About 12,000 members of a Somali ethnic minority are currently being held in refugee camps in Kenya. The United States has agreed to allow all 12,000 to emigrate to this country.
But some of those Somalis are reacting in a way that the U.S. hadn’t planned. Learning that they will not be allowed to perform female genital mutilation rituals on their children once they are in the United States, some families are rushing to perform female circumcision while still in the refugee camps.
This, in turn, has brought a new threat from U.S. officials that families that mutilate the genitals of their daughters may not be allowed to emigrate after all.
According to the BBC, “dozens” of Somali refugee families have forced their daughters to undergo female genital mutilation rituals before they set foot in the United States. A spokesman for the U.S. embassy in Kenya condemned the practice as a crime and said that any family found to have forced their daughters to go through the procedure in the past few months would be investigated and likely barred from entering the United States.
Left unanswered in the BBC piece is why aid workers in Kenya overseeing the refugee camps have allowed such high numbers of such mutiliations to occur in the first place. If this group of people were known to practice female genital mutilation, why did aid workers wait for dozens of cases to occur before letting people know that it would not be tolerated?
Source:
US may ban genital mutilation parents. Andrew Harding, The BBC, October 1, 2002.