Is the zeal to secure a first FGM conviction risking terrible injustices?
The medical evidence was scant. The main witness and detective were friends linked to the same charity. No wonder Britain’s second female genital mutilation trial collapsed last week
The young father in the dock at Bristol Crown Court was accused of the most shameful crime. ‘Cruelty on a person under the age of 16’, it said on the indictment, which gave little indication of the circumstances surrounding his arrest.
All child cruelty cases are, by their very nature, disturbing, but few more so than the events that led to this trial.
The defendant, we heard, was a 29-year-old Somali-born taxi driver who cannot be named for legal reasons; the victim, the jury was told, was his six-year-old daughter.
The police investigation was both complex and challenging. Detectives admitted there were still unanswered questions about what had actually happened.
They were certain of one thing, though. At some stage, the little girl was taken to an unknown address, possibly in the Montpelier district of Bristol, and subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM). FGM also has other names, such as ‘ female circumcision’ or ‘cutting’. The purpose, however, is always the same: to control and subjugate women.
In Africa, where FGM is prevalent, it is not uncommon for girls and young women to be held down, screaming, by relatives during the procedure, which, in its most extreme form, involves total or partial removal of the external genitalia to take away pleasurable sensation.
In cultures where FGM is practised, ‘uncut’ women are regarded as unsuitable for marriage because their sexual purity is uncertain.
The Bristol girl, the court heard, was found to have a small lesion made, it was suspected, not with a blade, but with a hot, sharp object — ‘something the size of a knitting needle’ — and classed as type 4 FGM. It is not one of the most severe forms, but still leaves a mark and carries a ten-year-jail sentence.
The thought of such medieval savagery actually taking place in Britain — modern, multicultural Britain — is truly shocking. According to anti- FGM campaigners, thousands of girls, in mainly African and Asian communities, in towns and cities across the country, are at risk of FGM.
Yet one crucial statistic undermines the received wisdom about FGM: there has not been a single conviction in the UK since FGM was made illegal in 1985, more than three decades ago. Which brings us back to Bristol. The father of the six-year-old girl, who has lived under a cloud of suspicion for the past two years, walked free from court last week after the judge ordered the jury to acquit him: he had no case to answer, the judge said.
The entire prosecution, in fact, relied on medical evidence that was of ‘ no value clinically or forensically’ and the testimony of a key witness was ‘unsatisfactory’. The witness in question, Sami Ullah, was a passenger in the defendant’s private hire car in 2016 when, during an extraordinary conversation, the driver apparently admitted, in broken english, that his daughter had undergone FGM.
Mr Ullah, now 21, was an ‘ honest witness’, the judge said, but he was ‘influenced’ by his role as an activist with the anti-FGM charity Integrate UK. ‘ Deeply troubling’ is how the judge described what he had heard in court before halting the trial.
And there was a further twist. The officer who led the investigation, DCI Leanne Pook, was also a trustee of Integrate UK and knew Mr Ullah personally, it emerged after the trial.
her appointment was approved by Avon & Somerset Police, but DCI Pook, a committed and capable officer, has faced accusations from the local MP and the Somali community that her position with the charity and her friendship with Mr Ullah created a ‘conflict of interest’.
Police worked with Channel 4’s Dispatches in anticipation of a possible guilty verdict making legal history. Cameras followed DCI Pook and her small team during the investigation. The documentary, The FGM Detectives, was finally broadcast a few days ago, but with a very different ending.
The controversy surrounding the failed prosecution was summed up by a respected former midwife and health visitor who has worked extensively with African communities both in London and abroad in ethiopia and Somalia.
‘Desperation to secure a conviction enabled this case, based on a mixture of hearsay and inconclusive medical evidence, to be tried,’ she tweeted.
The criticism, shared by other professionals, is understandable.
BACK in 2015, Dr Dhanuson Dharmasena, a London hospital doctor, became the first person to stand trial in relation to FGM.
