The whispers have been growing in volume for a while, tentative, but more and more concerned about exactly what the Female Genital Mutilation Act, passed in 2003, has achieved. The whole subject of FGM has sometimes seemed to emit more heat than light over the past few years, and now there is a growing concern that measures aimed at protecting children are actually harming them.
While the desire to protect every child from physical and psychological harm is laudable, the lack of clarity over what is actually happening to children in Britain with regards to FGM is now being seen to have a potentially negative impact on child protection.
In 2015, Keith Vaz, then chair of the home affairs select committee, described a situation in which “young girls are being mutilated every hour of every day”. Perhaps he was referring to NHS figures, recorded between April 2015 and March 2016, that showed “a case of FGM is newly recorded every 92 minutes on average”; or the numbers of patients with FGM who were “assessed on average every 61 minutes”.
No doubt Vaz had noble intentions in raising the issue, but the NHS figures in fact refer not to young girls who have been cut in Britain under the noses of doctors, social workers and the police, but to adult women who have received medical treatment for a variety of issues, who were subjected to FGM at a young age in their home countries.
What about the other claims around FGM? The planes full of children shipped to Africa and Asia when “cutting season” begins? In 2015 Baroness Tonge, on her return to London after a flight to Addis Ababa, reported passengers she’d seen to the Metropolitan police, concerned that she had stumbled on one of those rumoured FGM transports.
Had she overhead something? Had a girl quietly asked for help? Did she observe any signs of abuse that worried her? Apparently not: that “the plane was heaving with mainly British-Somalia [sic] families returning to Somalia for ‘the holidays’”, and that there seemed to be more girls on the flight than boys, was enough to raise her suspicions. “It was just odd,” she said. The police, feeling both public and political pressure to act assertively on FGM, checked the flight records and questioned the families on their return.
There are also routine checks of flights carrying “at risk” children, where sniffer dogs and uniformed officers meet departing families and warn them of the FGM law. The message is drummed in at nurseries, schools and GP surgeries too.
What happens to those who are accused of subjecting their children to FGM? A BBC Newsnight investigation this week featured one woman whose children had been put under a protection order – which can ban certain family members from contacting their children or taking them abroad. The reason for this order, the mother believes, was a question she had asked of her midwife regarding what FGM actually entailed (she came from a Kenyan background where it was not practised). This mother had to wait four months before a medical examination proved that neither she, nor her two daughters, had had FGM.
Other families have had children taken into care, sometimes for more than a year, while they wait for one of the accredited doctors who can perform the forensic exam needed on young girls’ bodies to prove whether FGM has taken place or not. One particularly upsetting case I came across involved an eight-year-old Somali girl who was taken from her parents at an airport, and kept in care for months before an exam exonerated them. She was traumatised by the separation from her family and experienced absence seizures while in care.
As Toks Okeniyi, of the Africa gender rights group Forward, says: “If there are bottlenecks in the system, it needs to be resolved to ensure that families are able to have access to clinics very early on in the investigation, to eliminate them and to protect the interests of the child.”
Discussion of FGM in Britain rests on just how many girls are “at risk”. In 2016, the Health and Social Care Information Centre reported 5,700 recorded cases of FGM in the previous 12 months: 5,657 of those women were born outside the UK. The cases of the 43 born here are extremely worrying, as are the reported 18 cases where the FGM actually took place in this country; however, around 10 of those UK cases were genital piercings, presumably freely chosen, which are now recorded as FGM type 4.
These much smaller figures accord with my experience – of opposition to FGM among the vast majority of British Somalis, who make up roughly a third of the historical cases. We are now seeing the second and third generation of British-Somali girls who only know of FGM from campaigns rather than lived experience.
It is still widely reported by campaigners that 23,000 girls in Britain are “at risk” of FGM every year, but there is little evidence of this from the NHS. It appears more likely that nearly all UK families from countries where it is prevalent know it is harmful and illegal; and away from the dominant societies and cultures where it is practised, they see no reason to continue the tradition.
This is a success born from many decades of hard work within communities by women who experienced the pain and harm of FGM themselves. But in treating the lack of cases and prosecutions as a failure, – with loud voices calling for tougher crackdowns – the government risks actually harming little girls. Those who sincerely want to help vulnerable youngsters should ask if the methods used so far have really achieved what they set out to do.
• Nadifa Mohamed is a British-Somali writer and author of The Orchard of Lost Souls
