Khalid Adem, 30, received his sentence Wednesday in a small town outside Atlanta, Georgia, for the 2001 offence, the Gwinnett Daily Post reported online. Adem must also pay a fine and serve an additional five years on probation after the 10-year term.
Prosecutors said Adem had an accomplice but had refused to divulge who it was.
Judge Richard Winegarden in Lawrenceville, Georgia, dismissed prosecutors' request for a 40-year sentence as too harsh, noting the cultural sensitivities and remarking that Adem had prayed before cutting his daughter, the Post reported.
'This is not a crime that fits into any well-defined category,' Winegarden was quoted as saying. 'There's no indication that the defendant committed the crime out of greed or anger. ... I don't think this is going to happen again.'
Female genital mutilation, also known as female circumcision, is a practice carried out in some African, Muslim and Asian cultures to limit women's enjoyment of sex and preserve evidence of their virginity.
In extremely wide cuts around the vagina, the wounds are sewn shut with only enough room for entry by a penis, and must be cut open to deliver babies. Many women die from infection either after the mutilation or childbirth, and those who survive often suffer serious internal problems all their lives.
Taina Bien-Aime, executive director of the activist organization Equality Now, said Winegarden's remarks reflected a popular misconception that genital mutilation is a 'cultural' matter.
'Culture is never an excuse for a human rights violation or for doing egregious harm to any human being,' she said in a telephone interview from New York.
Adem's sentencing represents the first documented case and conviction for genital mutilation in the United States, Equality Now said.
US Congress passed a federal law against the practise in 1996, and several state legislatures have done the same, including Georgia last year. No other known cases have been brought at either level.
The new Georgia law could not be applied retroactively to the Adem case, which meant local prosecutors used long-standing laws against child cruelty and aggravated battery to bring a conviction, Bien-Aime said.
The case came to prosecutor's attention after the little girl's mother realized her child had been mutilated, about two years after the fact, Bien-Aime said. The mother was by then in the middle of divorce proceedings.
'The child's behaviour became more and more erratic,' Bien-Aime said. Through referral from her paediatrician to a paediatric specialist, the injury was confirmed and reported to police.
The mother, who lives in a community of immigrants from countries where genital mutilation is practised, called Equality Now for advice.
'We put her in touch with local groups in Atlanta and an attorney who could help her,' Bien-Aime said.
Twenty-eight countries in Africa, where circumcision has been carried out by rusty knives and shards of glass as a coming-of-age ritual for adolescent girls, now forbid genital mutilation, Bien-Aime said. Egypt has also banned the more sophisticated method of clinical circumcision by a physician.
In fact, some of the African countries are more enlightened on the subject than long-separated immigrant groups in the US, Bien-Aime said. The New York-based international organization now brings representatives from some of those countries to help grassroots activism in US on the issue, as it did to the Atlanta region in 2003 as the Adem case was starting up.
'We had those (representatives) show the local population all the progress being made in Africa, and that it was time for the immigrant population to start speaking up,' Bien-Aime said.
The activist said that such work is especially essential in the post-9/11 world because many immigrants from developing nations feel 'very ostracized.'
In addition, genital mutilation is 'not something they really want to talk about,' she said.
International pressure has grown over 15 years to ban female circumcision. About the same time the US Congress banned the procedure, it also approved granting political asylum to women who fear they will be cut if they return home.
Fauziya Kassindja, a Togolese teenager, became a cause celebre in the 1990s when she went to jail for months while her asylum request moved its way up through the courts. An appeals court finally granted her refuge in the US.
In the Georgia case, the father wept throughout the trial and proclaimed his innocence even after his sentencing, the Daily Post reported.
'I love my daughter, and I always wish the best for my daughter,' he was quoted as saying.
His pro-bono lawyer W Mark Hill told reporters he planned to appeal the verdict.
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