The decision to charge him was announced in a blaze of publicity and came just days before Alison Saunders, the Director of Public Prosecutions, appeared before the Commons home Affairs Select Committee to explain why there had been no FGM prosecutions despite a hefty £35 million of government funding being spent in attempts to eradicate it.
In the end, the jury took 25 minutes to acquit Dr Dharmasena.
Then, as now, there were claims that the case was politically motivated — a Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) ‘show trial’ following lobbying by campaigning charities and feminist groups which receive that government funding.
It would be naïve to think FGM is not practised in Britain at all, and officers like DCI Pook should be commended for the work they do in raising awareness about FGM. Theirs is a task made infinitely harder because few in the community where girls might be at risk are willing to break rank and speak out.
But is FGM really happening on the scale suggested by the FGM lobby and some politicians?
‘As we speak, somewhere in London a young girl is being cut, and we in Parliament are unable to do anything to stop it happening,’ declared Labour MP Keith Vaz in 2015, when he was chairman of the home Affairs Select Committee. he called FGM an ‘ongoing national scandal’.
The statement, which is widely repeated in articles about FGM, does not stand up to scrutiny.
There were 5,391 newly recorded cases of FGM identified by GPs and NhS trusts in the year to March 2017. ‘Newly recorded’ means women who have had their details noted for the first time.
Of those 5,391, only 57 ‘procedures’ were performed in the UK, of which 50 were in the category of ‘piercings’, which are often undertaken by consenting women for cosmetic reasons or to enhance their sex lives.
SO ALMOST no hard medical data exists to support the view that FGM is endemic in Britain. It doesn’t mean FGM is not prevalent, but there is no evidence that it is.
Critics like Brid hehir — the former midwife and health visitor who tweeted about the shortcomings of the Bristol prosecution mentioned earlier — blame the culture of overzealousness for some children needlessly being taken into care or placed on child protection plans.
Isn’t there an element of hypocrisy and double standards about the current FGM orthodoxy?
Compare, for example, the way the liberal establishment embraced the concerns of FGM campaigners, while, at the same time, dismissing attempts to expose predatory Asian grooming gangs as racist, which stigmatised the Pakistani community.
Integrate UK says 2,000 girls in the Bristol area alone are at risk of FGM. The figure is understood to be based on girls in the city who come from FGM-practising countries, which include Somalia, Sudan, eritrea, egypt and Gambia.
But, in a recent article for the Guardian newspaper, Somali-British novelist Nadifa Mohamed argued that making such sweeping cultural assumptions was flawed.
‘We are now seeing the second and third-generation of British-Somali girls who only know of FGM from campaigns, rather than lived experience,’ she wrote. ‘ Nearly all UK families from countries where it [FGM] is prevalent know it is harmful and illegal, and away from the dominant societies and cultures where it is practised, they see no reason to continue the tradition.’
Leaders of the Somali community in Bristol have now called for a public inquiry into the way the NhS collects and records FGM cases.
They accused the police and the CPS, under the leadership of Alison Saunders, of being ‘very excited about the race to get the first [FGM] conviction’ at any cost, an allegation that was refuted by DCI Pook in the Channel 4 programme.
The man at the centre of the events in Bristol arrived in the UK from Somalia and began plying his trade as a private hire taxi driver, later joining Uber.
On March 9, 2016, he picked up Sami Ullah, an outreach worker with Integrate UK, from Bristol Temple Meads railway station.
Who could have predicted that a ten-minute journey to the charity’s offices would lead to a costly and time-consuming criminal investigation, embroil the police and the CPS in controversy and become the subject of a TV documentary?
It all began, according to Mr Ullah, when the driver asked him about his plans and he told him he was going to essex to deliver a safeguarding session on FGM. ‘I asked him if he
knew what FGM was,’ Mr Ullah said in court. ‘He didn’t.
