GENITAL MUTILATION VICTIMS BREAK THEIR SILENCE ‘THIS IS DEMONIC’
Court case sheds light on procedure inflicted on half a million females in the USA
It was the summer of 1990. Mariya Taher was 7 years old, vacationing in India with her family, when one day her mother took her to a run-down apartment building without explaining why.
She remembers climbing some stairs, opening a door and seeing older women in a room. There was laughter, and the place seemed cheerful.
But then came the betrayal. The child ended up on the floor. Her dress was lifted up.
“I remember something sharp down there and then I re- member crying,” Taher, now 34, recalls. “I remember my mom comforting me afterward and holding me in her lap.”
A decade later, Taher would better understand what happened to her on that summer day in Mumbai. She had survived the taboo ritual of female genital mutilation, a decadesold religious tradition that millions of women worldwide continue to be subjected to, including a half million in the U.S., where a historic criminal case involving the practice is unfolding in Detroit.
In a first-of-its-kind federal prosecution, authorities have charged three people for their alleged roles in the genital cut-
tings of two 7-year-old Minnesota girls at a Livonia clinic in February. Authorities say the girls came to Michigan with their mothers, thinking it was a special girls trip, but ended up having their genitals cut.
Dr. Jumana Nagarwala, 44, of Northville, who was arrested April 12, is accused of cutting the girls and, if convicted, could get life in prison.
Dr. Fakhruddin Attar, 53, of Livonia and his wife, Farida Attar, 50, were arrested Friday. He is accused of letting Nagarwala use his clinic to perform the procedure, while his wife allegedly held the girls’ hands to comfort them during the cuttings.
The three defendants belong to a small, Muslim Indian community known as the Dawoodi Bohra, whose members say genital cutting is an entrenched social and cultural norm, with some women viewing it as normal as having a period. Celebration parties are held after the cuttings, and the women and girls are supposed to keep it a secret. One of the key reasons for the procedure, victims say, is to curb a woman’s sexuality.
Taher, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., grew up in the Bohra community in the U.S. and is closely following the Michigan case along with several other cutting victims who spoke to the Free Press last week about their painful pasts and the stigma of growing up feeling different, betrayed and ashamed. Like the victims in the Michigan case, they were told to tell no one about the cutting, that it was a “special secret.” NO MORE SILENCE But the now-grown women are done being quiet.
After years of suffering in silence, fearful of getting shunned by their families and communities if they denounced genital mutilation, they are speaking out and demanding change. They want the cutters punished, along with religious leaders and parents who continue to support a practice that is illegal in the U.S. and has been condemned by the World Health Organization.
The Michigan case, they say, has emboldened them, particularly because the doctor’s defense revolves around an all-too-familiar argument made by the Bohra community: that the mild, ritual “nick” or “shaving ” isn’t actual cutting. The victims disagree, they say, and they have the mental and physical scars to prove it.
“It’s taken me a long time to be as comfortable as I am,” said Taher, who hopes that her Sahiyo campaign to end female genital mutilation will gain momentum from the Michigan case. “We can’t have this happening ... Whether it’s a tradition, for religious reasons or for sex, I see all of it as controlling someone. This is a form of gender violence. It’s a form of child abuse. It’s oppression.”
Activists and world health leaders stress that genital cutting affects girls of all socioeconomic backgrounds and occurs in all parts of the world, not just in remote villages in Africa or Asia, but in the U.S., too. To stress this point, the State Department this month released a video highlighting American survivors of female genital cutting, including a white American woman whose cutter, she says, was a fundamentalist Christian who mutilated her at age 3 to prevent her from masturbating later in life.
Coincidentally, the video was released on April 14, the day after the Northville doctor was charged in what would become the nation’s first federal criminal prosecution of genital cutting. A SHADOWY FIGURE At 43, Alifya Sulemanji can still vividly recall the dark shadowy figure coming over her more than three decades ago.
It was a faceless old woman with a razor in her hand. She was 7, and her mother, an aunt and a cousin had taken her to an old building in a shady part of Bombay to — as they told her — “take a worm out of my body.” She remembers climbing some stairs and entering a dark, dingy room. Then the shadowy figure appeared.
“They just made me lie down and they started cutting me with a blade,” recalled Sulemanji, who remembers bleeding heavily and crying. “They told me, ‘Stop, stop. Don’t cry. Don’t tell anybody; this is a secret among women.’ ”
A woman then put black powder on her genitals, which stopped the bleeding.
“In my mind, I still feel the pain. It was very awful,” Sulemanji said. “I kept telling my mom — even now — ‘What on earth made you do this?’ ”
“It’s our custom,” she recalls her mother telling her.
Sulemanji, who has bachelor’s degrees in economics and sociology, grew up in India and moved to the U.S. at age 29, when she got married. She is a member of the Dawoodi Bohra community in Long Island, N.Y., and has two daughters, ages 13 and 9. There is no way, she said, that she would ever subject her daughters to what she experienced at 7 — despite community and family pressure to do so.
