Why are British police stopping travellers at St Pancras to ask about FGM?
It’s a barbaric practice inflicted on girls in Africa which campaigners insist is rife here. Scotland Yard says it’s ‘determined’ to secure a conviction – but some experts say the claims are grossly exaggerated
TRAVEL-WEARY Eurostar passengers disembarking at London’s St Pancras International railway station last week could have been forgiven for thinking they had stepped into the middle of a major crime scene.
As well as the usual passport checks, those arriving at the terminus from Paris and Brussels were grilled about where they had been on holiday, who they had stayed with and how long they had been away for — the kind of questions usually reserved for suspected terrorists, drug smugglers or illegal immigrants.
But officials were also stopping young families of all ethnic backgrounds who looked utterly bewildered when they found themselves on the receiving end of questions about Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) — before being handed leaflets about this barbaric practice.
‘we are absolutely determined to obtain a successful prosecution,’ declared Inspector Allen Davis, of Scotland yard, who arrived at the station to oversee the latest stage of Operation Limelight, an initiative involving officers from the Metropolitan Police, British Transport Police and the UK Border Force.
For several years now, police have been swooping on passengers on flights into the UK from countries in Africa and Asia. But this is the first time they have targeted those arriving by train into Kent and London, stopping those who may have travelled from ‘countries of prevalence’ linked to FGM, such as Somalia or Ethiopia.
Many will argue that the exercise is laudable. FGM — the practice of cutting a girl’s genitals — has been illegal in the UK since 1985. In 2003, the law was further strengthened to prevent girls being taken abroad to have the abhorrent procedure, which is carried out for cultural or religious reasons.
Even stricter controls were introduced in 2015, making it a crime to fail to protect a girl from risk of FGM as well as a legal requirement for health professionals, teachers and social workers to report cases of FGM in children to the police.
yet over the past 32 years, despite the best efforts of the Police and the CPS, there has not been a single successful FGM prosecution in Britain.
Anti-FGM campaigners argue that this is a sign of just how insidious this appalling practice is and have increased calls for further action. SO,
TOO, have politicians. In 2014, Labour MP Keith Vaz, then chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, described FGM as a ‘national scandal’ and, despite the lack of evidence to support his claim, insisted that ‘young girls are being mutilated every hour of every day’.
The way FGM statistics are recorded by NHS Digital do not help to clarify the situation.
The figures are divided into four types, with further divisions, ranging from the removal of the clitoris to the narrowing of the vaginal opening. They also include women who have had genital piercings rather than any cutting.
The term ‘newly recorded’ is used, suggesting these are recent procedures, but the figures include historic cases of women from overseas who have had their details noted for the first time and may have had FGM years earlier.
Indeed, of the 5,391 ‘ newly recorded’ cases last year, only 112 involved women and girls born in the UK. Only 57 cases involved FGM undertaken in the UK and around 50 of those were genital piercings. The remaining seven cases did not involve cutting and there is no indication that they refer to children.
yet, as Inspector Davis made so clear at St Pancras this week, political pressure continues to mount on the police and the CPS to find an FGM perpetrator, someone who has performed it on a child, so they can secure the UK’s first conviction.
And while no one would argue against the need to stamp out a cruel ritual which has its roots in Africa and some parts of Asia, there is growing concern about the heavy- handed approach being taken by the authorities when the evidence suggests that FGM in the UK may not be as prevalent as once believed. Certainly, the idea that thousands of young girls are being dragged abroad each summer for the FGM ‘cutting season’ — as suggested by the high police presence at Eurostar stations in London and Kent last week — does not appear to bear scrutiny.
One former midwife and health visitor, who spent her career working in Ethiopia, Somalia and Central London, says that claims of an FGM ‘epidemic’ are ‘grossly exaggerated’ and ‘ criminalise entire communities’.
‘This is causing harm to some of the most vulnerable people in society,’ says Brid Hehir, who first came across FGM — ‘ very occasionally’ — while working in Africa, but never came across a case involving a child in the UK.
