Female Genital Mutilation

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

My Lords, this is undoubtedly a human rights issue of a very serious kind. The practice continues despite the criminalising of the process both here and back in most of the countries where it is widespread. I want to reiterate what my noble friend Lord Parekh said: it is very clear what the purpose is. It is about preparing women for marriage. My experience is that it is not often performed on babies nowadays; it is performed on girls, usually prepubescent girls between the ages of eight and 12, and it is done because there is still, if not child marriage, the betrothal of girls when they are still that young.

The idea is to keep women chaste, to remove their opportunity for sexual pleasure and to remove concerns that women with a clitoris will somehow be more promiscuous. Not all circumcision involves the removal of the clitoris, but for most women, it involves the stitching of their vagina and labia. Sometimes it even involves the removal of the labia. In Africa, I have heard practitioners and older men and women claim that it makes girls less wild, more placid and therefore exactly marriageable material.

I have gone to Africa with the charity SafeHands for Mothers and, like the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, I have heard the testimony of women and men and seen how traumatised women are having gone through that experience, especially if you talk to girls who have escaped the possibility or who have just undergone female genital mutilation. I have visited hospitals in north London to see photographs taken of the damaged and mutilated vaginas of women who attend hospital because they are pregnant. Obstetricians have to give them guidance on what to expect in labour and tell them that they will have to have an episiotomy in order to give birth. After giving birth, the women beg those same doctors to stitch them up the way they were in order to please their husbands. Doctors have to explain to women that they will play no part in that practice, but they know that those women return to them with a second pregnancy, and their vagina has been restitched. We have to ask ourselves how that is coming about. Doctors in this country are satisfied that women in the communities here perform these practices.

In Africa, I have heard doctors saying that a practice current there is the performance of symbolic cutting where there is no removal of the clitoris and it is simply, they insist, a small nick that answers the community’s cultural demand for the continuation of the practice. I hope that those in authority, in the medical profession and in the police are making it clear that a medical practitioner performing even the small nick will not be endured in this country and that prosecution will ensue. It must contravene the belief that we should do no harm.

I want to hear from the Minister about what is being done about reaching general practitioners, doctors in private practice and cosmetic surgeons to find out whether things are being done to women who want their vaginas restitched after birth. I want to hear what efforts we are making to breach the silence on this issue and whether we are doing enough in our outreach to the communities.

Finally, an absence of prosecutions is usually an indicator that there is something not happening, so I thank my noble friend Lady Rendell for keeping this matter before the House, and I hope that we will see greater activity on this issue.