Baroness Meacher
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(10 years ago)
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Baroness Meacher
“Offence of encouraging or assisting with the promotion of the practice of female genital mutilation
(1) The Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003 is amended as follows.
(2) After section 2 (offence of assisting a girl to mutilate her own genitalia) insert—
“2A Offence of encouraging or assisting the promotion of the practice of female genital mutilation
A person is guilty of an offence of encouragement or promotion of female genital mutilation if he encouraged or assisted another or others to commit an offence knowing or believing that the other or others would commit that offence.”(3) In section 5 (penalties for offences) insert—
(a) after “under” insert “sections 2 and 3 of”,(b) at end insert—“(2) A person guilty of an offence under section 2A is liable—
(a) on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding seven years or a fine or both;(b) on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or both.””
Baroness Meacher (CB)
Following legal advice, I amended Amendment 45, and it has now become Amendment 45A. The aim of this amendment is to tackle FGM at its heart. I applaud Ministers, the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, and others for tabling amendments which seek to protect young girls from the threat of this terrible torture and to protect their identity. All these are important, although we know that to achieve a prosecution of families committing FGM is not straightforward, and even with all the improvements in the new amendments, I still believe that it will be difficult. I understand that FGM is increasingly happening to tiny children who cannot yet speak, which will make prosecution even more difficult until very much later on because of course the families are trying to avoid detection. Prevention will be very difficult to achieve through protection orders, for example, if this is happening very early on in a child’s life.
Amendment 45A creates an offence of encouragement or promotion of FGM if a person,
“encouraged or assisted another or others”—
that is very important—
“to commit an offence knowing or believing that the other or others would commit that offence”.
The amendment seeks to ensure that if a community or religious leader encourages the practice of FGM, whether to a congregation, a small group of parents or indeed an individual parent, they would be committing an offence and could be charged. We are seeking something very different from the amendments so far, which have focused very much on an individual child and their family, but that is not where the focus should be when the core of the problem is actually in the culture of certain communities. If we want to stamp out the practice, we have to change the culture and the religious preaching.
The Minister explained to me just before this debate that the Bill team believes that the amendment does not achieve what we believe that it will. However, I sought legal opinion from Keir Starmer and his colleague Catherine Meredith, and they came back to me over the weekend and assured me that the amendment is fine and will achieve what we want it to. Of course, this was very late on; although I approached them some time ago, they are busy people and did not come back to us until very late. We therefore have not had an opportunity for the Bill team and government lawyers to sort this out. Not surprisingly, we therefore have a slight disagreement, but I am satisfied on the basis of my legal advice that the amendment will achieve what we want it to achieve and I will therefore speak to it on that basis.
The amendment would make a distinction between religious leaders who preach from the Koran and are therefore authentic—and, indeed, religious leaders who preach from authentic Hadith—who would not be committing an offence and would not be prosecuted if the amendment became law, and religious leaders who preach on the basis of the inauthentic versions of the Hadith, who would be committing an offence; they would be very clearly differentiated from the others. That is very important.
My concern about the parent-focused offences in the absence of Amendment 45A is that if parents believe that their religion requires them to practise FGM, when parents are arrested for this practice and are subjected to a protection order, they will regard the arrest or the protection order as some terrible action of the infidels. They will not be convinced at all and their thinking will not change. In addition, parents who are not directly affected by an arrest will not be convinced. They will think that these are the actions of infidels and therefore they will try to find a way of carrying on with their FGM practice. That is the importance for me of Amendment 45A.
Baroness Tonge (Ind LD)
I have gone into this in great detail since 2003, when the all-party group that I chair held hearings on the subject. We learnt from various groups that gave evidence, and I have learnt since, that it is usually the grandmothers in a family who are most insistent on this practice, and that it is not confined to a particular religious group. I would hate for people to get the idea from what the noble Baroness is saying that this is a practice of the Muslim religion or any other religion. It is confined to small cultural groups. It is often opposed by the religious leaders and men in the community but the grannies insist that it is done.
Baroness Meacher
I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her intervention. I completely agree: this is not exclusively a Muslim problem. Indeed, there are Christians, apparently, who promote FGM. However, we know that there are religious leaders who preach from the unauthentic Hadith and are certainly promoting FGM; they are rather effective at doing that. They ally, of course, with the grandmothers, and the grandmothers can look to them for support.
Another question is whether this practice is sufficiently prevalent to justify this new offence. Yes, it is. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, referred to international figures. I simply want to refer to a few from the British Arab Federation. It estimates that more than 100,000 women have undergone FGM in this country and that some 25,000 girls are at risk of having their lives destroyed in this way. The Local Government Association provides a figure of 144,000 girls born in England and Wales to mothers from FGM-practising countries between 1996 and 2010. We do not know how many of these mothers will have changed their minds about this practice, but the figures from the British Arab Federation are certainly alarming and we need to take them seriously.
We must applaud the British Arab Federation for making it its highest priority to work with all organisations to bring an end to this crime. The federation is clear that there is no evidence, as far as Islamic sources are concerned, requiring, justifying or condoning the practice of FGM. This, again, reiterates the point. This is not a problem of the whole of Islam—far from it—or, indeed, only Islam. It affects certain groups and certain leaders.
