Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the Answer of 22 June 2018 to Question 151231, for what reasons his Department does not collect data centrally on the number of reports made to the police under the FGM Mandatory Reporting Duty.

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.

To improve understanding of the prevalence of so-called ‘Honour Based Violence’ including FGM, we amended the police Annual Data Requirement (ADR) to allow police forces the opportunity from April 2018 to record on a voluntary basis where a crime has been committed in the context of preserving the honour of a family or community.

This new voluntary ADR collection will capture police recorded offences of FGM which were initially reported to the police under the FGM Mandatory Reporting Duty. Subject to data quality checks, we expect the first dataset under this new voluntary ADR collection to be published in late 2019.