Area Immigrants With Wounds That Won't Heal

"The grown-ups held me down," says Eliza, who was sexually mutilated when she was a girl in keeping with tradition in her native Senegal. Eliza is seeking safe haven for herself and her daughters in the United States. (By Lois Raimondo -- The Washington Post)
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Back home, her grandmother was a village elder in charge of coming-of-age ceremonies for girls. When Eliza's mother was old enough, the grandmother planned the celebratory rite that would make her presentable for marriage. She gathered the trusted relatives who held the girl down. Then she took a razor blade and mutilated her daughter.

Eliza's mother fled her native land long ago. Despite the powerful bonds of culture and family, she says she grew up with an awareness that was different from other girls in her tribe and felt cheated by what had been done to her. She obtained some education and eventually fled with her father to the United States. Several years ago, she was granted asylum on the grounds of female genital mutilation. She lives in Virginia and says she is determined to help prevent more girls from being cut.

But despite her convictions, Eliza's mother can not bear to have anyone know it happened to her. Even after 40 years, when she tries to describe that day and the painful inner conflicts it unleashed, she breaks down in uncontrollable sobs.

"I love my mother, yet she did that to me." Her voice fails, and she tries again. "I know she thought it was the right thing to do. I know it came down from her mother's mothers. I know people are ignorant and need to be educated. I know she loved me. But it is not loving someone to cut them and make them bleed," she says. "I had to stand up and stop it, or it will go down to my daughters' daughters."

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Of the millions of rural African women who face circumcision, most submit and go on with their lives. Only a few, usually those with money and education, defy their tightknit cultures and flee to the anonymity of larger African cities or abroad. Even those who immigrate to the United States, however, remain largely silent, accepting of tradition and enveloped in conservative emigre microcosms.

But a handful of women have sought protection from U.S. immigration courts since the law recognized female genital mutilation as grounds for asylum 12 years ago. Some circumcised women have won asylum by proving they feared further persecution; others have convinced judges that their daughters would face the same ordeal if forced to return to their native regions.

A year ago, two court rulings began to roll back those grounds, alarming women's rights activists. In the case of a woman from Mali, known as "Matter of A-T," the Board of Immigration Appeals found last October that because genital mutilation "generally is inflicted only once," that meant the victim "no longer has a well-founded fear of persecution" that would entitle her to be sheltered as a refugee.

In a second ruling, the board found that an illegal immigrant from Senegal was not entitled to asylum solely over concern that his U.S.-born daughters would be circumcised if they returned home with him. The court said the daughters could remain safely in the United States and that the pain of family separation was not enough to prevent his deportation.

Five weeks ago, the Attorney General's office ruled that the decision in "Matter of A-T" had been "flawed," and it ordered the board to reconsider the Malian woman's case. The order said genital mutilation is "only one aspect" of persecution that women in certain social groups can face, specifically including forced marriage.

"This is a very important development, because FGM is never a single act. It is part of a set of broader cultural practices that can affect women for life, especially in ways that restrict their personal freedom," said Layli Miller Muro, director of the Tahirih Justice Center in Falls Church, which helps abused immigrant women.

One African-born Tahirih client described how relatives accused her of bringing a curse on the family by refusing to circumcise her daughter, then tried to kidnap the girl and exorcize her to remove the curse. Another client said the day her husband died, his tribe planned to force her to marry his brother and circumcise her daughter. She said she barely escaped with help from relatives.

Even when such women obtain legal sanctuary in the United States, experts say they often feel isolated and depressed -- separated from the families and cultures that raised them, and unable to find confidantes in a new foreign society. Eliza and the other women interviewed also said they were fearful that their identities and whereabouts would become known, shaming them among African communities here and exposing them to pressure by persistent relatives to send their daughters back.

"At home, when you are to be circumcised, you are part of a system that honors and celebrates you. Here, when you get asylum, you are legally safe but alone. You have rejected what you are, and what do you replace it with?" said Zeinab Eyega, a Sudan-born activist who runs Sauti Yetu, a group in New York that offers mutilation victims a substitute for the social embrace that accompanied their circumcision. "We bring women together. We celebrate their birthdays and Mother's Day," she said. "Our message is: You are not alone."

Eliza and her mother participate in a women's group at the Tahirih center, where they can talk freely about their struggles. But both said they still feel uncomfortable revealing their stories, guilty and confused about the family ties and tribal beliefs they fled, and permanently damaged by their long-ago ordeal.

"It is not a scar. It is a wound that never goes away," Eliza's mother said. "I heard that the courts said once you are cut, then it is over and you are fine. But how can you be fine when what makes you a woman is missing? How can you be fine when you have a hole in your body and your soul?"