Ms Hehir, who has investigated the issue for the The Nursing Standard journal, adds: ‘It baffles me that suddenly, overnight, there is this huge FGM problem when throughout my working life in London — and my colleagues’ working lives — we had never come across it. There’s something really wrong.’
Other experts claim false accusations have seen children being taken into care or placed on child protection plans for months at a time while extensive and of ten drawn- out inquiries are made.
The African diaspora women’s campaign group Forward told the Mail this week of one case involving an eight-year-old girl being placed into foster care for eight months while waiting to be examined. She was subsequently found not to have had FGM. ‘Professionals are
sometimes fearful of things going wrong so sometimes adopt a kneejerk approach with FGM cases leading to procedural heavyhandedness,’ says Toks Okeniyi, the charity’s head of UK programmes and operations.
‘An example of this heavy-handedness is a woman who has just given birth to a baby girl being interviewed in hospital by social workers,’ she adds. ‘This can affect the bonding process between mother and baby and the mother is often terrified that her baby will be taken away.’
The charity has found that those falsely accused face psychological distress as well as financial hardship because they usually do not have access to legal aid.
One falsely accused mother, speaking under condition of anonymity, told of her ordeal to BBC’s Newsnight earlier this month. She explained how, after a midwife mentioned FGM during her third pregnancy, she asked a question about it to clarify what it was. ‘It was just curiosity really,’ she said.
That evening, a policeman arrived on her doorstep and warned her about the practice before handing her an information leaflet.
A year later, the same officer returned with a social worker saying they had been informed that she had undergone the procedure and that there were concerns of it being carried out on her daughters.
The mother denied the allegations but her daughters were placed on a child protection plan and closely monitored before they’d even been examined.
‘The atmosphere changed in the house. I wasn’t myself,’ she said. ‘I’d just had a baby. I wasn’t given time to recover. It felt like the whole world was crumbling down on me and my children’s behaviour changed in school.’
She told how she and her children had to have examinations. ‘And I knew that I hadn’t undergone FGM and my children hadn’t undergone any FGM and my children were fine and healthy. I hadn’t hurt them in any way.’
Earlier this year, family solicitor Dee Aktar represented another mother falsely accused of carrying out FGM on her daughter.
The unsubstantiated claims, which were made by the woman’s husband, came against a background of domestic abuse and the parents’ subsequent divorce.
Even when a physical examination proved the child had not been subjected to FGM, the mother’s ordeal was not over. The father then claimed the child was at risk of being forced to undergo the procedure in the future, triggering an immediate FGM Protection Order banning the mother from taking her daughter abroad.
The ensuing legal proceedings in the Family Court involved police and social services and left the woman facing the prospect of losing her children, not to mention a potential criminal trial.
‘ Understandably it was very stressful for her,’ said Ms Aktar, who works in the family law team at Miles & Partners Solicitors in London. She was adamant from the start that there shouldn’t have been any suspicions at all. She hadn’t had FGM and none of her other daughters had had it done.
‘It was clear to us our client had been falsely accused, but it took a lot of evidence gathering and presentation of a strong legal defence to convince the court of this and to free our client from the cloud of suspicion hanging over her.’
The mother was finally exonerated by a judge earlier this year.
Dr Dhanuson Dharmasena, a junior doctor at London’s Whittington Hospital, also found himself on the wrong side of the law two years ago when he became the first person in the UK to stand trial in relation to FGM since it was banned in 1985. Dr Dharmasena had been accused of illegally stitching a 24year-old woman back up after she gave birth, redoing the mutilation she suffered as a six-year- old in Somalia before her family came to Britain in the Nineties. In reality, the then 32-year- old doctor had saved the woman’s life by suturing her to stop her bleeding from an incision required for childbirth.
But even before he had set foot in court, the decision to prosecute Dr Dharmasena was announced with a fanfare of publicity by Director of Public Prosecutions Alison Saunders and hailed as a landmark case by anti-FGM campaigners and children’s charities.
But the jury at Southwark Crown Court that heard the flimsy evidence against Dr Dharmasena took less than 30 minutes to acquit him. A second accused man, a translator present during the birth, was also found not guilty of aiding and abetting the doctor. His lawyer described the prosecution as a ‘show trial’.
