Dalya, an eighteen-year-old student from Halabja, was cut by her neighbor. “I remember that there was a lot of blood and a large fear,” she told me. “This has consequences now during my period. I have emotional and physical pain and fear from the time when I saw the blood. I don’t even go to school when I have my periods because there’s too much pain. … My family supports me but sometimes I feel like killing myself because of the [menstrual] pain.”

Dalya told me that she is to this day still fearful of her neighbor. Her mother never wants to discuss this with her. “When she sees me this way, my mother feels regret because she circumcised me,” Dalya told me.

Dalya’s story represents the experiences of countless young girls and women whose families still force them to undergo female genital mutilation (FGM), an unnecessary procedure that is harmful to their health in many ways. To me, one of the most astonishing aspects of my research in Iraqi Kurdistan on this subject was the vivid detail with which adult women described their pain and trauma years and even decades after being subjected to FGM. The more I listened to them, the more it became clear how confused they still were about the reasons for this practice.

In 2009, I met seventeen-year-old Gola in Sarkapkan, a small village in the rural area of Ranya in Iraqi Kurdistan. Dressed in a long blue gown, Gola came to a neighbor’s house with her mother and younger sisters to speak to me. Before meeting her, I believed that women would have a difficult time speaking frankly about female genital mutilation, especially because of Iraqi Kurdistan’s socially conservative culture. But much to my surprise, Gola was confident and adamant about sharing her experience with this painful procedure as a young girl.

Gola told me, “I remember my mom and her sister-in-law took us two girls, and there were four other girls. We went to Sarkapkan for the procedure. They put us in the bathroom and held our legs open, and cut something. They did it one by one with no anesthetics. I was afraid but endured the pain. There was nothing they did for us to soothe the pain.