The other day I was watching the BBC hospital series Casualty. The storyline featured a teenage girl who was trying to stop her younger sister from bring circumcised. Although this story reflects a grim reality for many girls, it was encouraging to see a television series with six million viewers helping to raise awareness of an illegal practice that is being carried out on British girls abroad and in some British homes.
Two years ago, I wrote an article for New Humanist which examined the practice of British girls being taken abroad in the school summer holiday, to have their clitoris and much of the outer parts of the vagina removed in a practice known as Female Genital Multilation (FGM). I also noted that FGM was becoming more common in Britain.
According to the Foundation for Women’s Health Research and Development (Forward) 66,000 women in Britain live with the consequences of FGM, and up to 20,000 girls in Britain are at risk of suffering the procedure. Both these figures suggest an increase. A BBC report by Sue Lloyd Roberts from last July featured British Somali teenagers in Bristol talking about “FGM parties” in the city, where groups of girls are cut by an imam or an elder in the community.
A few months after writing that article, I attended a conference organised by Forward. A charity worker told me that a region in Senegal, West Africa, was planning to cut lots of girls. Everyone knew about it, including the authorities, who had declared a few years back that the practice of FGM had been abandoned in that locality.
It is now ten years since a law was passed that made it illegal for British girls to be taken abroad to be cut. An earlier law, passed in 1985, made it illegal for FGM to take place in Britain. Despite these laws, however, no one has yet been prosecuted in the UK. By contrast, in France there have been over 100 convictions. In France, where there is a strong suspicion that a girl has been cut, she is inspected. Schoolgirls are given letters to take home to their parents to warn them that they will be breaking the law if their daughter is cut. Such checks and warnings do not exist here.
But now there are real grounds for optimism. The British government has just pledged £35 million to help eradicate FGM “in a generation”. The money will support work in at least 15 different African countries. To publicise the campaign the minister responsible, Lynne Featherstone, visited a village in Senegal where (we hope) they have abandoned FGM.
According to a recent report in the Independent the Crime Prosecution Service is examining six cases of suspected FGM, to see if prosecutions can be brought under other criminal offences such as conspiracy charges and the Domestic Violence Crime and Victims Act.
Even more encouragingly, a recent announcement by two UN agencies suggests the practice of FGM is on the decline in African countries. In the 29 countries where FGM is concentrated, on average 36 per cent of girls aged 15-19 have been cut compared to an estimated 53 per cent of women aged 45-49.
Although a corner seems to have been turned, the path ahead will have a lot of potholes.
One midwife, Comfort Momoh, who helps victims of FGM from her clinic in St Thomas’s Hospital, told the Evening Standard that because older girls in Britain are saying no to being cut, “families are doing it to them as babies.”
It is shocking that the numbers of girls cut in the UK still seems to be rising. I think British parents need to be told that they risk prosecution if their daughter is cut. Perhaps letters could even be sent to new mums who were identified as having undergone FGM themselves. If there is a downward trend in FGM in many African countries and more resources are put into education and raising awareness here, there could be a light at the end of the tunnel.
