In 1994, Minnesota outlawed female genital mutilation, making it one of the first states to make the practice a felony punishable by imprisonment. Many people interviewed for this story said they had heard rumors that women went to Toronto, with its large Somalian population, Europe or back to Africa to have the procedure done. Circumcised female patients came from many countries, including Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Liberia and Egypt. Feelings about the procedure run high within the Somali community, Davis said. She recalls an older Somali woman rolling down her window and spitting at her before a meeting last May with 20 Somali women who in their homeland performed circumcisions.
Somali women are in a vulnerable and fragile position here.
This practice may be more than 10,000 years old. In Africa, women don't have a choice. Here, it's a fairly close-knit community, and they may be under similar pressure. Davis saw evidence of that ambivalence at a meeting last fall with young Somali mothers, who had a spirited debate over whether to circumcise their infant daughters. If they returned to visit family in Africa, some women argued, female relatives would kidnap their girls and circumcise them.