As UD anticipated, not a thing has been done by whatever they’re calling a government in Somalia these days about the deaths of little girls from mutilated genitals. And of course
It is clear to those of us who have worked on the issue for years that the recent deaths we have heard about in Somalia and elsewhere are not uncommon.
… [Last year,] 15 year-old Istar [was] married off to a 70 year-old man in Eastern Somalia… Istar had been subjected to infibulation. [Her “labia [were] stitched together following excision of the clitoris. This makes urinating and menstruating almost impossible as a girl is forced to do so through a hole the size of a matchstick.”]
As happens with many girls who have undergone this type of FGM, her new husband was unable to penetrate her during sex. He used a traditional dagger to cut her open. But he did it with so much force that the dagger went deep, affecting the vagina walls and cutting into her cervix.
Istar started bleeding profusely, forcing her family to seek medical help and counseling. Although she is now out of immediate danger, Istar is deeply traumatised and, unsurprisingly, she does not want to go back to her husband.
England, Australia, and America’s fight against female genital mutilation is, er, cutting-edge civilizational work. All three nations are fighting the good fight against this appalling and popular practice, and I gotta tell you. It ain’t easy. Here in America we’ve got brilliant baby-cutting defenders like Alan Dershowitz enduring very bad publicity to advise our own homegrown, Johns Hopkins educated (!) cutters on how to avoid prosecution. England is also having a devil of a time prosecuting mothers who abuse their little girls in this profound and repulsive way. But, like Australia, both countries are getting there.
Indeed, the latest Australian case is instructive. All of these court systems need to keep in mind that the mothers are going to lie through their teeth. I didn’t do it what are you taking about I’m a simple ignorant woman this is all over my head it didn’t happen my daughters are making it up someone else must have oh their clitoral hoods are missing wherever can they be I know they’re around here somewhere… A Somalian mother of two daughters took them to her home country to have some mindless stone-wielding person destroy them for life; when she got back she was arrested for “removing a child from the state for female genital mutilation.”
Having traumatized the girls for good by hacking off their genitalia, their mother destroyed them again by coaching them to lie in court and deny what they told social workers – that they were brutally hacked at in Somalia, with their mother standing next to them. Um, oh no, we just made it up cuz a stepsister gave us money to lie…?
The stepsister in question denied she asked the girls to lie to police or that she bribed them.
She maintained she had tipped off Child Safety services after learning of the mutilation seven months later, when the family returned to Australia.
I gotta tell you. Everyone deserves a defense in a court of law. I know, I know. But you’ve really gotta be desperate for money, or as …….. (you choose the adjective) as Dershowitz to defend people like this.
The mother was convicted.
There is no room in this country, not one inch, for these gruesome practices. Nothing—not a witless respect for the cultural traditions of others, not a craven impulse to avoid looking intolerant—nothing should stop us from protecting every single American girl from being abused in this manner. Nothing should stop us from unequivocally prohibiting this kind of savagery, least of all the absurd insinuation that to do so would be somehow racist or ethnocentric. We do not reject FGM because it is practiced primarily by dark-skinned people, or because it is often erroneously presented as an Islamic commandment. We reject FGM because it is barbarism.
We have planted every flag we have in the name of civilization, and it is time to plant one now. America is the inheritor of that long tradition that slowly, over centuries, produced John Locke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Abigail Adams, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr. Want to fight the patriarchy? Look no further than Somalia, where women are disbarred from making every major decision, including that most delicate and tender decision of how to manage one’s own fledgling sexuality. The Somalis take that right from 98 percent of their girls when they cut them open and rip away parts of their vagina. But this is America. These are our girls. And we don’t do that here.
We’ll never know how many children in the world have bled to death because their local village butcher, cheered on by their mother, slashed so deeply at their genitalia with a shard of glass that the butcher, instead of just destroying their lives, killed them.
A handful of people have ever cared about this outcome… Have ever allowed themselves to imagine the agonizing death of a six-year-old without access to painkillers, let alone medical care, as she bleeds out…
And after all, if these children hadn’t been witches they wouldn’t have died.
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As the latest FGM deaths in Somalia actually manage to make the world news, people are allowing themselves to wonder whether this country, where 98% of little girls are slashed, might actually start protecting its children from this practice. But:
1. Somalia has no law against FGM and isn’t in the business of getting one.
2. Even if there were a law, people would ignore it.
3. The government of Somalia claims it’s going to find and prosecute the people who created the three latest child corpses, but go ahead and ask UD if she thinks that that spectacularly failed state will find and prosecute anyone.
