A young girl sits between her mother's knees during a meeting of women from several communities eradicating female genital mutilation, in the western Senegalese village of Diabougo, recently. Tostan, a small Senegalese aid group credited with launching a grass roots campaign to abolish female circumcision in West Africa, will be awarded the $1.5 million Hilton Prize in New York, on Wednesday. - Reuters

PARIS, France (AP):

She remembers the new white dress with violet flowers, the lacy socks, the patent-leather Mary Janes. She was six years old and, she thought, off to a fête with her sister, her mother, three cousins and an aunt.

Instead, she ended up naked in the basement of a Paris dormitory for immigrants, the air thick with the odour of garbage, incense and blood.

She remembers the four women whose mouths were decorated with tattoos and who spoke a language she didn't understand, and how she struggled as one of them violated the most intimate part of her body with a razor blade. She remembers the searing pain that still makes her cry.

"You don't forget," said Aminata, now 31 and an assistant social worker.

She remembers her mother paying the woman before she and her sister left, crying and walking to their father's waiting car "like cowboys", their legs bowed out in pain, their fingertips grasping the edges of their dresses so as not to soil them with blood.

Widespread practice

Aminata, born in Paris of Senegalese origin, is one of the estimated thousands of girls and young women in Europe who each year are victims of female genital mutilation, an ancient rite in more than two dozen African countries and parts of the Middle East, brought to the West by immigrants. She asked to be identified only as Aminata S. because she has three sisters in Europe who have told no one about their excisions.

This September, scores of girls are likely returning to Europe with mutilated genitals after summer vacations in their families' homelands.

Several European countries have stepped up action against the practice, which is also called female circumcision, and have passed laws criminalising it. But it still goes on in secret, with progress far outpaced by uninformed attitudes and a lack of prevention campaigns.

"Things are really moving in Europe. It's a process that started seven to eight years ago," said Els Leye, who tracks the issue in Europe at Ghent University's International Center for Reproductive Health. "(But) it astonishes me how slowly it goes."

Deeply rooted

Despite the false notion that female genital mutilation is prescribed by Islam, it dates back to six centuries before the birth of Christ - and 12 centuries before the Muslim Prophet Muhammad. The practice is deeply rooted in ethnic cultures and spreads across religions, practised by some Orthodox Copts, Catholics, Muslims or Jews in Ethiopia, said Isabelle Gilette-Faye, director of the Group for the Abolition of Sexual Mutilation. Reasons vary from country to country, tribe to tribe, from purity and honour to tradition.

In each case, "sex and sexuality are marked", said Sokhna Fall, an ethno-psychologist who is part of a team that repairs mutilated genitals at Trousseau Hospital in Paris. "Your sex isn't yours. It belongs to the group (which) manages and controls the sexuality of its members."

The operation usually targets the clitoris and often the labia with crude instruments. Advocates say it tames a girl's sexual desire and maintains her honour. But health risks, from infection to sterility, follow for a lifetime.

Three million girls worldwide face the ordeal each year. Between 100 million and 140 million women are believed to have been subjected to it, according to UNICEF.

There are no reliable figures for the number of victims or potential victims in Europe, but it likely reaches the thousands and possibly tens of thousands, said Gilette-Faye.

France, followed by Britain, Germany and Italy, are the countries most at risk due to the origins of their immigrant populations.

No more excuses

"We can give no more excuses for this," former Chanel supermodel Waris Dirie, mutilated as a child in her native Somalia, said in an interview with Associated Press Television News. "This is a pure crime against a child. And we are doing it ... not God or nature."

In July, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has made enforcing immigrants' respect for European values a priority, sent a message of new firmness. He presented the Legion of Honour, France's highest award, to Dirie, the best-known campaigner against the custom, and to lawyer Linda Weil-Curiel, who has spearheaded the drive against it in France.

France, where the practice has been a crime since 1983, is the leader in tracking and prosecuting cases, with up to 40 trials in the past quarter-century and numerous convictions, mainly of parents. Only two women have been convicted of performing mutilations.

Many doctors, teachers and other professionals continue to turn a blind eye to what they consider a by-product of cultural differences, abhorrent but to be accepted.

"There are lots of doctors who say, 'So what. Once a child has been mutilated, what good does it do to inform ... ?'" said lawyer Weil-Curiel.