Female Genital Mutilation: 4th Person Charged In Historic 1st Amendment Case

DETROIT, MI — A fourth person has been charged in the landmark female genital mutilation case in Michigan — a Northville woman, Tahera Shafiq, 48, who is accused of being at a Livonia clinic where at least three girls underwent the controversial, internationally condemned procedure. The federal court complaint charging Shafiq comes nearly two months after charges were filed against Dr. Jumana Nagarwala, 44, of Northville, and Dr. Fakhruddin Attar, 53, and his wife, Farida Attar, 50, of Farmington Hills.

All four are members of a small Muslim sect known as Dawoodi Bohra, where such procedures are a religious rite of passage. Their attorneys argue the procedure was benign and did not involve cutting and is constitutionally protected. Legal scholars suggest it will be a difficult defense, as U.S. courts have consistently ruled there are limits on First Amendment religious protections.

Though the current court case, the first test of a two-decade-old U.S. law criminalizing the procedure, alleges two 7-year-old Minnesota girls who traveled across state lines so Nagarwala could perform the procedure at the Attars’ Livonia clinic, as many as 100 girls may have undergone FGM, federal prosecutors have said. (For more local news, click here to sign up for real-time news alerts and newsletters from Detroit Patch, click here to find your local Michigan Patch. Also, follow us on Facebook, and if you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)

Federal prosecutors said Wednesday that Shafiq was in the room when the two Minnesota girls were cut on Feb. 3, The Detroit News reported. Shafiq was implicated in a three-way text message with Nagarwala and Fakhruddin Attar, prosecutors said.

One of the Minnesota girls at the center of the case told investigators that she thought she was taking a “special girls’ trip” and was told to keep it a secret. She said she felt “a little pinch” in the area “where we go pee” and that it “hurted a lot” the next day, according to court documents.

Defense attorneys say the procedure involved only the scraping of a membrane from the girls’ genitalia, which was then presented to their parents for burial. However, medical examinations showed evidence of stitches to close cuts, according to court documents.

FGM is a cultural ritual performed to curb girls’ and women’s sexual pleasure and reduce promiscuity. In the Detroit case, the defendants are Muslims, but one of the highest rates of FGM occurs in Ethiopia, which has a majority Christian population. The practice has been internationally condemned as a violation of human rights by the World Health Organization, UNICEF and the UN Population Fund, among other organizations. Serious health consequences can result, including chronic pain, infections, infertility, complications during childbirth and psychological problems.

Whether involving a minor nick, as defense attorneys argue, or the surgical cuts alleged by the government, legal scholars say the defense may take the case into new First Amendment territory. Courts have consistently ruled again Jehovah’s Witness and Christian Scientist families who have argued the First Amendment gives them the right to refuse medical care for their children.

“It is hard for me to imagine any court accepting the religious freedom defense given the harm that’s being dealt in this case,” First Amendment expert Erwin Chemerinsky, one of the nation's leading constitutional law scholars and dean of the law school at the University of California at Irvine, recently told the Detroit Free Press. “You don't have the right to impose harm on others in practicing your religion.”

Michigan currently doesn’t have a state statute against FGM, but bills moving through the Legislature would give the state one of the country’s toughest FGM laws. The federal law makes FGM a five-year felony, but Michigan lawmakers may make performing the procedure a 15-year felony.

Nagarwala and the Attars also face termination of their parental rights in court actions filed by Michigan Child Protective Services. In all, six petitions have been filed in Oakland and Wayne counties to remove children from Dawoodi Bohra homes.

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