Was the Washington Post take on supposed FGM in Washington state really a national story?

It sounded like a horrendous story, with a Muslim couple wrongly accused of practicing female genital mutilation. Which is why I wanted to read it, especially since it was in my state, albeit an isolated corner on one of the beautiful –- and remote -- islands in Puget Sound.

But the more I read this story, the more I wondered if the reporter was being manipulated into creating a national narrative where none exists.

Before we start, remember that the locale of this story, the bucolic San Juan Island, has all of 6,822 residents. It’s not a large place and you can only get there by plane or (during the Covid era) by increasingly erratic ferries.

This Washington Post story notes that there are no nearby mosques, as if to make out the various islands in the San Juan de Fuca Strait as bastions of white Christian supremacy. Well, there aren’t any nearby synagogues or Hindu temples, either. There are scattered churches, an Orthodox monastery, a Catholic convent and several Buddhist retreat houses.

SAN JUAN ISLAND, Wash. — On the afternoon of July 28, the Homeland Security Investigations tip line received a call about a sensitive matter on an island off the coast of Washington state: “the suspected female genital mutilation of an infant by her Turkish mother.”
A babysitter on San Juan Island had seen what she considered an “abnormality” while changing the girl’s diaper, according to law enforcement reports. The sitter enlisted a friend to also inspect the child’s vagina, without the parents’ knowledge or consent. That friend then called the tip line, allegedly telling authorities she was acting on the sitter’s behalf.
The women, according to reports from the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office and U.S. Homeland Security, worried that the girl had undergone female genital mutilation, or FGM, an ancient ritual defined by the United Nations as the removal of external female genitalia for nonmedical reasons. FGM is a federal crime, and women’s advocates across the globe are campaigning to end the practice, which causes trauma and health complications.

I think I would use other words to describe FGM other than “ancient ritual.”

It's hard to imagine a topic that would be harder for journalists to write about than female genital mutilation (FGM).

In some parts of the world it is a procedure with deep cultural and even religious meaning. For others, it may be a way to keep young women attached to a tribe or a family structure that is truly patriarchal. Yet there are women who insist that it is an act that is totally necessary, if women are to be trusted, accepted and in any way empowered in certain cultures.

There is no question that there is a religious element to the FGM story, even though this rite "pre-dates both Christianity and Islam, and is commended in the core texts of neither faith," according to a disturbing, but fascinating, think piece at the website of The Media Project, the organization that supports GetReligion.

The author of this reported essay is journalist and media-literacy pro Jenny Taylor, best known was the founder of Lapido Media in England.

How high are the stakes in this ongoing crisis? Taylor notes:

As many as one-third of girls in areas of Sudan where there are no antibiotics will die, according to another report. The complications range from haemorrhage to tetanus, blocked urethras and infertility.

A key figure in the essay is anti-FGM activist 55-year-old Ann-Marie Wilson, the founder of 28TooMany. The name is a reference to number of countries that had not banned this rite, at the time Wilson began her work.

How old is this ritual? This first paragraph contains a detail that I had never heard before:

Wilson, a doctor of psychology and a midwife who trained in Pakistan, recently completed a paper on the origins of FGM, claiming that the mummies in the British Museum show clear signs of FGM.