Dawoodi Bohra Fgm10/21/2021
In the Indian sub-continent, especially in India, the Dawoodi Bohra community was brought into the limelight for their practice. Female Circumcision ( FC ) is a term that many prefer to interchange with Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), a practice that is supposed to be followed by some tribes in Africa. Female circumcision was an unheard thing in the Indian sub-continent till some years back.In fact, we do see a trend in the Bohra community of people wanting to give up the practice on future generations of girls.“It was really quick,” she says, speaking rapidly with a slight Texan twang. After that, she remembers screaming as one of the women made an incision on her clitoris, using nothing to numb the pain.The wording of the question also infers that all Dawoodi Bohra women have undergone khatna/khafz, which, from anecdotal reports and previous research on FGC in the Bohra community, we recognize is not the case. Young girls are still being taken to midwives and to doctors in Bohra-run hospitals.Soon after, Mirza entered the room, which had a narrow bed covered with a plastic sheet, she says, “like what you would see inside a doctor’s office.” As she laid down, she says two older women on either side of her held down her arms and legs while another woman removed her underwear.
I was like, ‘What is going on? What is this?’”For most of her life, Mirza had kept quiet. The United Nations and the World Health Organization consider FGM a human rights violation, defined as “all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.” Depending on the severity of the procedure, it can have serious health consequences, sometimes causing life-long pain.“It was really painful. Traditional practice of female circumcision with invasive forms of FGM.It was not until years later that Mirza recognized what she had experienced as female genital mutilation (referred to more colloquially as “genital cutting”), a ritual practice known as “FGM” that hails from various countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The current debates on the Dawoodi Bohra tradition of Female Genital Cutting. For much of her life, she says, it left her embarrassed, confused, and afraid of sexual contact. While the soreness and confusion of the next few days remain a blur, Mirza lives with the resulting scar to this day. In the end, though, the ruling was not in their favor. But until these arrests in Michigan, the law had never been tested, and its enforcement was minimal.Like other FGM survivors, Mirza said she was glad the Michigan case brought awareness to the fact that genital mutilation does happen in the U.S. In 1996, and in 2013, the Obama administration outlawed taking a girl overseas for the procedure. “I knew that nobody, not many people at all, are going to speak out about this,” she told VICE recently.Female genital mutilation was criminalized in the U.S. But in June 2017, months after two Detroit-area doctors and an office manager were charged with performing FGM on up to nine girls, Mirza spoke out publicly for the first time. On April 21, 2017, agents stormed Burhani Medical Clinic and arrested Dr. That made it all the more surprising when the first FGM case of its kind sprouted from the small Michigan city of Livonia, a tidy commuter town with the city motto “families first.” Just 97,000 people live there, 91 percent of them white.There, outside of Burhani Medical Clinic, a one-story office on an otherwise unremarkable stretch of suburbia, the FBI secretly planted a camera after receiving a tip that something was amiss, according to court documents. The best way to end a practice quietly enacted by mothers against their own children? Like male circumcision, should a version of FGM fall under religious freedom? And would a regulated, medicalized form of the practice actually be harmless?Secrecy around genital mutilation in America means that there is little data about the practice, and even fewer related arrests. His move launched it into an ongoing constitutional battle between the House of Representatives and the Trump administration.Caught in a political tug of war, for the community involved, the case has resurrected some controversial questions: Is a blanket ban on FGM in the U.S. All of the defendants, like Mirza, belonged to the Dawoodi Bohra community, a small Shiite Muslim sect whose traditional home is in western India.At the time, an FGM conviction carried up to a five-year prison sentence in the U.S. Four mothers who allegedly brought their daughters to Nagarwala for the procedure were also charged with violating the FGM law. She would spend almost seven months in jail, post a $4.5 million unsecured bond (believed to be the largest in Detroit’s history), and live under house arrest for 14 months. Two of the procedures took place in the couple’s clinic, prosecutors said.Nine days earlier, Nagarwala, a Washington, D.C.-born emergency physician, was stopped as she boarded a flight to Kenya. The couple was charged with helping Jumana Nagarwala, a Detroit-area doctor who allegedly performed FGM on up to nine girls over a three-year period. On his advisement, the FGM charges against Nagarwala, the Attars, and five others involved were dropped. Years later, the Supreme Court started to curb the government’s ability to draft such laws, as it did in 2000 when it ruled that violence against women was not an economic activity.“Once again, the House is called upon to defend the constitutionality of a duly enacted law and to protect people’s lives.”Citing that case, Friedman ruled that Congress had “overstepped its bounds” by regulating FGM. That was the case for the law prohibiting FGM. In the 1990’s, Congress had sometimes leaned liberally and categorized certain activities as “interstate commerce” in order to count them among federal crimes. ![]() A similar study from 2015 conducted by WeSpeakOut, a Bohra anti-FGM organization in India, said 75 percent of its participants had reported that their daughters, aged seven or below, had had their genitals cut. Today, they live in 450 communities spread across some 40 countries, according to Jonah Blank, author of Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity Among the Daudi Bohras.In 2017, a study published by Sahiyo, an anti-FGM advocacy group in the U.S., found that 80 percent of the nearly 400 Bohra women surveyed around the world had experienced genital cutting. The Dawoodi Bohras, thought to number between 1 and 2 million people, are just one of many ethnic and religious groups who perform FGM rituals. The group advocates for the right to practice female genital cutting in India, where no law against the practice exists but women’s rights groups have long fought for it to be outlawed.“My religious authorities said is a good thing to do health and spirituality. “Ours is the only community that talks about practices in one breath and has no gender bias at all,” Kanchwala told me. On boys, khatna is similar to the common, medicalized procedure of circumcision practiced by Jews.Some Bohras, like Samina Kanchwala, from the Mumbai-based group Dawoodi Bohra Women for Religious Freedom, view this interpretation as an example of the faith’s commitment to gender equality. For both boys and girls, Bohras claim khatna is performed for health and cleanliness reasons, although the World Health Organization maintains that there are no health benefits from any form of female genital cutting. Whenever circumcision is referred to in the Quran and the hadiths (the collection of the prophet’s sayings), he said, the clergy says it applies to both genders. ![]()
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