo: Equality Now

An article in Salon about girls suffering genital mutilation set my hair on fire. (Genital mutilation is a euphemism for several grisly procedures, often performed with unsterile instruments and without anesthesia.) Turns out, female genital mutilation  — or FGM –doesn’t just happen in other countries. It’s happening here. In the United States.

The Salon piece, written by Lynn Harris, offers this sobering information:

“Yes, FGM is practiced — or at least planned — on U.S. soil, on girls in immigrant families who were born and/or raised here. Perhaps even among people you know: Not long ago, a concerned mother posted on my Brooklyn-area parenting list-serv that she believed an eight-year-old friend of her daughter’s had undergone some form of the procedure in her home country in the Middle East (and appeared to be markedly traumatized). Archana Pyati, an asylum attorney for Sanctuary for Families in New York, has encountered dozens of FGM cases just in the past six months. ‘The majority of our African clients have been through it, and most often, they are fighting to protect their daughters,’ she says. (Older relatives with ’seniority’ often push for the procedure.) ‘It is our hope that by recognizing that FGM may be occurring under our noses we will become better able to respond to it, just as we would any other form of violence against children,’ she says.”

Check out the rest of the piece here. Violence, oppression, and being sold into sexual slavery are just some of the commonplace horrors women all over the world face, and we can help stop it. We can donate money to Equality Now. Even better, we can take part in one of their letter writing campaigns  to help females who don’t have it as good as we do.