Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment his Department has made of the effectiveness of the approaches taken by different police forces when they are notified by a body which is legally bound to report FGM that a girl or woman has been subject to FGM.

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 Serious Crime Act 2015 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.

The Home Office has published information for the professionals subject to the duty and the police on GOV.uk. This makes clear that upon receipt of a report the police will record the information and initiate a multi-agency response, in line with local safeguarding arrangements.

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 collection is also capturing police recorded offences of FGM which were initially reported to the police under the duty.