The United Nations disclosed a stunning figure this month: The number of females whose genitals have been scraped, pricked, or sliced off their young bodies has been underestimated—by seventy million. A new trove of data—the first survey from Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, plus population growth in other countries where the practice continues, often despite being outlawed—led to the revision. Nearly half of all Indonesian females under the age of twelve have undergone female genital mutilation or cutting, as it’s formally known. The new numbers bump up the worldwide total to at least two hundred million women and girls, alive today, who have undergone genital mutilation—some just a few weeks after birth, the vast majority before the age of ten.
Yet those numbers are still nowhere near the real total. The hardest part of tracking the practice is getting countries to probe and then disclose sensitive data, Claudia Cappa, the lead author of a new UNICEF report, told me. “We still don’t have robust national figures that can give us a sense of the scope,” she said.
The new data from Indonesia and anecdotal information from other countries—including Malaysia, India, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman—produced a second discovery. “The geographic center is now shifting,” Cappa said. “It’s not just concentrated in Africa, as was long believed. There’s now recognition that the practice is global.”
More than half a million females in the United States have either undergone F.G.M./C. or are at serious risk; that’s double or triple earlier estimates, according to an analysis by the Population Research Bureau and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The majority of at-risk females live in eight states: California, New York, Minnesota, Texas, Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey, and Washington. More than sixty-five thousand live in the metropolitan area of New York City and Newark, according to a 2013 study. Most girls who have suffered genital mutilation—which affects sex, childbirth, and mental and physical health—are from immigrant families, the C.D.C. reported.
President Obama urged action on Friday. “Some people say that F.G.M./C. is a rite of passage—something families do to help prepare girls for adulthood or marriage,” he said in a White House statement. “Just because this is a tradition in some places does not make it right. This practice is harmful, and therefore wrong wherever it occurs.”
The United States outlawed genital cutting in 1996, and in 2013 it criminalized the transport of girls under the age of eighteen out of the country for the purpose of genital removal—a practice known as “vacation cutting,” because it is often undertaken during school breaks. The government has financed prevention programs, both at home and abroad. In recent years, two dozen states have passed legislation—New York did so just last November—mandating education and outreach programs or increasing penalties for those who facilitate cutting.
Female genital mutilation, which dates back to antiquity, takes many forms. In 1997, the United Nations described it as “all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs whether for cultural, religious, or other non-therapeutic reasons.” It has only recently gained a place on the global agenda. In 2012, the U.N. General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution condemning the practice and appealing for governments to do more to stop it. It is now classified as an “irreversible human-rights violation,” Cappa said. She added, “Females live with the consequences for the rest of their lives.” Last year, the U.N. outlined new global development goals, which include eliminating child marriage and genital cutting by 2030.
UNICEF has tracked the data on F.G.M./C. in thirty countries. Three—Egypt, Ethiopia, and Indonesia—account for about a hundred million girls and women who have undergone mutilation, about half the global total. Somalia has the highest per-capita percentage; ninety-eight per cent of females there have been circumcised. In Sudan, Eritrea, Mali, Sierra Leone, Djibouti, and Guinea, more than eighty per cent of females between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine have been mutilated. In Egypt, UNICEF notes, sixty-five per cent of the mutilations are performed at home, using a blade or a razor; twenty-five per cent are performed without anesthetic.
UNICEF does report a modicum of good news. In some countries, the percentage of circumcised females has declined in the past thirty years. In Egypt, in the mid-eighties, ninety-seven per cent of females between the ages of fifteen and nineteen had been circumcised. The figure is now seventy per cent. In Kenya, the practice is down thirty per cent. But there’s a caveat. “Current progress is insufficient to keep up with increasing population growth,” UNICEF predicts. “If current trends continue the number of girls and women subjected to FMG will increase significantly over the next fifteen years.”
