Word: oluloro
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Dates: during 1994-1994
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...land to which Lydia Oluloro has been ordered to return, little girls are mutilated. It doesn't matter whether they are rich or poor, educated or illiterate. It can happen in their infancy or in their teens. The age varies among ethnic groups, as does the degree of pain. In some African countries, it is only a piece of the clitoris that is cut off. In others, the labia minora are sliced away. Natural protuberances are viewed as ugly, the unchaste accoutrements of prostitutes. Elsewhere, the entire outer genitalia are removed and the two sides of the vulva sutured together...
...case is at the center of a multifaceted controversy. Oluloro has, for one thing, asked for "cultural asylum," basing her claim to U.S. residency on her fear for her daughters' physical well-being. The State Department and human-rights activists are watching from the sidelines as an immigration judge prepares his decision, due March 23. It will not be an easy one. Oluloro's arguments are part of a messy battle she is waging with her ex-husband over the girls' custody, and the request for asylum could simply be a legal ploy...
Advocates for women in the U.S. want the Oluloro affair to be a test case. "Claims based on gender oppression have not been recognized as a basis for asylum," says Nancy Kelly, directing attorney of the Women's Refugee Project, a joint program of Harvard Law School and Cambridge and Somerville (Massachusetts) Legal Services. "Harm that is done to women is seen as a personal, private or cultural matter. Genital mutilation has not been seen as a type of harm." The feminist mainstream has been particularly galvanized by the highly personalized documentary film and book on female-genital mutilation, Warrior...
That is precisely what Oluloro believes. If she is deported and takes her U.S.-born daughters home, she says, her family will look askance at her American ways. "When I had a baby here, I called home, and my senior sister was asking if they'd circumcised her," recalls Oluloro, who underwent a clitoridectomy when she was five. "I said no, they don't do it in America here. It sounded so funny to her. She couldn't believe that. She said that if we come home, they are going to do it for her no matter what." Though Oluloro...