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These detectives recognise that FGM is a complex issue. Not only is there a lack of people willing to testify and a veil of silence surrounding the abuse, but it’s not always clear who the perpetrator is. Some mothers are entirely against FGM but their relatives carry it out regardless, sometimes without the mother’s knowledge. Who should be prosecuted in such instances? ‘If a person were to travel back to their country of origin, that child might not be at risk from their family, but from the wider community,’ explains one detective. ‘We know of stories where parents have found out their children have been cut unbeknownst to them – that must be devastating. The communities that practise it might not even know that what they have done is against the law in the UK, and that’s why education is paramount.’
Notwithstanding all these difficulties, the police continue in their attempts to act on any case of FGM that is brought to their attention, whether the CPS decides to pursue it or not, and to focus on the goal of prevention and not just on prosecution. Since 2009, a flag is raised at Project Azure whenever an incident is reported to the Metropolitan Police that has even a suspicion of FGM, which means that detectives monitor the prevalence of FGM across London, and pass on information to the relevant authorities to make enquiries. Since 2014, FGM training has become mandatory for first-response officers in the Met. The number of flags made to Project Azure is rising, and hopefully this is down to the greater number of officers who have been educated about what female circumcision is and what they need to look out for. The police have been working with social services on drawing up safeguarding arrangements, contributing to local-authority assessments that might result in a child being removed from a high-risk situation and confiscating passports from families to prevent them from travelling abroad. ‘We would rather a thousand children were protected rather than one person prosecuted, even though our job is to investigate,’ says another detective. ‘We always say that prevention is better than cure. We do a lot of small talks to training groups and big talks at conferences. And if you’ve spoken to a group of thirty people and you see the lightbulbs start flashing as you educate them about FGM, you know that while you may not have directly protected a child that day, you’ve spoken to people who can.’
As well as training police officers, detectives from Project Azure liaise with community projects, the Department for Education, the Department of Health and of course the Home Office, advising them on what protocols will help support and identify victims of FGM. They also work with the Border Agency at airports, speaking with and educating people who have arrived on flights from countries where FGM is prevalent, in case they have been cut and are in need of support – though, of course, it is not necessarily easy to identify a girl who may or may not have been cut – or in case they could identify a cutter, although that is also a near-impossible task.
Recently the law was changed, making it mandatory to report any suspicions of FGM to the police. This means that any health or social-care professional – including doctors, who must usually abide by doctor-patient confidentiality – or teacher who hears of a cutting taking place has a legal duty to report it as a crime. However, this has met with some resistance, the concern being that it might deter women from seeking medical assistance, for fear that there will be wider repercussions as a result. But other amendments have been made to the Serious Crime Act, such as extending protection to both British and non-British citizens, providing anonymity to victims, and making it the duty of any person who is responsible for the girl (defined as those having ‘frequent contact’) to protect her from FGM, with a possible prison term of seven years for failure to do so. Certainly, the greatest move towards ensuring the protection of children at risk of FGM in Britain has been the introduction of the FGM Protection Order that Funke was able to request.
This new civil legislation was spearheaded by London family-law barrister Zimran Samuel and his colleagues, many of whom worked pro bono. It was after watching The Cruel Cut, a documentary on FGM, that Zimran decided to take up the cause. Along with human-rights barrister Dexter Dias QC, Zimran submitted some recommendations to a parliamentary inquiry that was reviewing legislation on FGM, which included the idea of the FGM Protection Order – a piece of legislation that wouldn’t necessarily result in criminal prosecutions, but which would allow girls themselves to seek protection. Zimran approached the issue from the angle of a family lawyer, aware of the sensitivities and concerns that can surround any action pursued by the police and social services.
The main issue was that girls were often not coming forward because they didn’t want their parents to go to prison, and the criminal law is a blunt instrument. So we evolved an idea taken from the work I do within cases of forced marriage and recommended FGM Protection Orders as an amendment to the FGM Act of 2003. Normally, in the family court cases, those under eighteen need the permission of the court to apply for an order, but with these orders girls can apply themselves, even girls who are under eighteen. The scope of the people who can apply to protect the girl on her behalf is wide, too, as long as you can prove you are a connected person – a sister who has heard her younger sibling is going to be cut, for example, or a mother, a father, a teacher or even a friend. We just need to encourage girls to come forward and let them know that the route to protect themselves or others is not only prosecution.
The FGM Protection Order allows a judge to take out an injunction to stop the cutting from taking place. It also automatically triggers a liaison between professionals: police, social services, doctors. Providing there is evidence that a girl is about to be cut, obtaining an order is relatively easy – it can be done over the phone to a judge by a lawyer and out of hours, and it offers immediate protection for the girl, even if she’s already out of the country.