Speaking afterwards, Dr David Richmond, president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said the year-long case had ‘put back action against FGM’ and that ‘obstetricians — indeed all clinical staff — must be able to exercise their clinical judgment to provide safe, highquality care for the women they serve without the shadow of prosecution.’
Doctors on the front line do not believe FGM is taking place on anywhere near the scale that has been suggested.
Dr Catherine White is clinical director at St Mary’s Sexual Assault Referral Centre in Manchester, where girls deemed to be at risk are referred by police and social services.
She said: ‘Given the demographics of the area we cover and given the amount of publicity that went round at the beginning, everyone was expecting to see more cases, but we’ve not seen many at all.’
Since November 2014 when the referrals began, the clinic has seen just 44 referrals. OF
THOSE, only 14 girls showed any sign of FGM and, in each instance, the girls had not been born in the UK and the procedure had been carried out abroad before they came to live here.
Dr White added: ‘We’ve had some families who insist they haven’t had it done, they haven’t even heard of FGM, but the children might have been removed from the family and then we find, upon examination, that they haven’t had it done.’
Concerns have also been raised about the work of one of the UK’s most high-profile FGM campaigners — Comfort Momoh, a Nigerianborn midwife who set up the country’s first FGM clinic at Guys’ and St Thomas’ Hospital in London and was awarded an MBE for services to women’s healthcare in 2008.
Four years ago, Mrs Momoh claimed her own research revealed that more than half of GPs in London had seen at least one woman in the past 12 months who had suffered FGM.
She is now under investigation after apparently exaggerating her qualifications by referring to herself as Dr Momoh.
While the 55-year- old has an honorary doctorate from Middlesex University, she is not a qualified medical doctor and has no right
to use the title. Mrs Momoh, who is being investigated by The Nursing and Midwifery Council, is also alleged to have examined children for signs of FGM despite not having the relevant qualifications.
Official medical guidelines state that only a doctor with specialist training should carry out such examinations.
Her expertise was first called into question in 2014 when a judge described her as ‘not a reliable witness’ during a court case in Leeds in which a girl was alleged to have undergone FGM. After examining the child, Mrs Momoh originally said there was evidence to suggest ‘some form of FGM’. In oral evidence in court, she changed her findings.
Sir James Munby, president of the Family Division, said she merited ‘harsh criticism’ and had ‘difficulty in providing answers about even the simplest factual question’. He called her report on the child ‘a remarkably shoddy piece of work’ and ‘worse than useless’.
She has hit back at criticisms, saying that while she isn’t a qualified doctor, 35 years of experience around FGM make her an expert in the field.
‘I have made FGM known in this country when nobody wanted to know anything about it. I have encouraged people to speak out. I have supported survivors,’ she says.
‘I’ve got nothing to hide. I’ve done nothing wrong. The struggle continues, to support victims and to end FGM. That is the only aim of my life and I will continue.’
No one, of course, would argue against a call to bring about an end to FGM. It has become a hugely popular cause among politicians — as well as a ‘safe horse’ to back.
As former midwife and health visitor Brid Hehir puts it: ‘An entire industry has developed around FGM. And you’re either with them or against them.’
The question is, whether the kind of ostentatious displays seen at St Pancras this week — and regularly seen at airports such as Heathrow and Gatwick — are doing anything to help.
Certainly there is little sign that the £35 million pledged by the Government in 2013 to eradicate FGM in the UK and abroad is doing any good.
According to Toks Okeniyi, of Forward, a more ‘nuanced approach’ is required: ‘Professionals need to be sensitive to the difficulties this subject raises for survivors, victims and potential victims of FGM.
‘More emphasis should be placed on education and the importance of working with practising communities.’
Indeed, if politicians are really determined to see an end to FGM then they need to find a way to break the cycle in which it is passed from generation to generation by working with young girls and communities to ensure they are aware of their rights rather than lying in wait at airports and railways stations hoping to find someone to prosecute.