French Fight Female Genital Mutilation

I don't know why this issue is coming up today, but here's my second post on genital mutilation. This from NPR.

Recalling Brutality
Women activists in France have led the campaign in prosecuting those responsible for excisions performed on young girls, and the United Nations now considers the practice a human rights abuse.

Diallo was mutilated when she was 14, and the brutality of the practice is etched in her memory. "I was mutilated against my parents' will," she says. "It was during the summer visiting my father's family in a village near the capital Bamako. In Mali, it's the father's relatives who decide everything in the family."Diallo describes how several women held her down as one of them inflicted excruciating pain.

Supporters of female genital mutilation say it dampens a girl's sexuality and protects her honor.

Diallo says she can't even begin to list the psychological traumas she has since suffered. "They cut off my sex. It was as if they cut off my finger. They took away a piece of me," she says. "They imposed customs of a society where it's not permissible for a 14 -year-old girl to remain intact."