Legal Changes
At the time of the crime, many states—including Georgia--had no laws on the books specifically addressing female genital cutting. After Adem's arrest, Representative Mary Margaret Oliver (D-Decatur), in collaboration with Fortunate Adem, was able to get a law passed specifically outlawing female genital cutting in the state of Georgia. It was enacted in 2005. Khalid Adem was however not tried under this law, as his actions occurred before it went into effect.
Read more about this topic: Khalid Adem
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“I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)