Female Genital Mutilation

Karl Turner Excerpts

Thursday 29th January 2015 Westminster Hall

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is an enormous pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Weir.

It is important to note that female genital mutilation has been on the agenda for many years. Only this week, however, our Select Committee held our first evidence session on the matter since the publication of our report last July. One can never predict when one will get a debate in Westminster Hall, but it is extremely timely that we are able to have this debate so soon after our follow-up evidence session.

I am delighted that the Minister for Crime Prevention will respond to the debate. She is well known for her involvement in efforts to combat FGM over many years. Now that she has returned to the Home Office, after a period as an International Development Minister, she can once again focus on the important issue of FGM.

I am also pleased to see in the Chamber my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), who is another great campaigner on FGM. She has tabled parliamentary questions and motions on the matter because so many people in her constituency are affected by that terrible activity.

The whole Select Committee does not normally turn up for debates on our reports, but I am pleased to see the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) in the Chamber to support us. However, he has other important duties in the House to attend to, so I understand why he will not be staying for the whole debate.

The Home Affairs Committee was united and unanimous in presenting our conclusions to Parliament and the Government last year when we published our report on FGM. At the outset of the debate, it is worth reminding ourselves of the numbers involved. By their very nature, they are estimates, but it is important to read them into the record so that people are aware of them. An estimated 125 million women and girls worldwide have undergone FGM, and an estimated 3 million girls are subjected to FGM each year. It is estimated that 170,000 women and girls in the United Kingdom are living with FGM and that 65,000 girls aged 13 and under are at risk of FGM.

More than 200 FGM-related cases were investigated by the police nationally in the past five years but, unfortunately, it has taken 29 years since the criminalisation of FGM for the first prosecutions to be brought. As we debate the issue today, a prosecution is ongoing in another part of London. We cannot talk about the circumstances of that case, and nor would it be right for us to do so, so I refer to it only in terms of it being the first such prosecution. Interestingly, it was initiated only two days before the Director of Public Prosecutions came to give evidence to the Select Committee. Having waited 29 years, it was something of a surprise suddenly to get the first prosecutions only days before we looked at the subject, but we welcome them. There have been no prosecutions since, which is an issue for us and for the Government.

I described the figures I cited as “estimated” because the prevalence of FGM in the United Kingdom has been difficult to determine due to the hidden nature of the crime. In two London boroughs, for example, almost one in 10 girls is born to a woman who has undergone FGM, meaning that they are also at risk of being cut themselves. We have little information about the children who are most at risk, or even about the extent to which the cutting is occurring in this country or when the girls are taken abroad.

This crime—the mutilation of women and girls—is taking place in the shadows, so it is important that we shine a light on what is happening. As we speak, somewhere in London a young girl is being cut, and we in Parliament are unable to do anything to stop that happening. That was why the Committee’s recommendations were so forceful about the need for substantial changes to how things are done.

[Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)]

Will my right hon. Friend say something about whether it is now necessary to create the criminal offence of failing to report suspicion of FGM? Would that help?

[Keith Vaz]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on his appointment as shadow Solicitor-General. If the British people vote in a Labour Government and he is fortunate enough to become Solicitor-General, his Department—the Attorney-General’s Office—will have responsibility for that, so it will be for him and the new Government to say, “We will change the law.”

The Committee made specific recommendations on mandatory reporting and the criminalisation of failing to do so. The professions, however, are not so keen on that and would prefer to deal with this on a professional basis. We need to keep the law under constant review, but there is already legislation in place that has not been used. If my hon. Friend becomes Solicitor-General, we will expect whoever is his DPP to be a little more active than their predecessors of the past 29 years in ensuring that things happen.

The World Health Organisation defines FGM as

“all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.”

That will include, in our view, designer work on genitals that is done with the woman’s consent.

FGM is usually carried out on girls between infancy and the age of 15, with the majority of cases occurring between the ages of five and eight. It is commonly performed by a traditional practitioner who has no formal medical training, without any kind of drugs to assist with the pain that the young girls are suffering, and using knives, scissors, scalpels, pieces of glass or even razor blades. We heard harrowing testimony during our inquiry of how girls are often forcibly restrained, in some cases by close members of their families, including their mother and aunts. While the performance of FGM might be done by a stranger with the instruments that I described, the act usually involves the connivance and support of members of the family including, in some cases, mothers.

