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The lawmakers in Connecticut are considering legislation that would ban female genital mutilation.
The General Assembly’s Public Health Committee heard testimony on Monday on one of the various bills proposed this session prohibiting the procedure called female circumcision or cutting.
According to advocates, 28 states have enacted laws to combat it, and Connecticut needs to join them.
At least two dozen African countries and parts of the Middle East and Asia practice mutilation of girls’ external genital organs for non-medical reasons. It also affects many refugee and communities in the United States and Europe.
“This barbaric practice, which operates mainly in secrecy, must be stopped,” said Dorothy Cutter, a resident of Somers who testified at the public hearing. She called on members of the committee to pass a bill with strict penalties that prohibit transporting girls across the state border to carry through what she called “child abuse at its worst”.
Advocates warned after the judge’s ruling in Michigan that states like Connecticut, without laws on the books, could now become “destination states” for the practice.
The legislation was proposed earlier this year in Connecticut to make the practice a class D crime, guilty by up to five years imprisonment. That bill, however, didn’t move beyond a committee vote.
A large number of interest groups submitted testimony in support to Connecticut’s legislation this year. But in testimony submitted by Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, Susan Yolen, vice president of public policy and advocacy, warned it’s “hard to know” if female genital mutilation is being practiced at all in Connecticut.
She said creating a criminal penalty for those accountable could be a “difficult if not impossible burden for a young girl to bear”.
While Conceived Parentage goes against the practice, Yolen said the organization also recognizes the “unique challenges faced by immigrant women” and believes criminalizing the ritual “may only further isolate those who, now that they are in the U.S., can and should become more fully integrated into our way of live”.
She urged Connecticut lawmakers to consider “a different approach to the issue” and as an alternative enlist public health students or professionals to study the practice in Connecticut and identify “public health interventions” that could be used to mitigate or eliminate the procedure.
-Sowmya Sangam
