Every year I choose a university student to accompany me on my win-a-trip journey, which is meant to highlight issues that deserve more attention. My 2025 winner is Sofia Barnett, a recent Brown University graduate and a budding journalist — and with that, I’m handing the rest of the column over to her.
By Sofia Barnett, reporting from Sierra Leone
Secrets swirl through homes and villages around the world, and in a poor district of Makeni, Sierra Leone, they involve what families do to the genitals of their daughters.
More than two million girls around the world endure genital mutilation before their fifth birthday each year, and most women here in the West African nation of Sierra Leone have been cut. We often think of human rights abuses as wartime atrocities or what governments do to dissidents, but sometimes they involve what family members do to the people they love.
In a low-slung home in the city of Makeni, a mom explained why she wants her daughters to be cut: It is her culture. It keeps girls chaste. It marks their sacred transition into womanhood and welcomes them into a community.
But her daughter, Alimatu Sesay, 18, was having none of that. “I’m not ready to go” get cut, she said firmly. “It is my right.”
Sesay’s mother, Mariama Sillah, laughed and rolled her eyes. She herself was cut as a young girl, and generations of the female lineage have belonged to the secret Bondo society that conducts the cutting. She doesn’t want her daughter left behind.
