Lynne Featherstone, the Liberal Democrat parliamentarian who was once a home office minister, and Justine Greening, the education secretary, have written to Theresa May asking that she will allow girls’ schools to teach pupils what a bad idea female genital mutilation (FGM) is, so that the poor things will know how they can avoid being so tortured.

I can’t remember when I first heard of FGM – presumably when being told all about strange foreign places and habits, while absorbing the oddities of geography at school or later. The tiresome fact is that while the clitoris exists to make reproduction agreeable so that the species will continue, FGM makes reproduction the exact opposite when its painful removal is deemed necessary by any tribe or group.

So there is no harm in warning young girls, but you would think the males ought to be the ones to be lectured on the subject. (I know that in the hot places where the habit comes from, it is often other women, older women, who do the actual chopping – perhaps partly to be sure that lush young girls are not keen to attract all the older chaps.)

I do think that it should be the boys’ schools that make sure the pupils are aware of the awfulness of FGM, so that girls and women will not be in for a bad time at the mercy of boys and men who don’t see the usefulness of the clitoris at all.

There’s no harm in sensible information being available for all, but surely it’s the males that need educating.

What do you think? Have your say below