“I know how it feels,” she said. “It’s a very cruel thing to do to a little girl.”
Growing up in India, Sulemanji was told that the practice was meant to “curb a woman’s sexual desire” so that a woman wouldn’t have an affair or premarital sex. It’s a well-kept secret among women, she said, noting most Bohra men don’t know about the practice and that her own father didn’t learn she had been subjected to it until last year.
The Bohras perform genital mutilation, she said, by cutting the hood — or tip — off of the clitoris, which was done to her. Today, she said, the Bohras are changing their story about why they practice genital cutting, claiming the ritual is for cleanliness and religious reasons.
Sulemanji associates it with pain. “When I grew older, it kept bothering me. I asked my friends, ‘Did your mom do this to you?’ But they never heard of things like that,” she said, noting she learned that other Muslim sects in India didn’t subject their girls to cutting, which angered her even more.
Two years ago, after learning about an Indian journalist who went public with her story of genital cutting, Sulemanji decided to break her silence. In a move that stunned her Muslim community, she took to Facebook, along with her husband, and denounced female genital mutilation. She was unfriended by many. “It was burning inside. It had to come out,” she said. “I want to punish all the parents. ... I want to get all the cutters.”
Sulemanji has forgiven her mother, saying she is uneducated and didn’t know any better. Perhaps the most rewarding part of her activism, she said, is, “I convinced my mom that this is wrong. And she agreed.”
Sulemanji said the Bohra community restricts personal freedom and is more about uniformity, with rules about attire and proper beard lengths. ‘LIKE A CULT’ “We have a head priest who tries to control everything,” she said. “This is like a cult. It just feels like we have a tyrant over us, a whole control thing going on.”
But there’s still a lot of work left to be done, she said, noting the Michigan case.
“If this can happen in the USA — it needs to stop,” Sulemanji said.
“I remember everything,” she said. “It’s a bad, bad memory. It’s a scar on my life.”
For decades, A. Renee Bergstrom kept a dark, childhood secret to herself. In 1947, in a small Minnesota town, her mother took her to see a doctor when she was 3 years old. Her mother had expressed concerns to the fundamentalist Christian physician that she was touching her genital area.
“When she told the doctor, he said, ‘Oh, I can fix that,’ He removed my clitoris. And she knew immediately it was a mistake and told me to never talk about it,” said Bergstrom, now 72.
For years, Bergstrom did as her mother said. She told no one. At 15, she went to see a doctor about discomfort she was having in her genital area, When the doctor at the clinic discovered she had been cut, she recalled, he gave her a book on the sin of self-pleasuring. She continued her silence.
Bergstrom got married and had three children. She had a difficult time in childbirth and has never really known if her sexuality was affected, she said, noting: “How do you know?”
As an adult, she started researching and writing about what happened to her. Bergstrom got a doctoral degree in education and joined other victims in a movement to help end female genital mutilation. In December, she went public with her story and is featured in the U.S. State Department video about American genital mutilation survivors. NOT JUST MUSLIM PRACTICE Bergstrom explained that her reason for going public had a lot to do with her concerns that Muslims worldwide are facing growing discrimination. She was worried that genital mutilation would be one more reason for people to show animosity toward Muslims, and so she shared her story as a non-Muslim.
“I’m a white Christian American, and this happened to me. And the doctor who did it was a fundamentalist Christian,” Bergstrom said. “I remember the pain, and I remember feeling betrayed by the people who should have been caring for me.”
Bergstrom said she has forgiven her mother. She trusted the doctor just like many other women have trusted their religious leaders who tell them genital cutting must be done for religious reasons, she said. While she says she believes doctors, religious leaders and parents should be held accountable for subjecting children to genital cutting, she doesn’t believe children should be taken away from their parents, saying it “adds more trauma.”
In the Michigan case, one of the Minnesota girls was temporarily removed from her parents. Bergstrom said she was relieved to learn the girl was returned to her parents. But the cutter, she said, needs to be prosecuted.
“It surprised me that somebody educated here in the United States, and who more than likely knew she was breaking the law, did it anyway,” she said. “How strong is religion overtaking an oath to do no harm? ... I don’t believe physicians should be doing that.”
“It’s really a demonic practice,” Cole, now 43, recalls. “They told us, ‘If you talk about it, you’ll die. They brainwash you. … It’s a gross violation of our human rights.” In her freshman year in college, she decided to go public with her story. Cole was attending a workshop on cultural issues when someone started talking about genital mutilation and referred to it as a religious practice for Muslims.
Cole, who grew up Catholic in Africa, said she knew better as her procedure was about tradition and a rite of passage, not religion. So she stood up and shared her horror. “Everybody was silent,” she recalled. “I battled with it. I didn’t want to be judged. I was on a college campus in America for the first time. I didn’t know how they would take it.” But she found empathy. “My hope is to continue sharing my story, talk about it and to educate women,” she said. “They need education. There’s really nothing good about FGM.”
“I remember the pain, and I remember feeling betrayed by the people who should have been caring for me.” A. Renee Bergstrom