The UK has made great strides in eradicating the risk of female genital mutilation (FGM) being carried out on girls living in this country, experts said on Tuesday.
They said great progress had been made to change cultural perceptions towards the procedure, but more work was needed to help survivors.
Brendan Ostrowski Wynne, the co-founder of the charity The Five Foundation, believes the risk for children born here is now “close to zero”.
Speaking on the UN’s International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation, he credited the child protection measures, stronger laws and policies activists have worked hard to get in place.
This was supported anecdotally by a Somali FGM survivor from east London, who told The Standard how she witnessed her mother and other women in her community refuse to put their children through the procedure.
“The people who completely believed that it was a must back then don’t believe it now,” she said.
Specialists at clinics for FGM survivors in London also said progress was being made.
Fatima, a Somali-born counsellor for Northwick Park Hospital’s Hibiscus Clinic, in Harrow, north London, said: “FGM has been going on in communities for as long as we have been living here, but now it has really come to the surface.
“That whole stigma of ‘don’t talk about it’ is disappearing each year and more women are coming forward - especially in the younger generation.”
Although the picture is very different globally (FGM is still practised in 31 countries), the focus for girls and women living in the UK is now shifting to providing better care for the estimated 170,000 survivors living here.
Gynaecologist Dr Reeba Oliver, who runs the Lotus Clinic for Barts Health NHS Trust, said she is finding it “difficult to regenerate her services” for FGM survivors after the pandemic, when they were halted.
FGM clinics offer survivors reversal procedures, treatment for long-term effects such as infections, counselling and specialised maternity care for those who are pregnant.
Gina Acquah, a midwife at the The Hibiscus Clinic, has called for more training across the NHS so survivors are more likely to be identified and referred to these services.
She told of a client who had been to see her GP for recurring urinary tract infections multiple times before she was eventually sent to Ms Acquah’s clinic.
A major challenge in getting help to survivors is that many are too traumatised to seek help.
Sometimes “it is even difficult to get a woman to lie down for an assessment because they get flashbacks”, Ms Acquah said.
On top of this, many feel “their culture is being attacked” with some refusing reversal procedures so the man they will marry will believe they are virgins.
Ms Acquah said that for any of this to change, FGM should be seen as “everybody’s business”.
It has been illegal to perform FGM in the UK since 1985, and a criminal offence to perform FGM overseas or take a UK national or resident overseas to have FGM since 2003.
Last year saw the first conviction of its kind when Amina Noor was prosecuted for taking a three-year-old British child to Kenya for FGM.
This was made possible after it became mandatory for teachers or anyone in the health sector to report any suspected cases.
In total, there are currently more than 200 million girls and women alive who are survivors of FGM, around 170,000 of which are living in the UK, according to the latest figures from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Home Office.
NHS England said: "The NHS is committed to supporting FGM survivors which is why it has rolled out more than 20 National FGM Support Clinics across England, where patients can receive a range of support including referral to a specialist consultant where needed.”
In the second quarter of 2023, the most recent time period for which NHS data is available, 735 individual patients were seen in FGM clinics across London, 240 of which were newly recorded.
The boroughs where the most patients were seen were Brent (135), Ealing (85) and Enfield (50).
But several health professionals in the sector believe that the number of women who look for help from services represent “just a fraction” of how many are actually affected by FGM.
The Evening Standard has been at the forefront of the campaign to confront the practice of female genital mutilation — both by people living in the UK who have their daughters mutilated abroad and in countries where the practice remains commonplace.
The Home Office, which has pledged £8.4 million for organisations over the next two years, said: “FGM is a crime and it is child abuse. We are fully committed to tackling this awful practice and work to ensure we do everything we can to protect victims and prevent these crimes from happening.”
