Modelling the impact of migration on FGM/C prevalence and risk in immigrant and diaspora populations

Previous estimates of the number of women and girls impacted by female genital mutilation and cutting (FGM/C) in the United States (US) failed to account for the impact of migration and acculturation. Similar studies in Europe applied a standard factor to estimate the impact across the entire immigrant population. Several of the resultant European estimates offered two scenarios: no impact, in which prevalence remained unaffected by migration and acculturation, and partial impact, in which risk was assumed to drop by 50% for native-born children. Each of these previous studies was based on adaptations of the extrapolation method, which produces estimates based on the product of three input variables: the immigrant population in the country of residence, the prevalence in the country of origin, and the mitigating impact of migration and acculturation. This paper offers several methodological innovations to better estimate the impact of migration and applies the results to the US. It develops methods to account for selective migration, the mitigating impact of legislation and law enforcement, and it considers the age of migration and the age of cutting to estimate the impact of migration timing on the likelihood that individuals were cut prior to migration. Using these innovations to model the impact of migration on the population in the US suggested that previous studies had underestimated the number of women living with FGM/C, while overestimating the number of girls who were at risk.