A petition that calls on the Obama administration to tackle the issue of female genital mutilation (FGM) in the United States has been signed by virtually 200,000 folks.
Jaha Dukureh, a victim of FGM who has spearheaded the Adjust.org petition, will be on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to meet some of the much more than 50 members of Congress who have lent their support to Dukureh’s petition, which calls on Barack Obama and the Department of Health and Human Companies to commission analysis into the scale and severity of the problem in the US.
Dukureh launched her campaign at the Guardian’s New York office final month with UN representative Nafissatou Diop, US congressman Joe Crowley and Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger.
Doctors treating women and women with FGM say the analysis is badly needed. “We would know, we’d have a far better sense of it nationally … The challenge that I’ve faced in excess of my whole occupation has been that typically occasions we do not have information,” stated Dr Crista Johnson-Agbakwu, who treats girls from 43 nations at the Refugee Women’s Wellness Clinic in Phoenix, Arizona, exactly where a “staggering amount” of her sufferers have been lower.
FGM is a 5,000-12 months-old practice that will take spot across large parts of Africa, the Middle East and south-east Asia.
Although there are varying types of severity, it essentially entails the partial or whole elimination of the external female genitalia. Kind III FGM, the most severe, needs the lady to be sewn closed until finally her wedding night.
Although there are grassroots movements in some African countries to phase out the practice, many diaspora communities nevertheless need a lady to be reduce.
The United States has a patchy track record in tackling FGM. It was outlawed in 1996 with the Federal Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation Act, then last yr a bill was passed outlawing “vacation cutting”. Twenty states have their very own equivalent laws banning FGM.
But so far there has only been 1 conviction in the US due to the troubles in policing and enforcing the law.
Dr Terry Dunn, an obstetrician gynaecologist in Denver, Colorado, says he frequently sees the healthcare results of female genital mutilation which stick to girls by means of their lifetime.
“Recurrent urinary tract infections, horrible periods –you can envision if you had your vagina closed and you had your time period and you could only get tiny drops of blood out and you had been continually bleeding – that can make you at threat for infections and issues all during your existence,” he explained.
“Plus it is very challenging to do cervical cancer screenings on these individuals, simply because you cannot get a speculum in.”
Given that the very first federal law was passed, the African migrant population in the US has much more than doubled. Nonetheless, even in elements of the nation with important diaspora populations, there are only a tiny handful of obstetricians and gynecologists who have focused on treating patients with FGM.
The most latest analysis in to how many women and women may be affected by FGM are statistics extrapolated from the data from the 2000 United States census, which put the amount of females impacted at 228,000.
Johnson-Agbakwu says she is baffled at the lack of research: “Why are we seeking at numbers from 2000? We are residing in 2014.
“The law did not provide for adequate infrastructure to permit for training of our physicians and nurses,” she explained. “If you do not have nurses and medical doctors who can adequately recognise this how can you provide ample care. And culturally competent care”
Dr Nawal Nour at Brigham Women’s Hospital in Boston was part of an FGM taskforce that was set up by the American University of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in 1997 right after the federal anti-FGM law was passed.
Having now qualified what she calls a “small army” of ob-gyns in how to deal with sufferers with FGM, Nour notes that not every physician is equipped to deal with FGM patients. “You have overall health are suppliers who have no notion about FGM and are suddenly carrying out a pelvic examination on a woman with FGM and saying: ‘What happened to you?’” she explained.
Dr Robert Graebe, an ob-gyn based in New Jersey, recalls when he first started seeing individuals, they would come in, often with discomfort. “And I would experience some reasonably excessive destruction of the vagina. It’s debilitating and significant.”
Lamenting the lack of coordination and schooling inside the health care community in the United States on FGM, Graebe says: “The policy has been to back off. The healthcare neighborhood wants to react right here.”
At state and federal level, the obligation for monitoring, avoiding and treating females from FGM affected communities is unclear. The Centers for Condition Handle and Prevention, which carried out the only assessment of the issue in the United States, appear to be material with the status quo.
“I am not conscious of any ideas in the near future for a CDC study,” spokesperson Karen Hunter informed the Guardian by means of e-mail.
Robert Bock, a spokesperson for the Nationwide Institutes of Well being, mentioned that, while the NIH and its affiliated bodies do not at present have a approach for dealing with FGM in the US, “this appears to be anything that the State Department has taken a stand on, with regards to priorities that USAID [the United States Company for International Improvement] has stated in the previous.”
Nevertheless, the problem of FGM on US soil continues to be largely ignored.
Dr Marci Bowers, a surgeon based mostly in California, says he has presented reconstructive vaginal surgical treatment to 90 women in the United States.
“For me it is essential to get the word out that there are procedures to help these girls,” he said.
Bowers is hopeful the issue will by some means catch the consideration of strong women’s policy influencers in Washington. “I was hoping this would be anything Michelle Obama would flip her eye to,” she explained.
Petition to end FGM in US nears 200,000 signatures
