May 27, 2026
Talk: Local Solutions to Ending Early Marriage and Female Genital Cutting (FGC) in the Somali Diaspora Background
- 14:00 to 16:00
- Colloquium
- Antje Becker-Benton
In her talk "Local Solutions to Ending Early Marriage and Female Genital Cutting (FGC) in the Somali Diaspora Background," Antje Becker-Benton explores gender and power dynamics within the Somali diaspora community in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, initially focusing on two harmful cultural practices, child marriage and female genital cutting (FGC), as entry points for understanding broader transformations in family structure and community wellbeing.
Somali immigration to Minnesota accelerated following the 1991 civil war, with US voluntary agencies providing resettlement support. The community grew substantially through family reunification, and secondary migration from other states. Initially, men were employed in low-wage manufacturing and women combined childcare with entry-level employment. By 2010, gender roles shifted as women's employment increased and mothers became primary intermediaries with US systems and institutions. Families faced persistent poverty, housing insecurity, and remittance pressures, with divorce and family breakdown including absent fathers. At various times, political pressure on the Somali community intensified through federal scrutiny, travel bans, and extremism concerns. These intensified in 2025, mobilizing community solidarity and multi-faith alliances in response.
Source: Sahan Journal / provided
About Antje
Antje Becker-Benton is a globally recognized leader in social and behavior change (SBC) with over 25 years of experience designing and implementing health communication programs across 23+ countries. As Managing Director at Save the Children US, she built and led a team of 15 professionals, overseeing a large multi-country portfolio. Her career includes senior technical roles at FHI 360 and the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, where she developed evidence-based SBC frameworks and participatory communication toolkits adopted across multiple countries and local languages.
Her work has consistently centered on reaching marginalized and hard-to-reach populations — including indigenous and nomadic communities, sex workers, long-distance truckers, and fishing communities — with approaches grounded in cultural context and community participation. This commitment extends to her current research on gender, culture, and power within the Somali diaspora in Minneapolis.
Antje, who holds an MHS from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and an MA from the Freie Universität Berlin, is an adjunct lecturer at Georgetown University. She is a founding member of the Global Alliance for SBC and serves on the board of the Africa Society for Social and Behavior Change.
Contact and Registration
The MPIWG Gender Colloquium 2025/26 is open to all: academics, students, and members of the public are all welcome to attend, listen, and participate in the discussion. Please register here: gleichstellung@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
About This Series
Evidently, feminist progress and male violence grow concurrently: the feminist paradox signifies that the more equal women become, the more hatred and violence they face. Today we can see misogyny —Frauenhass in German—everywhere, including new forms of violence such as cyberbullying. It is a proven fact that misogynist violence is constantly on the rise—that is, violence specifically directed at women, such as domestic violence, femicide, sexual assault, stalking, hate speech, and pathological attempts to control their lives.
Women’s right to make decisions about their bodies should be self-evident, yet it is enshrined in law in only a few countries around the world. Historical trajectories show that reproductive biases are aligned along the axes of class, race, ethnicity, and gender. Hence, we use reproductive rights as a common, intersectional thread to investigate the backlash against feminism, which has culminated in an ever-increasing onslaught. There can be no doubt that the current backlash against women’s rights goes hand-in-hand with the rise of far-right extremism.
The 2025/26 Gender Colloquium at the Institute brings together scholars and professionals from the medical and biomedical sciences, public health institutions, media and film, political and legal sciences, and the humanities to confront the issues of abortion, early marriage and female genital cutting, femicide, forced sterilization, #MeToo, and reproductive regimes.