Half a million girls in immigrant/refugee households in US at risk for genital mutilation
The number has jumped dramatically as Muslim refugees have entered the US from Somalia, Ethiopia and to a lesser degree Egypt. The horrific practice has been illegal in the US for nearly 20 years!
This map is incredible since it almost state-for-state matches the highest refugee resettlement states in the US!
From the Los Angeles Times... Emphasis is mine:
Nearly 507,000 women and girls in the United States could be at risk of female genital excision, including 57,000 in California, a new study has found.
That is more than twice the number that were thought to be at risk in 2000, the last year for which estimates are available.
Analysts at the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit research organization in Washington, attributed the preliminary findings released Friday to an increase in immigration [REFUGEES—ed] from countries where the practice is common, including Egypt, Ethiopia and Somalia.
It is unclear how many families continue the practice after moving to the U.S., but community activists say there is anecdotal evidence of girls being sent back to their parents’ home countries for “vacation cutting” and of traditional cutters traveling to the U.S. to circumcise girls in this country.
To estimate the number who may have undergone the procedure or be at risk, the research group used data collected by the Census Bureau for the 2013 American Community Survey to determine the number of women and girls whose families originate in countries where female genital excision is practiced. It then applied the prevalence rates in those countries to the numbers in the U.S.
The methodology is similar to that used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a study that found about 168,000 women and girls were at risk of genital excision in the U.S. in 1990, said Mark Mather, the group’s associate vice president for U.S. programs.[….]
California is the state with the highest at-risk population, followed by New York (48,000) and Minnesota (44,000), the Population Reference Bureau found. [We know that Minnesota has the highest Somali population in the US—ed]
[Article originally published February 6, 2015]