An estimated 66,000 women and girls in England and Wales have had their genitals forcibly mutilated, according to Department of Health figures due out this autumn.
Women of all ages, some just babies, are forced to have part or all of their genitalia cut off and stitched up, without anaesthetic.
The practice is so serious among immigrant communities in London that the Metropolitan police yesterday offered £20,000 to anyone giving information which leads to successful prosecution, the first reward for a general crime rather than a specific case. No one has yet been prosecuted under the Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act in 1985 and the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003.
Police know of girls being mutilated in London, said a top Met officer; the reward was to send out the message such mutilation was a form of "child abuse", for which practitioners and those sanctioning the abuse could be jailed for up to 14 years.
The 66,000 is a total extrapolated by Forward, a group campaigning against female genital mutilation, or FGM, from figures in the 2001 census for adult and child women immigrants from the 28 African countries known to practise mutilation. At a briefing at New Scotland Yard, Maureen Salmon from Forward said the total was likely to be an underestimate, due to the influx of refugees from Somalia, Sudan and Sierra Leone, countries with civil wars and with large FGM-practising communities..
Comfort Momoh, a midwife at Guy's and St Thomas's hospitals specialising in surgical reversals of FGM, told the briefing that each year she saw 400 to 500 women who had been mutilated and had come to her clinics to seek help: "I do two to three reversals every week."
The campaign is timed to coincide with the start of the school summer holidays, when many girls are sent abroad for FGM. Detective Chief Superintendent Alistair Jeffrey, head of the Met's Child Abuse Investigation Command, said: "We want to get the message across: this is a brutal attack on children, this is child abuse."
However, he made clear the campaign understood it had to contend with a view within African communities that FMG was not wrong, and those against the practice were prejudiced against the communities: "It is not an attack on anyone's culture."
Salimata Badji-Knight, a campaigner from Senegal, was aged 4½ when she had the painful procedure performed on her by women from her community who had no medical training.
More than three decades later, married and living in central London where she works as a PA, Ms Badji-Knight fears she may never be able to have children as a result. "No one can tell me there is nothing wrong with this. It is not true. It has dramatically changed my life for ever.
"It has caused a lot of health problems for me. I do not want anybody else to go through it.
"We are not asking people to give up their culture. They can keep traditional clothes, languages and food.
"Why do they need to go and mutilate a young innocent person without her knowing what is going to happen, just for culture? It does not add up for me."
