It Doesn't Get Easier

i read it in the metro paper
i read it in am new york
i read it on the beeb
i saw it on cnn

every time, my stomach turned and my lady bits shrank into my body.

scissors? seriously? to a two year-old? and not just a random one on the street... uh-uh. your daughter. with a pair of scissors, you cut off her clitoris. and she was two! i guess you felt you needed to nip things in the bud before the boys came a knocking... anything to keep your daughter good and pure i suppose.

and that must have been one advanced and totally silent 2 year old girl. her mother did not notice anything was wrong for two years. she didn't notice her daughter walking kinda funny for a bit? she didn't think something was amiss when she gave her baby a bath? the first days the baby girl did not scream bloody murder whenever anything came near her "private part"?

the khalid adem, the father, was weeping on the stand and denying he did it. who knows, maybe the little girl grabbed the scissors and did it herself - you know how crazy an unsupervised two year-old can get. one moment she is running around chasing butterflies the next she is grabbing a pair of super-sharp scissors and just cutting anything she can get her hands on - hair, paper, clitoris. crazy kids!

so he has been sentenced to 10 years in prison in this groundbreaking first genital mutilation case to be tried in america. i was thinking giving his daughter a pair of rusty blunt scissors (don't want her hurting herself now) and letting her play to her heart's content. i'm sure she knows how to use a pair of scissors by now. there must be something she gets from her dad.