Children's Genitals Under The Knife, Social Imperatives, Secrecy, And Shame, By Hanny Lightfoot-Klein.

The object of this book is to give voice to the multitudes of human beings who exist behind the statistics on genital surgery performed on them when they were non-consenting children, and who have long endured their suffering in silence, for reasons of suppression, desperation, or shame. I have endeavored to create an understanding of the connection between genital surgery perpetrated on infants and children too young to be capable of meaningful consent or effective protest, and of the frequently cataclysmic diminution in quality of life that they have suffered as a consequence.
 

To anyone not totally steeped in denial, or tyrannized by social custom, as most people in genitally mutilating societies certainly tend to be, whether we are talking about female genital cutting, inter-sex surgery or male foreskin ablation, it should be perfectly obvious that genital cutting of any sort is the kind of nightmarish event that makes the most cruel reality of a child's ultimate fears.

The Rape of Innocence: female genital mutilation and circumcision in the USA, By Patricia Robinett

Genital mutilation in the USA has been a well-kept secret. "The Rape of Innocence" is an autobiographical account of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant woman who discovered she had been the victim of clitoridectomy as a child in Kansas in the 1950s. The author is a therapist who deals with trauma. In her work, she has met many other American women and men who were genitally mutilated as children and adults. Could you -- or someone you love -- have been cut too? This book may explain the U.S. epidemic of sexual dysfunction, anger, anxiety, depression -- unresolved psychological trauma from circumcision. Now that the word is out, the healing can begin.

An interview published in Anthropology Today, Volume 25, Issue 6 (p 14-17). DOI 10.1111/j.1467-8322.2009.00699.x  Fuambai S. Ahmadu is both a professional anthropologist and an initiated member of the Bondo society of Sierra Leone. She said that she is confident that she gets all the satisfaction of anyone when she makes love. "According to her [Hanny Lightfoot-Klein, the author of Prisoners of ritual] five-year research, 94% of circumcised women reported sexual satisfaction and orgasm and many said they had sex three or four times a week."

Study published in Journal of Sexual Medicine, Vol. 4, Issue 6, pp. 1666-78 (Oct. 23, 2007). The study found that significant percentages of women still experience orgasms after genital mutilation.

Results. The group of 137 women, affected by different types of FGM/C, reported orgasm in almost 86%, always 69.23%; 58 mutilated young women reported orgasm in 91.43%, always 8.57%; after defibulation 14 out of 15 infibulated women reported orgasm; the group of 57 infibulated women investigated with the FSFI questionnaire showed significant differences between group of study and an equivalent group of control in desire, arousal, orgasm, and satisfaction with mean scores higher in the group of mutilated women. No significant differences were observed between the two groups in lubrication and pain.

Study published in American Journal of Epidemiology, Vol. 136, No. 7: 895-907 (1992). The authors found that "a history of excision and BCG vaccinations decreased the risk of HIV-2 infection." That is, women who had undergone female genital cutting had reduced risk of HIV infection.

NOTE: The Patriotic Vanguard website is off-line. The Wayback Machine has a copy of Statement by African Women Are Free to Choose (AWA-FC), Washington DC, USA. Other copies can be found on the net by searching for "Statement by African Women Are Free to Choose."

A statement by African Women Are Free to Choose (AWA-FC) published in The Patriotic Vanguard on February 20, 2009. Western culture abhors female genital mutilation (FGM) or female circumcision (FC), although the culture accepts and endorses male genital mutatilation (MGM), commonly called male circumcision. The African Women Are Free to Choose organization asks Westerners to leave their female cutting culture alone. The AWA-FC claim that female circumcision is not mutilation.

An article published in the Duke Law Journal, 47 Duke L.J. 717 (February 1999). The article discusses the attempt by a Seattle, Washington, hospital to perform a symbolic sunna (female circumcision) on the daughters of Somali immigrants. The Somalis threatened to have a traditional circumcision performed on the girls if the hospital did not do something.