‘I then used words from the Somali language. A word meaning to make permissible. He didn’t understand that. I then used another word. He seemed to understand and made a cross with his index fingers, saying: “You mean cutting”.
‘I agreed with him that was what it was. He said it was very wrong, and I agreed with him. He said: “I did the small one [the less severe form of FGM] to my daughter, but other people do the big one.”
‘ I questioned him by saying: “Really?” He told me he’d got it done in an area of Bristol; Montpelier was the area he named.’
Mr Ullah used Uber’s feedback service to identify the Somalian, before reporting him to the police.
The taxi driver was arrested shortly afterwards. His statement was taken by DCI Pook, the senior investigating officer. He denied that any conversation about FGM had taken place.
There was no note or recording of his alleged admission, nor was he asked to confirm or repeat anything he said. English is not his first language. Neither does Mr Ullah, who was seated in the back of his car, speak Somali.
The shortcomings were obviously picked up by the jury. Shortly before the trial collapsed, a note was handed to the judge with a series of questions. One of them was: ‘How reliable is the conversation between the defendant and Sami Ullah if English is a problem?’
If, say, a reporter had obtained an explosive story in such questionable circumstances, it would never have seen the light of day.
Yet, in June last year, after medical evidence had been obtained, the driver was charged.
Integrate UK sent DCI Leanne Pook, a trustee of the charity, a large chocolate cake. She posted a photo on Twitter with the caption: ‘ From our gorgeous friends @IntegrateUK who want to say thanks to the cops.’
If there was a hint of hubris in the exchange, it was premature.
MEDICAL evidence proved to be as shaky as the ‘admission’ in the taxi. The first medical examination had found a tiny mark on the little girl, but the second, by a different expert four months later, could not corroborate the initial finding.
DCI Pook’s reaction to the news was captured on TV. ‘That’s just a hammer blow to our case,’ she admitted. ‘ I’m disappointed because I don’t think we will get justice for this little girl.’ Her mood changed, however, when she received the full report from the second doctor, which revealed that it was possible nothing had been found because the alleged injury might have healed by the time she saw the youngster.
Even so, there were other issues with the medical evidence. Photographs of the girl’s alleged injury were taken on equipment that were 15 years old. All but four of the 25 pictures were blurred.
In court, consultant gynaecologist Nicholas Morris, called to give evidence for the defence, said he saw no trace of an FGM procedure in any of the photos.
Alison Saunders insists the CPS does not ‘shy away from difficult cases’. But surely this case should never have gone to trial at all.
Mr Morris, who set up an FGM clinic in 1997 to help African immigrants arriving in the UK, the majority from Somalia, is highly respected. In April, he was due to attend an FGM conference hosted by Integrate. His invitation has now been withdrawn.
‘ I know absolutely nothing about this,’ said Dave McCallum, chairman of the charity’s board of trustees and a former detective chief inspector with the Avon & Somerset force.
Mr Morris told us: ‘I can only conclude that some in the charity think that, by appearing for the defence, I am in some way supportive of FGM.
‘But I spoke as I found, as I am legally and medically bound to do. The crux of the matter for me was there was no evidence of any offence having been committed as it was presented in court.’
Founded in 2009 as Integrate Bristol, the charity became a nationwide organisation in 2016. Latest accounts show it received funding from Bristol City Council (£4,490), Avon & Somerset Police (£10,000) and the Home Office (£24,830).
Since 2016, more than 100 organisations and community projects have received government funding to tackle FGM.
Yet health professionals working on the ground, like former midwife Brid Hehir, remain convinced that claims of an FGM ‘epidemic’ have been ‘grossly exaggerated’.
‘The reality is that in the past four years, when [FGM] campaigners have been at their busiest, nothing has been identified,’ said Miss Hehir, who has investigated the issue for the Nursing Standard journal.
‘During the time I was working in London, none of my colleagues in healthcare, including community nurses, health visitors, child protection experts and paediatricians, ever saw a child who had undergone FGM, and neither did I.’