Last week a woman was found guilty of taking a three-year-old British child to Kenya for female genital mutilation (FGM). Amina Noor was convicted at the Old Bailey of assisting a non-UK person to carry out the procedure overseas 17 years ago. This landmark conviction, the first of its kind under the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003, shows what risks British girls face. But it also demonstrates that mandatory reporting by teachers and the health sector of any suspected cases — or of girls at risk — is working.
This is something I fought hard for because I underwent FGM abroad at the age of seven, so I know this girl’s pain. When I told my teacher in Manchester, very little could be done to help me or others like me, because there was nowhere for my teacher to report to and at the time it was only illegal to subject girls to FGM in the UK. This was a loophole many of those who supported FGM knew about.
So for years I watched my friends and peers being taken out of this country as happy, healthy little girls and come back as sad, confused children — because of FGM. It still hurts thinking about the first time I saw one of my friends after she had FGM. I knew the pain she was in but being a child I did not have the words to express anything I was thinking or feeling. So we would carry on pretending everything was okay in school or at the park.
Thankfully, those days of forcing children to keep silent have changed following the work we have done to improve laws and policies. We have taken this issue out of the shadows and onto the front pages of national media. The Evening Standard was the first paper not just to cover FGM seriously, but to also put a call to action on the front page just over 10 years ago. That front page story led to me getting a call from the then-health secretary Jeremy Hunt, kicking off the Government’s commitment to help to end FGM.
I knew the pain my friend was in but as we were both children I did not have the words to express our feeling
The Five Foundation, which I co-founded in 2019, has led this work and continues to transform the conversation in the UK and around the world. While our focus has been on raising funding for African grassroots campaigners, we have also pushed for the UK to keep doing more to put measures in place to protect girls at risk. I want to see this country reclaim its position as a world leader on ending FGM and I am convinced that it can happen again. We know that, at the last count in 2014, some 137,000 women and girls have been affected here, but most of these women had already been cut before the updated 2003 law, which made it illegal for a girl to be taken abroad to undergo it.
The next urgent step is to get updated figures based on the most recent census. I have met with senior members of the Government in the last few days to talk about how we can best work together to achieve this. But I fear domestically FGM and its prevention has taken a back seat to other government business. That is beyond depressing to say out loud because we know that we can end this horrific form of abuse if we want. And it would not even cost the Government anything new because there is already an allocated amount to do the work needed.
I know this because as a government adviser I suggested what we needed to do as part of the violence against women and girls strategy which the previous home secretary delivered — and ironically our current Prime Minister signed off as chancellor. And I mention Rishi Sunak because I hope he or someone in his team reads this article and helps put into action a policy that will prevent little girls being subjected to the torture which FGM is.
I put my head above the parapet and started to campaign against FGM because I felt that my silence was complicit. It was not easy; I lost friends and family members when I first started talking about my experiences of FGM. I am sad to say I also almost lost my life because pro FGM people wanted to shut me up by killing me. But I stood my ground because I wanted my niece and little cousins to never know the pain I did.
Today I am putting my neck out again to ask our Government to do more, and for readers to stand with me again, in making sure that happens. Because as dark as my first years of campaigning were, this city via this paper gave me hope. And with that hope we moved mountains and I think we can do that again to truly end FGM.
