Minnesota Somalis Hide Female Genital Mutilation and Get Away With It in US

Focus on Minnesota found a state lawmaker and survivors of a “hidden” brutality raising concerns as neither prosecutions nor sanctions could be linked to a felony impacting women and girls.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) may have taken himself out of the running to maintain his executive seat amid sweeping, unchecked, multibillion-dollar fraud schemes, but that wasn’t the only crime in his state where accountability appears to be lacking. Home to the largest Somali population in America, among which United Nations data contends roughly 98% of females have been the victim of genital mutilation, a records review by Fox News Digital failed to pin down any prosecutions.

“It’s hidden — it’s a cultural practice, and who is doing the cutting could be a family member or a doctor who is also in that same culture,” Minnesota state Rep. Mary Franson (R) told the outlet more than three decades after the procedure that cuts, piercess, removes or sews closed parts or all of the female’s external genitals was made a felony in her state.

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“Only legal accountability can help reduce that risk. I survived female genital mutilation, and I carry its scars with me. But I refuse to accept that another girl in America must endure what I did in Somalia,” she added as she repeatedly called on President Donald Trump to issue an executive order to strengthen enforcement of the Stop FGM Act of 2020 that he’d signed prior to the end of his first administration.

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Believing some families take girls back to Somalia to have the procedure on school breaks, she noted some Somali men won’t marry women if they haven’t undergone the procedure, “It’s tied to dowry. It’s tied to marriage. It’s tied to what men expect. Families believe it protects a girl’s value.”

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