Young girls in Minnesota are suffering irreversible harm in silence, even though state law has called the act a felony for more than thirty years. Female genital mutilation—cutting or removing parts of a girl’s external genitalia for cultural reasons—continues inside tight-knit Somali immigrant families, shielded by shame, family pressure, and official reluctance to look too closely. Despite a documented survivor population in the state and a national estimate exceeding half a million affected women and girls, Minnesota prosecutors have secured zero convictions.
Zahra Abdalla still carries the memory of the day it happened to her. Between the ages of six and seven, in a Kenyan refugee camp, adult women from her community pinned her down without anesthesia and used a razor blade.
“They tied my hands and my legs,” she recalled. “I remember being held down. I remember the pain—and knowing I could not escape.” She fought back hard enough to interrupt the procedure before it was finished, but the damage was done. The wound was washed with salt water. Years later, as a grown woman in Minnesota, Abdalla needed surgery, endured multiple miscarriages, and faced excruciating difficulties with intimacy. Today she leads the Somaliweyn Relief Agency, determined to break the code of silence that protects the practice.
Abdalla makes clear that the custom is not abstract. In the communities where it thrives, families view it as essential for a girl’s marriage prospects and social value. “It’s tied to dowry. It’s tied to marriage,” she said. “It’s tied to what men expect.” Girls who resist risk being seen as damaged goods. The pressure is so intense that some families reportedly fly daughters back to Somalia or neighboring countries during school breaks to have the procedure performed out of sight of American authorities.
The numbers explain why Minnesota sits at the center of this American failure. Somalia reports a 98 percent prevalence rate among women and girls ages 15 to 49, according to United Nations figures. Minnesota is home to the largest Somali population in the United States, and federal estimates from more than a decade ago already placed tens of thousands of women and girls here at risk or already cut.
A CDC-supported study between 2019 and 2021 identified Minneapolis as one of four U.S. metro areas with a significant survivor population. Yet the Minnesota Department of Health does not track specific FGM cases, and no state agency publishes enforcement data.
Survivors and advocates describe the same wall of secrecy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born author and founder of the AHA Foundation who underwent the procedure herself as a child, does not soften the truth.
“Female genital mutilation is violence against the most vulnerable—children,” she stated. “It causes infection, incontinence, unbearable pain during childbirth and deep physical and emotional scars that never heal. Religious or cultural practices that deliberately and cruelly harm children must be confronted. No tradition can ever justify torture.” She survived. She refuses to let the next generation endure the same.
Minnesota first banned the practice in 1994, making it a felony with no parental-consent defense. Congress later strengthened federal law, with President Donald Trump signing expansions in 2018 and the Stop FGM Act in 2021 to cover interstate and international travel. A 2017 federal case in Michigan involved two Minnesota girls allegedly taken across state lines for the procedure, but that prosecution collapsed on jurisdictional grounds before the statute was fixed. In Minnesota itself, court records, licensing boards, and county attorneys show a perfect record of inaction: not one documented prosecution in thirty-two years.
State Representative Mary Franson, a Republican who has pushed FGM legislation since 2017, points to the obvious problem.
“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,” she said.
The current legislative session features a bipartisan bill to create a task force on prevention, authored chiefly by Democratic Representative Huldah Momanyi-Hiltsley of Kenyan heritage and co-sponsored by Franson and several Somali-American and other Democratic lawmakers. Franson has faced accusations of racism for her involvement, the same dynamic that stalled her earlier efforts to treat FGM explicitly as child abuse. The pattern is familiar: Minnesota authorities have hesitated before when cultural sensitivity collided with evidence of large-scale wrongdoing, whether in welfare fraud or daycare scandals.
The consequence is simple and brutal. Girls who should be protected by American law instead learn early that some traditions are allowed to operate outside it. Medical professionals encounter survivors in clinics but report nothing that leads to charges. Families weigh silence against ostracism. And the state that prides itself on progressive values refuses to enforce the one law that would shield its most defenseless residents from ritualized violence.
Survivors like Zahra Abdalla and Ayaan Hirsi Ali have already done the hardest part: they spoke. The rest is on lawmakers, prosecutors, and the public. A task force may study the problem. Real accountability demands arrests, convictions, and the clear message that no community’s customs override the right of a child to grow up whole. Until that line is drawn and defended without apology, Minnesota’s felony statute will remain little more than words on paper while girls continue to pay the price in blood and silence.
Samara Sterling
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 