Within forty-eight hours of this new legislation coming into force, Zimran had already obtained an FGM Protection Order to safeguard Funke’s three children. Commencement of the new legislation was brought forward to time with the school holidays which started on 17 July 2015 – although there was no opportunity to roll out a huge awareness campaign about it (and, in fact, the family lawyer Funke had originally approached found Zimran on Twitter, of all places). The most important thing is that those three girls are now protected. That, to me, is huge progress. However, Zimran warns there is still more work to do.
Until the last two years, doctors and teachers and social workers weren’t really talking about FGM – they saw it as a Somalian or Nigerian issue, and that just isn’t the case. It is a British issue. I think we’ve been far too cautious as a nation and I think that there are a lot of lessons to be learned from France, which has been dealing with this problem very well since the early nineties.
There is no better example of just what a problem FGM is for teachers than the story of Sayfiya. In August 2015, Miss Smith, a secondary-school teacher, was busy preparing her classroom for the new term. She had chosen that particular day to go into school purely at random and, despite the fact that it was the school holidays and she should have been enjoying a well-deserved break, she decided to check her work email. What she found there sent shivers down her spine. It was an email from one of her thirteen-year-old students, a young girl called Sayfiya, who was bright, articulate and hard-working. Except she wasn’t enjoying her summer holidays like her friends. Instead, she had been taken with her brother against her will to Sudan – a country where 88 per cent of women undergo FGM. A country where women are not just sewn up in preparation for marriage, but are often restitched each time they give birth. The last two words on the end of the desperate message to her teacher read: ‘Please help’.
Miss Smith immediately contacted the police, who informed the Foreign Office, and negotiations began with the Sudanese authorities to try to locate Sayfiya and her brother and bring them home. Her mother, who had returned to the UK without her children, had undergone FGM as a child, along with her sisters. She had talked in the past about cutting her own daughter, so there was a strong
suspicion that this young girl was about to be mutilated too. Barristers in the UK had no time to waste and – under the instruction of Kent Children’s Services in conjunction with the Foreign Office – immediately secured an FGM Protection Order.
Two things make this case particularly remarkable – and worrying. Firstly, it was their own mother – a woman described as ‘middle class’ living in an affluent Kent suburb – who had allegedly abducted the children and taken them to Sudan, against their father’s wishes. Sayfiya had already gone as far as tearing up her passport in an attempt to stay in Britain with her school friends and everything that was familiar to her. However, her mother had simply obtained another, such was her determination that her daughter should move to a country where child marriage is legal.
The second thing that makes this story unique is that the passports they held were British ones; these two children had been born in this country and were British citizens. They knew nothing of the life they were about to be introduced to. What they knew was British streets and British television, pop stars and after-school clubs. For them, Sudan was an unfamiliar country with an unfamiliar culture. Thankfully, the FGM Protection Order offered Sayfiya a guarantee of safety, and she was returned home safely to the UK. But can you imagine how afraid Sayfiya must have felt? To be taken from all that is familiar to her and dumped in Sudan; to exchange the life she knows in Britain for an alien country. To live in a place where practices that are illegal here and viewed as barbaric are not only accepted but she will now be subjected to them. It is stories like these that make me want to fight to educate every single schoolchild about the risks. Sayfiya is clearly a bright girl; she raised the alarm by contacting her schoolteacher and in turn her teacher knew how to respond.
As Zimran notes, other countries have taken a more hardline approach to FGM and have achieved results when it comes to prosecutions. In the past thirty-five years, there have been at least twenty-nine trials in France, resulting in 100 people – both parents and cutters – being convicted. In France, schoolgirls are subjected to mandatory examinations, and some people in the UK – including the Labour MP Diane Abbott – have called for the same in this country, saying we have been too tolerant in the past. ‘We do not need simple consciousness-raising and educational information. We have to face up to the need for prosecution and for routine medical examination,’ Abbott said in 2014, during a parliamentary debate on FGM. ‘It is a practice to which some of the British authorities have turned a blind eye for too long. It is long overdue that we, as a political class, take serious action on FGM.’11
While I agree that we have engaged in wilful blindness, I don’t agree with forcing girls to have their genitals examined by the state. These girls and women will already have been through the trauma of being cut; they will feel isolated, ashamed, freakish – all the things that I felt when I arrived in this country. To make them open their legs to be forcibly examined by a stranger would, in my opinion, be a violation of their human rights – even if it did result in more prosecutions. And even then, who is to say there would be a guilty verdict? Both Zimran and I believe that what we need instead is a continued conversation about FGM, more support available for women to seek out, more resources ploughed into educating people about it.
Criminal law has its own place and I’m keen to see prosecutions against the cutters, but I’d rather focus on prevention. We need to go further; we need to train judges so that they know the high-risk areas and how to talk to victims. In the Foreign Office we have a Forced Marriage Unit, offering training for professionals up and down the country; it offers a helpline girls can call any time, day or night, with full-time staff. Most importantly, it liaises with foreign embassies around the world to repatriate girls who are at risk. That doesn’t exist for FGM; there is a similar unit in the Home Office but it doesn’t have the same clout, the same staff, or the same liaisons with different countries. In name it is similar, but in hours and resources and staff it is completely different. Its focus tends to be FGM within the UK. However, there is now an FGM lead within the Forced Marriage Unit, which continues to do incredible work on the frontline.
