Minnesota made performing female genital mutilation a felony more than three decades ago. In all that time, the state has never secured a single criminal prosecution under the statute. Not one.

That's according to a Fox News Digital review that found neither the Minnesota Attorney General's Office nor any county prosecutors contacted could identify a single FGM case brought to trial.

The Minnesota Department of Health told Fox News Digital it doesn't even track specific data on the practice. A state with one of the largest Somali populations in the country criminalized the mutilation of young girls in 1994 and then, by all available evidence, never enforced the law.

A crime that leaves scars but no case files

The scope of the problem is not speculative. The CDC's most recent national analysis, published in 2016, estimated that more than half a million women and girls in the United States live with the physical and psychological aftermath of FGM. A CDC-supported Women's Health Needs Study conducted from 2019 to 2021 included Minneapolis as one of four U.S. metro areas documenting a significant survivor population. United Nations data estimates roughly 98% of women ages 15 to 49 in Somalia have undergone the procedure.

Zahra Abdalla knows what those numbers look like up close. The Minnesota-based Somali survivor and executive director of the nonprofit Somaliweyn Relief Agency told Fox News Digital she was between six and seven years old when it happened in a refugee camp in Kenya. She asked that her face be blurred.

"They tied my hands and my legs. I remember being held down. I remember the pain, and knowing I could not escape."

The cutting was performed without anesthesia, with a razor blade, by adult women. Abdalla said a disruption stopped the procedure before it was fully completed. The wound was later washed with salt water. The damage required surgery and, in her account, contributed to multiple miscarriages and severe complications with intercourse.

"That pain, I thought I was going to pass out."

Abdalla described FGM not as a fringe aberration but as a practice embedded in community expectations. "It's tied to dowry. It's tied to marriage," she said. "It's tied to what men expect. Families believe it protects a girl's value."

And silence protects the practice. "You don't talk about it," Abdalla said. "You're told to stay quiet."

A law that exists only on paper

Minnesota Republican state Rep. Mary Franson, who is co-sponsoring legislation this session to establish a task force on the prevention of FGM, explained why enforcement has proved so elusive:

"It's hidden, it's a cultural practice, and who is doing the cutting could be a family member or a doctor who is also in that same culture."

That's the enforcement gap in a sentence. The crime happens behind closed doors, performed by trusted figures within insular communities, on victims too young to understand what is being done to them and too afraid to speak of it later. Abdalla said she cannot confirm specific cases inside Minnesota but believes some families take girls back to Somalia during school breaks to have the procedure performed abroad.

The federal picture is only marginally better. Congress criminalized FGM in 1996. A high-profile federal case in Michigan in 2017, in which prosecutors alleged two young girls were taken from Minnesota to undergo the procedure, collapsed. In response, Congress strengthened the statute. President Donald Trump signed the Stop FGM Act into law, expanding federal jurisdiction to explicitly cover cases involving interstate or international travel. Nationwide, the only widely cited state-level conviction occurred in Georgia in 2006.

So across the entire country, with over half a million estimated survivors, the legal system has produced essentially one state conviction in two decades.

The politics of looking away

Franson first introduced FGM-related legislation in 2017 that would have classified the practice as child abuse and clarified parental accountability. It stalled and never became law. She told Fox News Digital that the legislation originated not from her but from women within the Somali community who wanted action:

"The bill was brought forward by women in the Somali community. I was the chief author, but then Democrats told one of the DFL women that if I carried the bill, they would not support it."

Her explanation for the opposition was blunt: "Of course, it's because they believe I am a racist."

Consider what happened there. Somali women approached a Republican lawmaker for help protecting girls from mutilation. Democrats refused to support the bill because of who carried it. The messenger mattered more than the girls.

This session's task force bill is co-authored by Rep. Huldah Momanyi-Hiltsley, a Democrat of Kenyan heritage, alongside Democrat Reps. Kristin Bahner, Kristi Pursell, and Somali-American Democrat Rep. Anquam Mahamoud. Franson is co-sponsoring. None of the Democrat lawmakers responded to multiple Fox News Digital requests for comment.

The bipartisan co-sponsorship is a welcome development. The silence from every Democrat on the bill is not.

Cultural sensitivity is not a shield for child abuse

The broader pattern here is familiar to anyone who has watched progressive politics collide with uncomfortable facts about immigration and cultural integration. The left has spent years constructing a framework in which any scrutiny of practices within immigrant communities is reflexively branded as bigotry. That framework has consequences. When cultural sensitivity becomes a reason not to investigate, not to prosecute, and not to even collect data, children pay the price.

Minnesota's Department of Health doesn't track FGM data. The Attorney General's office punts to county attorneys. County attorneys have no cases. Everyone points somewhere else, and no one points at the crime.

This is the same state that has faced scrutiny over high-profile welfare and daycare fraud cases in which prosecutors allege billions of taxpayer dollars were siphoned off. The pattern is not coincidence. It is institutional paralysis born of a political culture that treats enforcement within certain communities as inherently suspect.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born activist and founder of the AHA Foundation who survived FGM herself, framed the stakes without ambiguity:

"Female genital mutilation is violence against the most vulnerable, children. It causes infection, incontinence, unbearable pain during childbirth and deep physical and emotional scars that never heal. Religious or cultural practices that deliberately and cruelly harm children must be confronted. No tradition can ever justify torture."

She called legal accountability the only mechanism that can reduce the risk to girls living in communities where the pressure to enforce the practice is overwhelming.

"I survived female genital mutilation and I carry its scars with me. But I refuse to accept that another girl in America must endure what I did in Somalia."

Enforce the law or admit it's decoration

The United Nations observes an annual day of awareness in February to combat FGM globally. Awareness is fine. It is also cheap. Minnesota has had awareness of this problem for over thirty years. It wrote a felony statute. It collected no data. It brought no charges. It let a bill to strengthen protections die because the wrong party's name was on it.

A task force is a start, but task forces are what governments create when they want to study a problem they already understand. The facts are not in dispute. The practice is real. The survivors are here. The law is on the books.

What's missing is the will to use it. Somewhere in Minnesota, the law says this is a felony. Somewhere in Minnesota, a girl is being told to stay quiet.