Britain has looked the other way for too long over FGM

The Prime Minister’s Girl Summit showed that the Government is slowly waking up to the issue of female genital mutilation (FGM). Yet this encouraging step forward stands in the shadow of a much larger question: how is it that our fear of offending “culture” has allowed 137,000 girls living in England and Wales to have their genitals cut off? These hundreds of thousands of girls living in Britain – whose quality of life has been sacrificed to an ancient ritual of sexual control – deserve a clear answer.

For decades, those responsible for protecting the well-being of our British girls have looked the other way, choosing to protect the supposed cultural identity of groups rather than the human rights of the individual. According to FGM campaigner Leyla Hussain, “the biggest barrier has been lack of political will”, followed by our need to “use the ‘correct’ language” when talking about FGM.

This reluctance to confront FGM has meant that, until this year, not one successful prosecution had taken place, despite the fact that specific legislation against FGM was put in place 30 years ago. Instead, we have left it to left it to members of communities affected by FGM – and not afraid of speaking out - to drag us up to speed. 17-year-old British student Fahma Mohamed has spent her teenage years getting in front of policy makers and demanding they take the issue seriously. This year she led the nationwide campaign against FGM – which was followed by a Home Affairs Committee report on FGM in the UK, and now Girl Summit.

The authorities’ lack of action until now has not been due to a lack of awareness. In 2010, the in-depth study on FGM and other ‘honour’-based violence, Crimes in the Community, called for an end to cultural relativism. And, over the past decade, there has been an average of almost three articles per week discussing FGM in the British press, and has been raised in parliament on over 45 occasions, according to the British campaign, Justice for FGM Victims UK.

Yet, despite being armed with all the information, local authorities and the wider majority have not only stayed silent for fear of being called racist or "Islamophobic", but have spoken out in defense of the very traditions that are harming British girls. Londoner and FGM survivor Leyla Hussein hit the nail on the head with a recent social experiment, whereby she exposed the extent at which cultural relativism has taken root on our streets. When asked to sign a petition in favour of FGM in order to show support for the protection of Leyla’s “culture, traditions and rights” all but one member of the British general public agreed in the first half hour.

In Honor Diaries, the award-winning film screened by the Henry Jackson Society recently, Raheel Raza, a Muslim human rights activist, completely dismisses the term ‘Islamophobia’ – the very concept that has paralysed any Western action against FGM up until now – as “a recent construct”, its sole purpose “to deflect any criticism of Islam and Muslims”. Sherizaan Minwalla, another activist from the film, agrees: “they shouldn’t be afraid of helping someone because they are afraid of insulting or offending a community”. Raza urged the audience to put speaking up against oppression above the potential consequences: “being called a racist isn’t going to kill you”, she said, whereas being too afraid to speak out “could cause someone else’s life to go”.

Other countries do not share this fear and, as a result, the UK has lagged behind both in Europe and sub-Saharan Africa – in its efforts to deal with the problem. In Kenya, where FGM is a deeply engrained tradition, the practise decreased by 10 per cent in ten years, falling from 38 per cent in 1998 to 27 per cent in 2008. According to FGM activists, prosecutions have been crucial to this success. According to, Khady Koita, a campaigner at the Group for the Abolition of Sexual Mutilation (GAMS), stronger law enforcement has given people the strength to stand up to their community in their refusal to continue the practise and that, “thanks to the prosecutions, they have an argument”.

Furthermore, the contrast between France’s common sense, zero tolerance approach and its British neighbour is so stark that, according to Bindel, Britain is becoming a safe haven for those wanting to mutilate children and get away with it. “Migrants occasionally resort to sending their daughters to Britain to have them mutilated,” she writes. France, on the other hand, has successfully prosecuted a long line of perpetrators. It has no specific FGM laws, rather bringing a total of 29 cases to court under existing child abuse and cruelty legislation. This success is largely due to France’s robust approach to collecting evidence – doctors are protected by the law in breaching patient/doctor confidentiality and are made aware that failure to report FGM makes them complicit in the crime itself. This one-law-for-all approach has allowed successful convictions to act as deterrents against future perpetrators.

Muslim activists, who have kept women’s rights at the centre of their work rather than cultural identity, have been left baffled by the West’s fear of acting against FGM. This fear of offending culture and tradition is shrouding brutality against African girls being cut in the UK, to the extent that the West is no longer considered a place of refuge for women around the world – but a hub for those wanting to mutilate girls and get away with it. For too long, African girls and women living in the West have paid the terrible price for this fear, which appears to be engrained throughout the very authorities supposed to be offering its citizens protection against FGM. Only when FGM is seen for what it is – serious child sexual abuse of the most heinous kind – and is treated accordingly, can there be any hope of undoing the damage already done.

Emily Dyer is a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society