Religion said to be key to combating female genital mutilation
The one thing that Afrah Farah will tell you about her genital cutting experience is that it happened. She doesn’t want to say how old she was, where it happened or who was or wasn’t with her.
Yet despite the painful memories that the experience evokes and her concerns about people’s reactions, Farah said she knows she has to speak out.
“It’s basically a traumatizing experience. It’s traumatizing for every young girl who goes through that. It’s something that sticks in your memory” said Farah, a Somali immigrant who came to the Boston area by way of Kuwait and Germany in 2007 and now works as a drug developer in a Massachusetts laboratory.
