Women in Society

Baroness Rendell of Babergh Excerpts

Wednesday 21st July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Rendell of Babergh]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, for occasioning this debate and for choosing this subject, not just on the role of women but on women’s position in the modern world. My intention is to speak—not by any means for the first time—on the position of women trapped by a tradition that keeps them in a world closer to the medieval. Some women, perhaps the majority, have never enjoyed such freedom and never so closely approached equality with men as we do today, but that is some of us. They are in the minority, those who suffer a lifetime of discomfort, the curtailment of liberty, daily embarrassment, monthly misery and constant pain, but it is a very large minority, running into millions—perhaps as many as 10 million—for women’s genitalia are mutilated as a matter of course across sub-Saharan Africa from west to east, as well as in parts of Asia.

When on television, on the internet or in our newspapers we see pictures of starving women, women afflicted by flood and famine, refugee women with their children or women as victims of rampaging armies, do we ever think that disaster is not the only burden that they have to bear? In very many cases, they have been genitally mutilated as well. I have no space here to describe the process of the various greater and lesser types of female genital mutilation. I have done so before on many occasions.

This may be the place to explain that FGM or female circumcision, as it used to be called, is in no way analogous to male circumcision. It is never therapeutic, as male circumcision may be, and it always does harm. Very few—a tiny minority in this country— want to talk about it. Very few would be willing to give evidence against perpetrators. It is enough to say now that it is a useless procedure that serves no purpose other than to help to enslave women and to keep them in their place—that place being subservience to men.

We have as many as 200,000 women living in this country who have been mutilated. To “cut” a woman, as the procedure is known, is against the law in the many African countries where it is practised. That law is generally disregarded. FGM is against the law here. It carries a maximum penalty of 14 years’ imprisonment, but so far there have been no prosecutions. Silence on the subject prevails in the Somali, Sudanese and Nigerian communities, among many others. The police, who are strongly against FGM, are hampered in their efforts to bring prosecutions against circumcisers who come here to perform FGM and against parents who take their children to the Horn of Africa for it to be carried out there.

The Metropolitan Police is determined to find a way of bringing a prosecution. It knows that such success would be a huge deterrent to those planning mutilations. Sending a circumciser to prison would be the best warning possible to others but, in the absence of prosecution and conviction, the heavy penalty must itself be a deterrent and the police would prefer to deter than to punish.

In the dozen years that have passed since I first began campaigning against this practice, knowledge of it has spread widely. As well as FORWARD, the principal association opposing it, groups small and large have been started all over the United Kingdom. Most of them include in their membership women who have suffered FGM and who are therefore best able to instruct others about the pain suffered by the children on whom it is performed—some as young as four or five years old and a few babies under one year old—and many can number health professionals among their members. Hospitals increasingly incorporate African clinics where women can attend for help and treatment.

I am the patron of the London-based FGM National Clinical Group, where reversals of mutilation are routinely performed by a woman surgeon. Recently, we produced a DVD, which we have circulated across the United Kingdom, showing this reversal being performed. The procedure is carried out under the National Health Service and is available to all women who choose to have it. If it is not the perfect answer, for nothing can restore entirely what has been destroyed, it is of enormous help to women whose destiny seemed a lifetime of pain and fear.

Unfortunately, a large number of health professionals, especially those operating outside the big cities, still remain ignorant of FGM, fail to recognise it and are at a loss to know how to treat a mutilated woman in labour and childbirth. It would be of enormous help in making FGM in the United Kingdom a thing of the past if recognising it and knowing how to remedy its complications were to become part of the training for every doctor and midwife and if that training could include teaching the sensitive approach necessary when in contact with African women immigrants, who will be essentially modest and inhibited.

Women in Horn of Africa countries have a saying. It sounds antiquated to our ears—to us whose ideas of sexual relationships and women’s place in society have been so radically transformed in the past half-century—but it represents a reality to African women. It sheds a new light, or perhaps I should say a new darkness, on what most other women would see as happy occasions in their lives. I have quoted it before, but it may be illuminating to quote it again. They say that the three days of sorrow in a woman’s life are the day she is “cut”, the day she is married and the day she gives birth. There is no need to be more explicit. We have only to give it a moment’s thought to understand its dreadful meaning. I ask the Minister whether the Government’s intention is to keep these women in mind and to do all that they can to help the police and the health professionals in their efforts to end the practice of female genital mutilation.