Giving Compass' Take:

• Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux explains the need for real data on female genital mutilation in the United States to replace very rough estimates. 

• How can funders help spark conversation around this issue? How can data be effectively collected? 

• Learn how ICE is attempting to address female genital mutilation. 

Female genital mutilation is an umbrella term for the ritual, medically unnecessary excision of part or all of a girl’s external genitalia.

The WHO estimates that more than 200 million girls and women have undergone the practice in the places where it’s common, and more than 3 million girls are at risk of the procedure each year. But the global data on female genital mutilation is incomplete.

This is problematic for the U.S., which made the genital cutting of female minors illegal in 1996 but doesn’t conduct its own surveys on the procedure’s prevalence. Collecting the data is difficult, and the issue hasn’t historically been a public health priority in the U.S. Instead, government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rely on data collected abroad and immigration rates from countries where the practice is common to estimate the number of women and girls who may be at risk.

The lack of data means that advocates and government agencies don’t know where prevention resources are needed, clinicians don’t know which patient populations are most at risk or which kinds of cutting are most prevalent, and the problem continues to be perceived as one that primarily affects other countries.

The most recent U.S. estimate — which doesn’t even try to quantify the number of women and girls who have undergone the procedure — concluded that as of 2012, there were approximately 513,000 women and girls at risk of genital mutilation — more than three times higher than estimates from 1990. But that number should be taken with a big grain of salt, according to CDC epidemiologist Thomas Clark.

Read the full article on female genital mutilation by Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux at FiveThirtyEight