I knew then that female genital mutilation would end one day in Africa.

I learned that that ceremony that I went through when I was 13 years old, it was called female genital mutilation.

No mutilation.

Genital stimulation. Duh.

When Agnes first started fighting to stop female genital mutilation in her community, she had become an outcast, and she was exiled and slandered, and the whole community turned against her.

Pears dried in the form of genital organs.

Last year, his owner noticed some blood trickling from his genital region.

Three years ago, Agnes opened a safe house in Africa to stop mutilation.

For example, any social history will reveal that mutilation and torture were routine forms of criminal punishment.

And as we speak right now, three million girls in Africa are at risk of going through this mutilation.

And in Europe, there's certain parts of Europe, where we're seeing a four fold increase in certain genital birth defects.

That mutilation of her clitoris had actually obviously impacted her life and changed it in a way that was devastating.

On the streets of our cities and on the farflung battlefields, fighting against the mutilation of our hopes and dreams.

They had made up these songs that they were singing, about the end of suffering and the end of mutilation, and they walked us down the path.

The Dallas Morning News won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for a series it did on women around the world, but one of the reporters told me she's convinced it never would have happened if they had not had a female assistant foreign editor, and they would not have gotten some of those stories without female reporters and editors on the ground, particularly one on female genital mutilation men would just not be allowed into those situations.