Asylum

Fauziya Kassindja arrived at the U.S. border on December 17, 1994, and presented herself to customs officials. The 17-year-old from Togo asked for asylum. She was fleeing her country, she said, to avoid those who wanted "to scrape my woman parts off."¹

What terrorized Kassindja was female genital mutilation (FGM), or, euphemistically, female circumcision. This traditional rite of puberty is performed widely in central and northern Africa and involves a clitoridectomy (the excision of the clitoris), which deprives a woman of all or most sexual sensation. Sometimes, more drastically, FGM extends to infibulation, the cutting away of all of a female's external genitalia and labial tissue. The UN estimates that as many as 130 million girls and women in the world today have suffered FGM and that each year another 2 million girls are subjected to the knife, shears, or razor blade. The practice is extremely painful. A woman who performs the rite in Togo explains that "young, weak girls are held down by four women. Stronger ones require five women, one to sit on their chests and one for each arm and leg."²

Aside from the psychic scars, FGM can be dangerous when carried out, as it usually is, by people who are not medically trained and who operate in unsanitary conditions. Infections and other complications are common; death can result. When a journalist asked the patriarch (senior male) of the Kassindja family in Togo about the danger, he conceded that "there are some girls who die." Still, he insisted, "To me it is not the excision that caused the death." When the reporter asked him what did cause the death, he merely shrugged.³

Supporters defend FGM on two grounds. One is tradition. "Since our forefathers' time, this is the law," a village elder said.⁴ The second rationale is that it supposedly ensures chaste behavior by girls and women. "Am I supposed to stand around while my daughter chases men?" one African father asked incredulously. "So what if some infidel doctor says it is unhealthy?" he went on. "Banning it would make women run wild like those in America," added another man to reporters.⁵

It should be noted that some women favor FGM. "During the ceremony they find out if you are a virgin," one Togolese woman explained. "If you are a virgin the man will pay more dowry and your family will be honored by the husband." Other women are merely resigned to their fate and that of their daughters. "I have to do what my husband says," one woman commented. "It is not for women to give an order...I remember my suffering. But I cannot prevent it for my daughter."⁶

Shielded by her family, Kassindja was able for a time to avoid the rite. But then, at age 17, she was betrothed to a 45-year-old man. He demanded that she undergo a clitoridectomy. Rather than face mutilation, Kassindja fled from Togo to Ghana, and through a circuitous route, she eventually tried to enter the United States, where she had a relative. There she was initially treated as a criminal, and was subjected to treatment that must have made her wonder whether her flight had been from one purgatory to another. "What I hate is when they put 20 or 30 people in a room," Kassindja has recalled. "They strip all of us together. They tell us to turn around, open your legs, squat. They stand looking at you. Sometimes they laugh."⁷

Kassindja's plight gained increasing attention of the national press, however, and in April 1996, she was released after nearly 16 months in prison to await the resolution of her appeal for asylum. The following year, a U.S. court finally granted asylum to Kassindja on the grounds that immigration law allows asylum for those who can show that they have a well-founded fear of persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinions, or membership in a social group. The court found that Kassindja's membership in the Tchamba-Kunsuntu tribe, as a social group, made her subject to persecution. In support, the court quoted an Immigration and Naturalization Service report that commented, "It remains particularly true that women have little legal recourse and may face threats to their freedom, threats of acts of physical violence, or social ostracization for refusing to undergo this harmful traditional practice."⁸

While Kassindja left the courtroom a free and whole woman, other women have not been and will not be so fortunate. Reportedly, the girls in Kassindja's home village are now being cut at age 4 to 7 instead of 14 or 15. The reason for that change, a male village elder explained, is, "We don't want to let them grow up before we do it because they can run away."⁹

The larger implication of Kassindja's refusal to submit is that it highlights and symbolizes the determination of many people to eradicate the practice of FGM. About a third of the countries where FGM is performed have made it illegal, but these laws have only begun to reduce the incidence of FGM. Some advances have been by individual countries. The ability to seek refuge is clear in Canada, which, like a few other countries, has enacted a law that makes FGM and other acts of gender abuse grounds for asylum. The U.S. court decision in Kassindja's case should have made it easier for other women to claim asylum, but that has not occurred. For example, Adelaide Abankwah, who fled from Ghana to escape FGM, spent two years in a U.S. jail before she was finally granted asylum in 1999.

There is also a determined international effort to end FGM by such global organizations as the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the World Health Organization. Perhaps most prominently, this campaign is represented by Waris Dirie, a women's rights activist, fashion model, and victim of FGM at age 5. One of her contributions has been to publicize her ordeal in an effort to educate others about FGM. Dirie's (1998) story, Desert Flower, was published as a book and excerpted in Reader's Digest. She also serves as special ambassador for the elimination of female genital mutilation of the United Nations Population Fund. Ambassador Dirie, a native of Somalia, lived through her ordeal, but a sister and several of her cousins did not. Then at age 13, betrothed to a 60-year-old man and facing even more radical FGM, Dirie fled, as Kassindja had, to safety in another country. "Because women and girls are not valued equally as human beings, they are treated as less than such," Dirie charges. "Female genital mutilation is one example of this that has got to be stopped."¹⁰

Notes

1. New York Times, April 15, 1996.

2. New York Times, September 11, 1996, p. B7.

3. New York Times, September 11, 1996, p. B7

4. New York Times, September 11, 1996, p. B7.

5. New York Times, August 8, 1996, p. A3.

6. Both quotes are from the New York Times, September 11, 1996, p. B7.

7. New York Times, April 15, 1996, p. A1.

8. New York Times, June 14, 1996, p. A1.

9. New York Times, September 11, 1996, p. B7.

10. UNFPA press release, September 18, 1997, on the UNFPA Web site at: http://www.unfpa.org/news/pressroom/1997/dirie.htm.