Unlike her elders and peers in her village in Uganda, Kinah* did not agree with the practice of genital stretching, an unusual and drawn-out form of female genital mutilation (World Health Organization definition of FGM (pdf)). For most of her life, Kinah’s mother sent her away to Catholic boarding school. At school, she converted to Christianity and became a student leader. At every family gathering, Kinah resisted public pressure to participate in stretching. She took extra classes over vacations to avoid returning home.

Finally, Kinah had to return home, as she had completed the highest level of education that she could. Once home, she was forced by her female relatives to undergo a painful, unsanitary series of stretchings. Kinah opposed FGM on religious grounds, due to her firmly held conviction that the practice was outdated and wrong, and out of fear for her personal health, safety and security. Again and again Kinah told her family that her faith prohibited participating in these rituals, but her relatives continued to force her into stretchings.

In her tribe, once a daughter is sufficiently stretched, the stretched tissue is cut in a public ritual. Horrified by the public humiliation and the religious nature of the impending cutting ceremony, Kinah was convinced that she had to escape.

After narrowly escaping her village, Kinah arrived traumatized in the U.S. in 1998. Unfortunately, Kinah filed her request for asylum more than one year after her entry, contrary to the rules governing such applications. When she asked Human Rights USA for help, she was about to be deported back to her village in Uganda where she would have been considered a betrayer of the village and immediately forced into the cutting ritual. Her daughter, a U.S. citizen and toddler at the time, would also face public stretching and cutting in the future, regardless of her mother’s beliefs.

In 2005, we assisted attorney Lisa Weinberg of Lutheran Social Services of New England in arguing that it was impossible for Kinah to have filed her claim by the deadline due to the trauma she suffered as a result of the FGM. The Immigration Judge agreed that the sexual and psychological trauma Kinah suffered was an extraordinary circumstance warranting an exception to the deadline and granted Kinah asylum on September 29, 2005.

Kinah continues to live in the United States with her daughter.

Kinah made the brave and dangerous choice to oppose her society’s traditional practice of genital stretching and cutting, and when her opposition was ignored and her personal sanctity violated, she sought protection in the United States. Human Rights USA continues to work to set precedents for other forms of gender-based abuse, such as forced marriage and sex trafficking.

*Kinah is a pseudonym. Her name in legal documents is V-K-.

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