Edi wrote:If there is reasonable cause to suspect the parents are taking them out of the country for FGM (and there always is with these immigrants), preventing them from doing so is not trampling on their rights, but protecting those of the child. I'd support automatic loss of custody of non-mutilated girls for any family who is known to have had a single child mutilated like that.
So... if you have a refugee family from, say Somalia that arrives with a mother who has been subjected to FGM and a 16 year old daughter (who might even be married with children of her own) who has also had FGM you will automatically remove custody of all other female children from the family upon their arrival In Finland? And all subsequent female children upon their birth?
If the law does not allow for these things, it should be changed. I take a very dim view of racism and bigotry, but there are certain cultural practices (like FGM) that are so indefensible that I'm liable to punch anyone defending them in the face and telling them to go fuck themselves.
I'm not defending the practice, far from it, but I actually have done a little research into it and these practices do not occur in a vacuum. There are places in the world where a woman who has NOT had FGM will automatically be assumed to be a whore and could be executed for the "crime" of having normal genitals. That's the context some of these families are coming from. So, you have people from a culture where no one has seen what a
normal adult female crotch looks like, and where possessing one can get you killed. You're asking the family to let their daughters develop what looks like, to them, a monstrous and deformed crotch area AND making it impossible for those girls/women to ever safely go back and visit the old country or relatives there AND sharply limiting their marriage prospects among their own ethnic group where the males are all conditioned to view a mutilated crotch as normal and view an unmutilated one as monstrous. Now, I completely agree that's a horrific state of affairs and we should be an end to those circumstances if we can, but having a kneejerk reaction and depriving immigrants of half their children is likely to have some bad consequences.
As noted, the parents will seek underground cutters in their new home country if they can't go back to the old one. Hell, in the old country you have grandmothers using broken bottles and razor blades to do this "surgery", so maybe you'll have to prevent granny from ever being along with the daughters in the kitchen. If you summarily take away all the girl children, though, you'll
really piss off the parents because, you know, people get so goddamned cranky when you steal their kids - and that is how it will be perceived.
I suppose you could just ban those ethnicities from immigrating but then you'll guarantee those girls will be mutilated back in their home countries. While they're still at risk they are at less risk living in Europe.
Crap.
