Advocates push for anti-female genital mutilation law

Beacon Hill lawmakers and advocates seeking to end the practice of female genital mutilation or cutting were anxiously awaiting the Joint Committee on the Judiciary’s imminent report of proposed legislation on Thursday, which would indicate if bills targeting the practice would move forward in this legislative session.

The deadline for all bills to be reported under Joint Rule 10 is Feb. 5, but some at the Statehouse said this proposed legislation might come out sooner.

House bill 3332, presented by state Reps. Natalie M. Higgins, D-Leominster, and Jay D. Livingstone, D-Boston, and Senate bill 834, presented by state Sen. Joseph A. Boncore, D-Winthrop, in particular, would establish criminal penalties for those committing FGM/C of imprisonment for up to 10 years and a fine of up to $10,000; allow for civil lawsuits by victims; prevent parents or guardians from taking a female child out of state for FGM/C, and set up a variety of avenues for outreach, victim support and education surrounding the practice.

Massachusetts is one of just 15 states that has not adopted anti-FGM/C laws.

The issue has become more urgent after a federal judge in 2018 struck down a law banning the practice, which was passed by Congress in 1996. Judge Bernard Friedman of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan found the law unconstitutional because it attempted to regulate local criminal activity, which traditionally falls under state jurisdiction.

“We’re cautiously optimistic that this is moving forward,” Higgins said in an interview. “We’ve got to make sure Massachusetts is not among the 15 (states) left out.”

Higgins, who worked as a rape counselor for a decade, said the bills had wide support from immigrant and medical communities as well as women’s and children’s advocates.

Although many were surprised there were FGM/C victims in the United States and that the practice was still going on, Higgins said, “Sexual violence is underreported in this country. FGM is even more so.”

FGM/C is defined by the World Health Organization, United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and United Nations Population Fund as “all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs whether for cultural, religious or other non-therapeutic reasons.”

FGM/C is recognized internationally as a human rights violation.

According to a 2016 article in the journal Public Health Reports, using survey data from 2002 to 2011, the prevalence of girls ages 15 to 19 who had undergone FGM/C is highest in Somalia, with 97%; Guinea, 89%; Sudan, 84%; and Egypt, 81%. But FGM/C occurs worldwide.

“The practice doesn’t stop once they come to our shores,” said Elizabeth Yore, a Chicago-area lawyer and child advocacy expert who is spearheading the national #EndFGMToday campaign.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than half a million women and girls in the United States had FGM/C performed on them or were at risk of FGM/C, including 14,591 women and girls in Massachusetts. Massachusetts ranks 12th in the nation for at-risk populations.

Yore, who worked in Africa and the Middle East on international child abductions, would see FGM/C overseas and think to herself, “Thank God it’s not here.”

She said, “Never in a million years” did she think she’d be working to stop the practice, often hidden from view, in the U.S.

It shocked Yore that in Massachusetts, home state of female pioneers such as Abigail Adams, Susan B. Anthony and Abby Kelley Foster, FGM/C had not yet been criminalized.

Legislation was crucial because, she said, “They won’t stop unless they know it’s punishable. This is about empowering victims to be able to say, ‘no.’ ”

There is a tremendous amount of family and cultural pressure for victims to not speak up, according to Yore. “This is much like human trafficking,” she said. “They’re intimidating them into silence.”

There are no health benefits to FGM/C. In information provided by the Massachusetts Medical Society, complications related to FGM/C include severe bleeding and problems urinating; cysts and infections; as well as complications in childbirth and increased risk of newborn deaths.

Dr. Cynthia D. Hall, a urogynecologist at UMass Memorial Medical Center and associate professor at University of Massachusetts Medical School, has seen complications during her work in Africa, including “really bad vaginal birth injuries” among women who had been cut. Hall travels to Rwanda and previously to Niger, which are not countries where FGM/C is widely practiced, but patients come in from other countries.

In Worcester, she said, she sees about one case a year and hears of others from colleagues who encounter it.

The women she's encountered aren’t being cut locally but either came to the U.S. after having FGM/C in their native country or were taken back to their family’s country to be cut, a practice sometimes known as “vacation cutting,” which proposed state legislation would outlaw.

One patient, she said, had her labia sewn together and was leaking urine. The woman had had multiple births, but afterward a community birth attendant would sew her back up.

Hall performed a simple procedure to separate the woman’s labia.

“She was embarrassed to talk about it. She was embarrassed to be examined,” Hall said.

Hall stressed that FGM/C “can look very different in different patients.”

Yet even less physically destructive forms can cause persistent pain and result in post-traumatic stress disorder.

It happens in Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities around the world, Hall said. It also is generational, with younger women, including sisters of survivors, less likely to have been cut.

Mariya Taher, 37, of Cambridge has been speaking up at the Statehouse, online and to national audiences for several years about her experience as a survivor of FGM/C.

Taher, a social worker, writer and co-founder and U.S. executive director of a nonprofit organization, Sahiyo, united against female genital cutting, grew up in a Dawoodi Bohra community, a religious sect within the Ismaili branch of Shia Islam. Her family came from India.

She was told it was a sensitive topic, to be spoken about by women only.

“After doing research on FGM/C online, it dawned on me that what I had been brought up to believe was a religious or cultural practice was in actuality violence and, because I was 7 when someone cut off that piece of my clitoral hood, that it was child abuse,” Taher wrote in an article published in the independent online news site, Fair Observer in 2018.

Taher said in an interview that she had been working with the Women’s Bar Association for the past four years to craft legislation outlawing FGM/C. It was “kind of mind boggling actually that it hasn’t passed yet.”

Bills filed in the last legislative session didn’t succeed, she said, because of misunderstanding about what the issue was.

There was “fear of overstepping or targeting already vulnerable communities,” Taher said. “It’s so tied up with this idea of religion and culture.”

Adding to the advocacy challenge, survivors traditionally haven’t spoken out, hidden in shame and pressure from social norms of their communities.

That’s changing, though, and efforts such as an online Change.org petition and Sahiyo’s Voices to End FGM/C videos give a voice to diverse survivors in the U.S.

“There’s this epic silence on the issue that only in the last 10 years is breaking the surface,” Taher said.

The message has started to get through.

“We’ve learned a lot about FGM,” said state Senate President Emerita Harriette L. Chandler, a Worcester Democrat.

Chandler said she hoped proposed legislation would move forward. But she acknowledged that a paucity of survivors willing to speak out and the lack of availability of firsthand information about FGM/C happening in the state were obstacles.

“If we’re going to change this, people have to stand up and speak out,” she said.

“I actually think it’s long overdue,” said state Sen. Michael O. Moore. The Millbury Democrat is one of many Central Massachusetts legislators who signed onto bills outlawing FGM/C.

“I think this is a horrific thing to have happen to a woman or a child. It’s simply based on control over a woman,” he said.

State Sen. Ryan C. Fattman, a Sutton Republican, said he spoke a year ago with Chandler about bipartisan support for the legislation.

“I’m very careful of what I attach my name to these days,” Fattman said. After researching the issue, he is “very supportive” of the bill, particularly because it contains education and prevention components.

“Doing this to a child is barbaric,” he said.

Even if there were only one person in his district who might be helped, “It matters,” said Fattman. “Statewide, there’s a lot of lives there.”