Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to the latest NHS Female Genital Mutilation Experimental Statistics Report, published on 6 March 2018, how many (a) police investigations, (b) arrests and (c) convictions have resulted from, or have been pursued in light of data published in that report.

Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is a crime and it is child abuse. The Government is clear that we will not tolerate a practice that can cause extreme and lifelong suffering to women and girls.

The FGM Enhanced Dataset is published quarterly and annually by NHS Digital and provides information on the number of women and girls with FGM who are being cared for by the NHS in England. The most recent set of annual statistics were published in July 2017 and quarterly statistics were published in June 2018. A detailed breakdown of these statistics by local authority, age at which FGM was carried out and country where FGM was undertaken is available online at https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/female-genital-mutilation. These statistics demonstrate that a very high majority of cases are identified in adult women who were born in Africa or Asia who also underwent the practice in their country of birth.

In addition, in 2015 the Government introduced a new FGM Mandatory Reporting Duty requiring all regulated health, social care and teaching professionals to report known cases of FGM in under 18s directly to the police. Whilst we do not currently collect data centrally on the number of reports made to the police under the FGM Mandatory Reporting Duty, we are considering how this data could be collected in future as part of the police Annual Data Requirement.

Information on police investigations, arrests and convictions resulting from the publication of the FGM Enhanced Dataset is not collected centrally.