I agree with Zimran wholeheartedly, that the protection needs to be extended and maximised. These new laws and amendments to existing legislation all contribute to giving girls in the UK the right to refuse to be cut. But it’s not just British citizens who need to be protected. Dexter Dias QC has championed the broadening of the legal protection offered to cover non-permanent residents as well.
It is a question of how genuine we are about implementing the human rights treaties that we are signed up to. Children who are on these shores – no matter where they come from – should have equal protection. Our obligations under the UN convention, which we are signatories to, say that we have a duty to protect all children. It is an absurdity that we might not protect a child who has only just arrived in this country and is then sent back to Somalia to be mutilated and that the adults involved have not committed a criminal offence. Whereas it is a criminal offence if the same thing happens to a child who has been here for a few more weeks and is therefore ‘settled’. We have a duty under international law to provide real support and real financial commitment to ending harmful practices where women and children are the subject of physical harm and discrimination, and FGM is one of the most egregious examples of both things. We have a duty to engage with communities and get them collectively to move away from these practices.
But we can only do that – only fulfil our duties – if the British public stops looking away, because the more we pretend these things aren’t happening (just like I did for years), the more they will continue in secrecy. We must protect children – all children – from abuse; there can be no ifs or buts.
16
The Medicalisation of FGM
In 2013, the NSPCC set out to discover just what British teachers knew about FGM. Their findings made for some pretty depressing reading: 16 per cent said they didn’t know that FGM was a crime, despite the fact that it has been illegal in this country for thirty years.12 Another 16 per cent said they didn’t consider FGM child abuse. And 60 per cent were not aware of any government guidance on how they should tackle suspected cases. A massive 83 per cent of them also said they had received no adequate FGM training. There are initiatives that are trying to change this picture, but it is deeply worrying that there is still a lack of training and awareness among teachers about the true horror of FGM. And if such a knowledge gap exists among educated individuals who interact daily with children from a multitude of migrant communities, what must we assume about the ignorance of the wider British public?
Some 60,000 children who are at risk are going to school each day where their caregiver might have no idea what FGM is or how to deal with it. What would a teacher say if a child confessed to them that they had been cut during the school holidays, or that they feared they might be taken abroad at half term to a country they’d never visited before and cut? Twenty years ago, a fellow campaigner and friend of mine was in exactly that position. When she confided in her British schoolteacher that she had been cut, her teacher’s response was, ‘Oh, lovely!’ – she must have assumed that being cut was some kind of harmless tradition or ritual, one she knew nothing about and didn’t think to question further.
In this way cultural celebrations provide a mask of acceptability, of being the norm, behind which perpetrators of an abhorrent crime can hide, and a convenient excuse for the West to avert their eyes, tiptoeing around the issue for fear of offending different cultures, of interfering or being insensitive. In my opinion, the West’s reticence to date makes them co-conspirators, afraid of calling FGM what it really is – which is child abuse. But then all across the world, in different countries, they have other names for it.
In the Maasai culture, FGM is called emuratare and, as we’ve seen, usually takes place when a girl is eleven or twelve. In some Maasai tribes, in preparation for cutting, any hair on a girl’s body is shaved a
nd she is washed with cow’s milk. Animals are slaughtered for a huge feast the night before, and after the cutting the girls are given animals’ blood to drink in exchange for the blood they’ve lost. In Somalia, the gudnin normally takes place at a much younger age. The cutting is preceded by the gathering of family members for a feast and, as you’ve read in my story, the showering of gifts. In Nigeria, drummers beat their tamas as the girl is led towards the circumciser, who is herself decked out in juju artefacts that will help protect the girl she is cutting. And in British homes, we can only speculate, such is the secrecy of the practice in the UK – perhaps families mark this rite of passage with the same kinds of food that are eaten back in their homelands; perhaps they shower the girls with the same gifts and praise, as they talk of this ‘passage into womanhood’, the importance of being a ‘brave girl’, how ‘proud’ they are as parents. Research suggests that migrating communities tend to hold on to their old traditions as a way of maintaining their identity – people can find it hard to integrate or adapt, especially if they don’t speak the language, and sometimes cling on to the old ways as a form of protection against the new culture in which they now find themselves.
But if you put aside these variances in custom – the traditional foods, drink, music and clothing that distinguish one FGM-practising community from the next – there is one thing that all these girls, from Maasai tribes to Manchester daughters, have in common, and that is the pain. These different rituals and rites serve only to normalise FGM within the community, and validate it as a practice in the eyes of the people who live within it. They are ceremonial smoke and mirrors that have managed to disguise the true nature of the abuse for generation after generation, so that people both inside and outside the community view the practice as an integral part of that culture’s social life, intrinsic to its structure.