I came across this post about female genital mutilation. It's not for the faint-hearted, but it is something that we need to care about, I think.

The link is on Blogher under religion and spirituality: http://blogher.org/topic/religion-spirituality

I've been aware of this issue for years. Your comment was spot-on about this being one of many ways that women are taught to be complacent about abuse.

Unfortunately, when the abused are not educated about how abominable this is, they grow up thinking this is normal and become the abusers of the next generation.

Probably the most effective activists would be outspoken educated/health care women who cared, from those Muslim communities. Muslim female and male physicians and nurses in numbers, could pack a whallop in making change here.

Thanks for bringing up this topic, Casey. Educating women about what is "normal" and what practices, under the name of religion, are "normal and expected" seems to be the only way to bring this practice to a stop.

The woman's comment about pain and suffering being part of being a woman is frightening. That a woman should suffer so horrifically and then bring her own daughter to the same sort of pain and mutilation is such a foreign idea to me. But unless they know differently, what can we expect?

Didn't Martin Luther King say:

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance.

Very fitting quote Dotsie.

I've heard that the men don't insist on the mutulation..it's the women!

You have got to be kidding Hannelore...The Washington Times Newspaper did an exposee of sorts and delved deep into the culture and they found it was the male elders that forced this. They do it so the women get "NO PLEASURE" from the sex act. They think of and use and treat women as less than their animals over there. Oprah had a program on the same subject and some of the young women who had been able to escape said the same thing. They are forced and some even killed of they try to run away...It is barbaric and still practiced in secret today.

It was practised in the UK in some immigrant communities until legislation against FGM was passed. It is barbaric, with immense complications to health. Fistula being one of them.

I know several women who have had this done to them after their first period, at which time a great ceremony is held for the young girl and the thing is done. She is then initiated in the world of woman.

I became quite friendly with a mother of 7 children from Somalia who had this done to herself. She had big problems whenever she had her mens..as the blood could not flow out freely and clotted inside of her..She has big pain at childbirth eventho the stitches would be cut so that the baby could pass thru the vagina canal. And then she would again be sewed with everything in place. She didn´t want this for her child, she told me, and was not going to do it for her. In the end, her husband was reunited with this mother and she had her little girl was cut and sewed as well. In this case and in many others that I knew, it WAS the old grandmother who saw to it that these preceedures were done on the very young girls in their families.. because it brought dishonor on the old woman herself and the entire family, if this was not done...

humlan, it's so hard for me to read your post. I have goose flesh. What were your words to her when she spoke of this? I'm sure you had to be careful and choose your words wisely so not offend...