During our inquiry, we heard some excellent evidence from those involved in dealing with FGM and campaigning on the issue. On Tuesday, we took evidence from two campaigners called Leyla Hussein and Alimatu Dimonekene. We also took evidence from Keith Niven, who is head of the rape and child abuse command in the Metropolitan police, Professor Nigel Mathers from the Royal College of General Practitioners and Janet Fyle from the Royal College of Midwives, all three of whom also gave evidence during the original inquiry. In addition, during the original inquiry, Leyla Hussein appeared before us, and we also took evidence from Professor Janice Rymer, Obi Amadi, a community practitioner, Dr Kerry Robinson, Dr Comfort Momoh, Linda Weil-Curiel, a lawyer from Paris, and Dr Emmanuelle Piet, a female gynaecologist who is county medical officer in a district in France.

The Committee’s conclusions were quite clear. We lamented the lack of prosecutions, so we were glad when Alison Saunders came before us to announce that prosecutions were taking place. Rather bizarrely, I found out about the first prosecutions on the Friday before that evidence session in a supermarket in Battersea, along with the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison), who is another great campaigner on FGM. We were there to talk about diabetes when the call came through to her that the first individuals had been arrested and would be charged. I pay tribute to all her work in the House on the issue both before and after she became a Minister, and she still has an interest as a Health Minister.

There is no doubt that prosecutions can send out the powerful message that the Government are serious about an issue, so the lack of prosecutions relating to FGM—only two in 29 years—is lamentable. The Committee said that we need many more prosecutions. It is not possible to match up the hundreds of thousands of girls affected worldwide, and the thousands affected or at risk in our country, with the fact that there have been only two prosecutions. We are not saying that we should prosecute for the sake of it; we are asking why there have not been sufficient prosecutions, and that is when we must look to the various agencies and their reactions.

Hon. Members will know that whenever the Select Committee conducts an inquiry, we come away with one standard recommendation: agencies concerned with a policy area have to work together. That is absolutely clear as far as FGM is concerned. There are some individual practitioners—Dr Comfort Momoh, for example, whom we visited at St Thomas’s hospital to look at her clinic and to talk to some of the women who were waiting to see her—who have tried to bring agencies together, but the process has taken far too long, and the agencies involved have become institutionalised.

We were especially critical about the lack of action by the police. We were not very impressed with the evidence given by the Association of Chief Police Officers lead. We did not feel that the answer to FGM was more seminars, discussions and conferences. We believe that the action required as a result of our report should be on the front line, engaging with community organisations to ensure that action is taken. We were not pleased with what the police had done.

On Tuesday, Detective Chief Superintendent Niven reminded us of evidence that had been given to us previously: the police cannot take any action if there are not sufficient referrals. At that time, the police were saying that it was not their responsibility, as they would act and investigate as soon as somebody came to them, and bemoaned the fact that not enough people were reporting the issue. We therefore must go to the next stage in the chain: social workers and doctors. The Committee believes that when doctors examine a young girl and find that FGM has been committed against her, they are under a duty to report it. We were of a view that there should be mandatory reporting, with a sanction for those who fail to report. Colleagues from the Committee—I am delighted to see my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick) here, as he took part in the inquiry sessions—put this question to all our witnesses: what should the sanction be? A number of them talked about the need for criminal sanctions, depending on the seriousness of the failure to report, which suggested that some individuals deliberately wished not to report, while others did not know what they were looking at.

Frankly, I was surprised to hear from some of our witnesses that doctors might not know what FGM is. Given that it takes seven years to train a doctor and medicine is one of the most difficult subjects to get into at university, I would have thought that most people who came out of that training would know whether FGM has been committed against a patient, rather than requiring further training. Of course we need particular FGM training, but doctors ought to know when something is wrong. I was really surprised that people, including social workers, were saying, “Well, the doctors might not know.” When we asked why, they said, “They may not be trained about it.” That is a big area that we need to look at, and the Committee believes it is important that we do so.