Mrs. Goundo’s Daughter is a documentary created by local filmmaking team Barbara Attie and Janet Goldwater.
The film chronicles the plight of West Philadelphia resident Mrs. Goundo, an expatriate of Mali and one of Philly’s 50,000 African immigrants. In the film, Goundo seeks asylum on the grounds that if she is deported her 2-year-old daughter Djenebou will be subject to a crude procedure called female genital mutilation (FGM).
In FGM, parts of babies or young girls’ genitals are sliced off. There is zero medical benefit. Severity ranges from cutting the tip of the clitoris to carving off everything external and sewing the vaginal opening almost completely closed. It’s done with bottles, knives or razors and without anesthesia. In Mali, about 85 percent of all girls undergo FGM. The motivation is to cut girls’ sexual desire, preserve virginity and make her less likely to cheat on a husband later on.
Mrs. Goundo’s Daughter brings home the fact that FGM doesn’t just affect other people in faraway lands. Djenebou, born here, is an American citizen. She lives in Philly. She’ll go to school with our kids. Only a toddler when the film was shot, she’s a pudgy tumble of cuteness in a hot-pink butterfly shirt. The thought of anyone taking a knife to this grinning baby is almost too much to bear.
The film jumps between Philly and Mali. In Mali, women wrapped in brightly patterned dresses and scarves walk with dozens of children. White string is loosely knotted around kids’ necks and waists to ward off evil spirits. But the smiling faces of their elders are the real danger. In a few minutes the kids, all girls, will be held down while a woman slices into their little bodies. Filmmakers are shooed away right before the actual procedure. The camera’s eye pans across the pained fear on the girls’ faces as they wait.
Back in a Philadelphia courthouse, Mrs. Goundo testifies that she would not be able to protect little Djenebou from this fate if they are deported to Mali. She explains that even if a girl’s mother is against FGM, extended family will hijack the girl, do it anyway and blame God’s will.
For years, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Children’s Fund, United Nations Population Fund and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) have all issued statements denouncing FGM in all its forms. In the United States, as with most of the Western world, any form of FGM is illegal and constitutes child abuse.
Now that might change.
On April 26, the AAP released a controversial statement advocating the legalization of a light form of FGM they call a “ritual nick.”
The justification the AAP is offering is that a sanitized version in a clinical setting will protect girls who would otherwise be sent back to their respective homelands to endure a far more brutal version. The statement reads: “These physicians emphasize the significance of a ceremonial ritual in the initiation of the girl or adolescent as a community member and advocate only pricking or incising the clitoral skin as sufficient to satisfy cultural requirements. This is no more of an alteration than ear piercing.”