Female Genital Mutilation

Debate between Keith Vaz and Kerry McCarthy

Monday 10th March 2014 Westminster Hall

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the e-petition relating to stopping female genital mutilation in the UK.

I am delighted to serve under your chairmanship today, Mr Robertson. Shortly, I think we shall be joined by the Minister for Crime Prevention, the Minister responsible for this area—[Interruption.] Indeed, he is rushing into Westminster Hall as I speak. Well done to the hon. Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman) for sitting in for him; I think he was trying out the chair. I am also pleased to see my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones).

This is a critical debate. It takes place on the eve of the start of the first parliamentary inquiry into female genital mutilation—an inquiry that begins tomorrow, with the hearings initiated by the Home Affairs Committee. This is the right time for Parliament to discuss this issue.

I begin by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel), the Chair of the Backbench Business Committee, for granting this debate and I also thank the other members of her Committee. I appeared before it for the first time to ask for the debate and I was delighted that its members were able to say yes. I particularly thank the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham), who I think is planning to attend this debate. She certainly supports it; she supported the application for it and we would not have secured it without her, so I am extremely grateful to her.

I also thank the members of the Home Affairs Committee, who all co-signed the application for the debate: my hon. Friends the Members for Dudley North (Ian Austin), for Newport West (Paul Flynn), for South Ribble (Lorraine Fullbrook), for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) and for Walsall North (Mr Winnick), and the hon. Members for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood), for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison), for Northampton North (Michael Ellis), for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) and for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless).

This is the first debate in this House on this subject since the relevant legislation was updated in 2003. I cannot think of a crime as horrible as FGM that has not been the subject of a prosecution since it became illegal. On numerous occasions, Members take part in debates on Home Office and other Bills, passing legislation and bringing in new offences, but this is the only crime that has not been prosecuted.

We need to look carefully at the reasons for the lack of prosecutions; we need to hear, as we will during the Select Committee hearings, the testimony of individual survivors and others. We also need to hear from Members who have raised the issue on so many occasions during questions—including today’s questions to the Home Secretary, when it was raised four times. Although some people may feel that the crime is hidden, it is very much on Parliament’s agenda.

The World Health Organisation estimates that 140 million girls and women alive today have been forced to undergo FGM. It further estimates that 66,000 women resident in England and Wales in 2001 had undergone FGM. There is another estimate that more than 24,000 girls in the United Kingdom are at risk from FGM.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I do not know whether my right hon. Friend is aware that some time ago I tabled a number of parliamentary questions to try to find out whether the lack of prosecutions was because the Crown Prosecution Service was not willing to prosecute or because the police were not passing such offences to it; it looked as if very few cases were being referred to the CPS for consideration.

What assessment has my right hon. Friend made of the action plan from the Director of Public Prosecutions? When it was launched—quite a while ago now—I thought it was a really positive step forward in encouraging the police to report more cases of FGM to the CPS, but nothing seems to have happened as a result of it.

[Keith Vaz]

My hon. Friend is right. We are concerned that despite the action plan—welcome though it was; it provided a framework for prosecutions—there have still been no prosecutions. One of the witnesses for our inquiry will be the new DPP, Alison Saunders. Unless we find out the reasons why there have not been prosecutions for FGM here when there have been prosecutions for it in other countries, we will not be able to find those who are responsible for it here and bring them to justice.

The three figures that I gave the House—140 million girls worldwide now, 66,000 women resident in England and Wales in 2001 and 24,000 girls at risk in the UK today—are only estimates, and we must show caution when we cite them. Indeed, high-profile figures from the communities affected by FGM have cast doubt on some of them. Today in The Guardian, Nadifa Mohamed, the famous Somali novelist, suggested that the estimates are “crude” and

“based on unreliable data…several years out of date”.

We rely on the estimates because they are the only ones we have, but we need to ensure that we are cautious about how we use them. What we are trying to do in Westminster Hall today, and what I hope the Select Committee will attempt to do in its hearings, is to get to the facts, so that we have some accurate way of knowing who and how many people are at risk. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) said, every Member in Westminster Hall today knows that there have been no prosecutions for FGM, and I am sure that they will repeat that fact in their contributions. We need to find out why.

I also commend the work of Leyla Hussein. Her documentary “The Cruel Cut” went a long way towards raising awareness of this issue. The Home Affairs Committee is due to view it shortly as part of its inquiry and Leyla Hussein will be giving evidence to us tomorrow. The issue of awareness, exemplified by the number of people who signed the petition, is extremely important. If people are not aware, they cannot be concerned; if they are not concerned, we cannot catch those responsible.

I am pleased that the Minister for Crime Prevention is in Westminster Hall today, because he has been very clear about this issue. He is a special Minister because he says what he thinks, does not read from a script and is not one of those robotic Ministers who will accept everything that the civil servants say. He makes up his own mind—he is going red, but I think that is true—and is pretty blunt. He was very blunt when he said that he is not prepared to worry about cultural sensitivities and that if a crime is being committed, it needs to be investigated.

This will be one of those rare debates in which every single speaker agrees that something needs to be done, although, of course, we need to await the outcome of the Home Affairs Committee inquiry and the other reviews before we find out precisely what needs to be done.

--- Later in debate ---

[Keith Vaz]

I thank the hon. Gentleman. He is right. Common sense dictates that the first thing one would do is go to the doctors, because they would know better than anyone else. We can make suppositions, but at the end of the day, when people are being treated in hospital or undergoing other forms of assessment, the doctors are in the relevant position.

I would not want to say that the hon. Gentleman has identified one of the Committee’s recommendations, bearing in mind that we are only starting the inquiry tomorrow, but common sense dictates that the medical profession has a huge role to play in trying to help us solve the problem. However, we will not know how until we have the chance to hear from them.

[Kerry McCarthy]

I met a group of women health workers in Bristol on Friday. My right hon. Friend knows that Bristol has been at the forefront of the campaign against FGM. Some brilliant work has been done by the young women there. The health workers obviously come into contact a lot with women who have undergone FGM, but usually at the stage when they are giving birth and going through maternity services. That is far too late to identify who carried out the operation on them, given that that usually happens before the age of nine.

The health workers were convinced that the best solution would be to have examinations of girls in schools. I agree with my right hon. Friend that this is an incredibly sensitive matter, but I just wanted to place on the record that the health workers I spoke to thought that the solution would be for us to have some system of inspecting girls at risk.

[Keith Vaz]

That is extremely helpful. If my hon. Friend would like to put the group that she contacted in her constituency in touch with the Select Committee, we would very much like to hear from them. One feature of this inquiry is not just to hear from the men in suits, who always want to give evidence to Select Committee inquiries—although I hope that the Minister will come suitably suited and booted when he appears. We also want to hear from others, including all the stakeholders. Local groups know more about this subject than those of us who sit in Westminster. Please put us in touch with the groups, so that we can hear from a wide range of individuals and organisations about this subject.