US Congress members join campaign calling for end to FGM

More than 50 members of Congress have joined a campaign calling on the White Residence to carry out a research into the risks of female genital mutilation for American girls and introduce emergency hotlines and airport checks to avert them becoming taken out of the nation for the practice to be carried out abroad.

In a signal the expanding political momentum in Washington behind a Guardian-backed campaign, American FGM survivor and campaigner leader Jaha Dukureh also met this week with officials at the departments of justice and education to discuss their response to a petition with more than 202,000 signatures demanding a extensive US action program.

Senior Democrats think President Obama, who signed a law banning travel for the purposes of carrying out FGM in 2013, is sympathetic to calls for further US action on the issue but fear a wider lack of information of the hazards to American girls and women is holding back a much more co-ordinated official response.

“It’s so essential for the Obama administration to join us and to break the silence so we can educate folks all around the nation,” said Texan congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee, one particular of 58 signatories to the White Property letter, in the course of a briefing in Capitol Hill this week.

“We hear from women usually who were born right here in the US and have been by means of FGM. These younger females are your average American youngsters: some of them you know, some of them are residing in your neighbourhood.”

New York congressman Joe Crowley, who aided launch the FGM campaign and petition at the US headquarters of the Guardian final month, mentioned raising awareness was especially essential at the begin of the so-known as “cutting season” when girls from immigrant families are returned to nations in Africa throughout the summer season holiday.

“It is crucial that as we enter these summertime months and we know families will be taking their kids overseas to reconnect them with their homelands, that they recognize that it is against the law to transport their youngster overseas for the purposes of getting FGM,” mentioned Crowley.

“We want to alert educators and counsellors on how to look for women at chance,” he extra, calling for a “national hotline so people who know girls at threat can get in touch with in and found out how they can strategy this sensitive situation.”

The last complete research in 1997 estimated 70,000 women and youthful women living in America were at risk of getting subjected to the practice, but campaigners argue much more up-to-date study is required into the scale of the difficulty in light of new census data on immigrant communities.

“People usually assume that FGM is an African issue, not an American difficulty,” mentioned Dukureh, who is also becoming supported by the campaign group, Equality Now and whose petition is hosted on the campaign platform, Adjust.org.“There are a lot of women during the nation – in Altanta, in Minnesota, in New York – that have been via FGM and we do not have a single government programme in area for survivors, or to avert it taking place.”

She also joined representatives Crowley and Jackson-Lee in urging the US to lead and support fund a co-ordinated worldwide response.

“We have to begin from house,” explained Dukureh. “We have to do something in our own nation before we can inform other nations what to do. Politicians need to comprehend that this is an American dilemma as well.”

Jackson-Lee stated worldwide figures suggested 30 million ladies and women stay at chance about the planet of what the United Nations defines as the “partial or complete elimination of the female genitalia for non-health-related factors.”

“We are an enormously diverse nation and we welcome the diversity of traditions, but we do not welcome oppression or the denial of human rights,” she said.

“Too a lot of American women encounter the oppression of FGM … just believe of a youthful woman going via this, unknowingly or without her permission to, in essence, alter her existence permanently. It is said that FGM is to preserve the virginity of the women and to maintain them pure till marriage but it is genuinely taking their spirit away.”

US Congress members join campaign calling for end to FGM