4. The butchers are people in high standing in the community, with a serious financial investment in FGM. (When you’re finished imagining the children’s deaths, imagine an impoverished local family working themselves to the bone to scrape up enough money to pay for their daughter to be eviscerated.) No one will go against them.
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And 5.: What’s the problem here? Cutters have been at it in England for decades, and everyone knows it, and there’s a law against it, and not one prosecution has been successful. In America there’s a bunch of cutters on trial in Detroit as we speak, and no less a figure than Alan Dershowitz has come to their defense.
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UPDATE:
“I believe that the [Somali Attorney General] was [speaking harshly about the practice] for press. When the cameras are not there, I doubt there is much interest in [this] case or any others,” [a British Somali activist] says.
And as FGM becomes more common in the United States, our doctors too will start specializing in the many complications of the slashing off of six year olds’ genitals. The Somali doctor quoted in my headline has of course a steady stream of bleeding mutilated children to specialize in, since 98% of the little girls in that country get hacked, mostly by local village butchers. I’m sure we’ll have our share of local butchers here in the ol’ US of A too; but some of our castrators will maybe have nursing degrees or whatever.
Meanwhile, the latest child FGM death in Somalia seems to have attracted sufficient global attention to rouse the government (“government”) to say that it will pursue the case in the courts, blah blah. I’m sure we’ll all forget the clinical details long before whoever is trying to run Somalia remembers that it was after all just a girl and really who gives a shit. There’s a war on.
One of the doctors who tried to save Deeqa after the botched procedure told CNN she suffered the most extreme form of FGM he had ever seen.
“Her whole female genital tract had been removed, the labia and the clitoris had been cut off, it’s type 4 FGM.
“She was brought in two days after they cut her, she was already infected with tetanus,” Dr. Abdirahman Omar Hassan said.
If they’d been able to save her, Deeqa could have lived out her full life span: Buried under a body veil at eleven years old, married to some random old guy at twelve, finished off at thirteen in an honor killing.
The father of a 10-year-old girl who died after undergoing female genital mutilation (FGM) in Somalia has defended the practice.
Dahir Nur’s daughter died of blood loss on 17 July, two days after being taken to a traditional circumciser.
But he told Voice of America (VOA) “people in the area are content” with FGM even considering the dangers, adding it is the country’s “culture”.
According to Unicef, 98% of girls and women in Somalia have undergone FGM.
Dr Abdirahman Omar Hassan, director of Hanano hospital in the city of Dhusamareb, told VoA he had never seen “anyone who was mutilated like that in my life.”
[Nur’s daughter] had [also] caught tetanus, most likely from the unsterilised equipment used during the original procedure.
From the New York Times:
“I don’t know how you repair this,” said State Senator Peter W. Galbraith, a Democrat who represents the village [of Williamsville, Vermont], walking along the road on Tuesday.
… “When are we going to get out of Afghanistan?” [a resident whose house was ruined] asked Mr. Galbraith, a former United Nations representative in that country, as he came by. “Frankly, I really am focused on the world, and it really helps you put things in perspective. No matter how much we lost, it’s nothing compared to the starvation in Somalia.”
International soccer’s governing body has always been a punchline for corruption in sports. They make the NCAA look like UNICEF.
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Yes, my dear little brothers in sport, our retreat last week was all about this primary fact: We stink to high heaven.
What will we do about it?
Nothing.
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I mean, look up there. Two posts up. Headline Among the Company’s Expenses…
Do you seriously expect us to fuck with that?
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Sweetie, I hear you. But it’s too late to get rid of the scum. And our next President, Rick Perry, wouldn’t hear of it.
My best advice to you: Try to get a job at a school that’s not a sports factory. There are plenty of fine colleges and universities in this country.
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Another comparison.
“[P]rotecting and enhancing the integrity of intercollegiate athletics” … is the equivalent …of upholding the gold standard of the government of Somalia.
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And never forget who’s running the show.
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“It’s a circus. And the NCAA is running behind the elephants with shovels.”
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College football and men’s basketball are multi-billion-dollar businesses being run as an illegal cartel. So don’t say Congress or the President shouldn’t be “wasting time” on sports.
If the President and Congress make it clear to the university presidents that the system is completely unacceptable and they will lose all the tax breaks they currently enjoy if they do not do a complete tear-down, that will force action.
It sounds impossible. So did going to the moon. Sometimes you need to attempt the impossible. Especially when the current situation is completely sickening to witness.