Philomena Nwaokolo, and her daughter, Victoria.
Each year, thousands of women in Africa are subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM), a grotesque practice performed by female elders on women both young and old that results in the partial or total removal of a woman’s clitoris and labia. Common complications associated with FGM include pain during urination, intercourse, and childbirth, and death from infection or hemorrhaging.
FGM is widely recognized as a severe form of sexual abuse and has been universally condemned as a violation of a woman’s right to bodily integrity. A number of African governments have criminalized the practice, but as the U.S. government and women’s rights organizations have observed, these governments have failed to enforce new criminal prohibitions against FGM, and the practice remains widespread in several countries including Togo, Cameroon, Senegal, Guinea, Uganda, Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia.
Many women who have sought the protection of local police when threatened with FGM have been turned away due to taboos against interfering in “domestic affairs,” and have been forcibly returned to their families, or raped by the police.
Human Rights USA was one of the first groups to advocate for asylum status in the U.S. for women fleeing FGM. In 2003, we won the highest-level court decision at that time dealing with gender-based abuse in the refugee context, Nwaokolo v. Ashcroft. In this decision, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals held that FGM constitutes a form of torture, and that the risk that an asylum seeker’s U.S. citizen daughter would be subjected to FGM must be considered by the immigration courts.
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