The descriptions of the way FGM is performed are utterly appalling. Just reading them was a painful experience for me. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, went into this in great detail and I certainly do not want to repeat what she said. As I have already said, there is no mention in the Koran of FGM and no mention in the authentic Hadith of FGM, so there are perfectly proper Islamic texts that do not in any way encourage this activity. Indeed, Islamic law prohibits partial or complete removal of any bodily organ without proven medical need. Thus FGM is unlawful, as I understand it, according to Islamic law. It is important that, in proposing this amendment, we make this absolutely clear. In no way is this amendment an attack on Islam: quite the opposite. It is an attempt to secure the proper practice of Islam. There is a lot of work going on in communities to encourage them to abandon FGM, but this work is being hindered by these leaders who stick to unauthentic texts.
Currently, under Sections 44 to 46 of the Serious Crime Act 2007, anyone inciting or carrying out FGM in a particular case can be prosecuted for incitement. The LGA argues, quite rightly, that it is not possible under current law to prosecute someone who in general terms says that there are religious, health or other grounds for carrying out FGM. That is the whole point of this amendment and the whole point of referring to the plural: if somebody preaches to “another or others” that FGM is important to their religion, they are committing an offence. This amendment should make it much easier to bring cases against those who promote this practice. Inhibiting the preaching or promotion of this practice is much better than action ex post. That is what we are all working for: to try to prevent this thing ever happening in the first place. A lot of the focus has been on prosecuting people after they have practised FGM and that is just not good enough.
I know that the Government have concerns about whether this amendment really would achieve what we hope it would achieve, but I hope that we can have further discussions. I take the point that there will also be debates in the other place. Therefore, we do not even have to resolve these issues, and the issues around the previous amendments, before Third Reading, although I will certainly seek to do that with my legal advisers. I beg to move.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
Again, this has been a further excellent debate on the role of the criminal law in helping to put a stop to the practice of FGM in this country. I am grateful for the constructive approach that the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and others have adopted in both debates and in the discussions we have had outside and inside the Chamber.
As many noble Lords have said, we are aiming to get to the same end. It is slightly unfortunate that the amendment was tabled quite late and that there is a difference of opinion in terms of what the amendment seeks to achieve. My noble friend Lady Hamwee rightly pointed out, on the point about “other or others”, that the amendment does not seek to achieve what was sought in the original amendment, if that makes sense.
I also thank my noble friend Lady Tonge and the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, for pointing out quite strongly that this is not a religious matter. There is nothing in any religious text that points to FGM being something that should be carried out on young girls. It is a specific cultural practice that exists in certain communities in the world and has found its way to this country. Legislation alone cannot eradicate a practice that is so deeply ingrained in the culture and traditions of those who practise it and have been doing so for centuries, but I agree that the law is a very important part of our response to the abhorrent practice of female genital mutilation, and it is right that we should change it where necessary.
We believe that the new offence that we have just debated of failing to protect a girl from risk of genital mutilation gets to the heart of the issue. The Government’s new offence focuses on those who allow this dreadful abuse to be perpetrated on their daughters rather than on those who may only encourage them to do so. That is not to suggest that encouraging female genital mutilation, or indeed any crime, is in any way acceptable.
I take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, that such behaviour also constitutes an offence under the provisions of Part 2 of the Serious Crime Act 2007, which contains inchoate offences of: intentionally encouraging or assisting an offence; encouraging or assisting an offence believing it will be committed; and encouraging or assisting offences believing one or more will be committed. As the noble Baroness observed, the revised wording of the proposed new offence follows closely the wording of the existing inchoate offences. That is both its strength and, dare I say, its weakness. As a result, it would not cover behaviour that is not already covered by the existing 2007 Act offences.
We are not persuaded that creating a specific offence of encouraging FGM is necessary or appropriate. The provisions in Part 2 of the Serious Crime Act 2007 apply to all criminal offences precisely so that it is not necessary to create specific encouraging or assisting offences for every crime. We agree that the behaviours now referred to in the noble Baroness’s revised amendment should be criminalised, but that is already the case. This amendment would not advance the criminal law in this area—I suspect this is where we are going to have a further conversation.
We believe that changing the culture and attitudes that allow female genital mutilation to persist will be better achieved through the awareness raising and community engagement that the Government have already embarked upon, rather than through the creation of another, arguably unnecessary, inchoate offence.
I wholeheartedly commend the aims of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and others in tabling her amendment. As I have said, this House is united in its desire to eradicate FGM, even though we may differ on how best to achieve that end. I hope the noble Baroness will agree that the government amendments that we have just debated represent a substantial package of measures to strengthen the civil and criminal law to tackle FGM. I firmly believe that they offer a better way forward, and on that basis I ask the noble Baroness not to press her amendment.
Baroness Meacher
I thank the Minister for her constructive response and all noble Lords who have spoken very constructively in this debate. I particularly thank my noble and learned friend Lady Butler-Sloss for her very important point that this amendment, unlike any other, would achieve deterrence, and that is what we want to do. We want to deter this dreadful act. We do not want just to prosecute after the event, although it is difficult ever to achieve a prosecution. If we can deter, we have really got to the goal that is now clearly shared across all sides of the House, which is to change the culture on FGM. We therefore need to change the way the leaders operate and the way they encourage people to indulge in this terrible act.
I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, for her very helpful support. We must try to find a form of words that the government lawyers, our lawyers and all other lawyers agree will achieve this incredibly important objective. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.