Arizona Republic newspaper. Tuesday, 12 January 1993.
Arizona Republic newspaper. Tuesday, 12 January 1993.
According to the customs of her African ancestors, Teneng Jahate was merely a dutiful mother. But a French court, in a landmark judgement, sentenced her to prison last week for arranging the circumcision of her two eldest daughters.
Jahate, a Gambian living in France since 1983, was sentenced to one year in prison, plus a four-year suspended term, for hiring a midwife to circumcise the girls in 1987, when they were 1 and 2.
The procedure entails slicing off the clitoris and surrounding tissue, and is performed without anesthesia. Critics call it genital mutilation and a way for men to curb a woman's sexual pleasure. French law classifies it as a form of child abuse so severe that it could draw a maximum life sentence.
The sentence was a milestone in France's battle to stop the practice among its large African immigrant population.
Female circumcision is practiced widely in countries such as Somalia, Mali, Senegal, Sudan and Ivory Coast.
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