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Violence against Women and Children

My Lords, violence against women and children is committed from various motives—hatred, jealousy, revenge, rage or loss of control through drink or drugs—or from an irrational and mindless assault on the nearest potential victim simply, as my noble friend Lady Gale said in her excellent introduction to the debate, because she is a woman. However, there is one kind that is unique in that, dreadful though it is in its effects, it is committed out of love. I speak of course, as I so often have over the years in your Lordships’ House, of female genital mutilation. Parents who cause this kind of physical injury to their growing daughters, or even to their baby girls, do so to protect their cultural identity and in what they overwhelmingly believe to be the child’s best interests. It is for love of their children that they commit these cruel and damaging acts and it is this that helps to make combating female genital mutilation such a formidable task. FGM happens all across sub-Saharan Africa—in Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Egypt Eritrea, Ethiopia, the Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sudan. People believe that, uncircumcised, their daughters will fail to be accepted socially and fail to find husbands. Therefore, FGM can be called a form of social control of a woman’s sexual and reproductive rights. The World Health Organisation estimates that between 130 million and 140 million girls and women have experienced female genital mutilation and up to 2 million girls a year undergo some form of the procedure, the most stringent form of which is the excision of the external genitalia, followed by a complete stitching up of the tissues over the wound. However, there is another, almost more repugnant, type, which involves cauterisation by burning or the introduction of corrosive substances into the vagina for the purpose of tightening or narrowing it. These practices are age old and perpetrated in the vast majority of cases because parents desire the best for their children. It seems strange to us now—it is strange—that FGM was carried on in Africa and in parts of Asia for centuries, perhaps for millennia, with no one in Europe or the American continent having any idea of its existence, still less its prevalence. Even in the 19th and early 20th centuries, if explorers or anthropologists had brought home travellers’ tales of this practice and the suffering that it caused to women, prudish horror would have prevented its being talked about. Though missionaries were aware of it in the beginning of the 20th century and took steps—largely ineffectual—to stop it, it was not until the 1970s that, with immigration beginning, health professionals in the United Kingdom first saw its results, usually in pregnant patients. Then gradually began a movement to monitor its happening here and the start of measures to put a stop to it, leading to the Female Circumcision Act of 1985. Now, in 2009, it is still happening here. The 2001 FORWARD study estimated that nearly 66,000 women with FGM were living in England and Wales, and the number has increased since then. FGM is against the law; performing it is against the law—a law reinforced and enlarged by the Female Genital Mutilation Act of 2003. However, just as there were no prosecutions under the previous act, so there have been none under this one. Much has happened to bring hope since then. When I first took an interest in FGM nine years ago and began working with groups and health professionals to end it, ignorance of FGM’s existence was profound. People preferred not to know. Many believed it wrong to interfere with tradition and cultural customs. What I will call the ““yuck”” factor was very evident, with those who heard about the practice recoiling from it and making a face. ““I would rather not know””, was a typical reaction. Many health professionals were ignorant of the procedure or even denied its existence in this country. No one seemed to know of the custom of immigrants taking their small daughters—infants or babies even—back to their country of origin for this purpose. All that has changed or is changing. As I have said, FGM is carried out from what may be called good motives: the welfare, as it seems to those of a very different culture from our own, of young women growing up in a society where women do not enjoy anything approaching equality and where the finding of a good husband and father of future children is paramount. In this country, if not yet to any extent in Africa, this is changing. Girls born to women of African origin have the chance here of education and a great measure of independence. If some of them suffer FGM, they will see to it that their children will not. Their children will find partners outside the ethnic group, people who find the practice of FGM repugnant. But all this is in the future. In the here and now it is said that as many as 20,000 girls are at risk of FGM in England and Wales. It has been a matter of great regret that no prosecutions have been brought under the 2003 Act. The Metropolitan Police, with their Project Azure, do their best to find and bring perpetrators to justice in the face of what amounts to almost a conspiracy of silence in the community. However, interestingly, they say that even if the Act has not resulted in prosecutions, its very existence provides a warning to potential circumcisers. People, usually women, whose intention is to carry out mutilation, are being prevented from doing so when it is explained to them that FGM is against the law and that the maximum penalty is 14 years’ imprisonment. The FGM National Clinical Group, of which I am a patron, has experience of older women going back into their communities and deterring neighbours from taking their daughters back to Somalia for circumcision to be carried out. Much more can be done to hasten the process of ending FGM in this country by education and explanation. Almost incredible as it seems, midwives at a London hospital have been told by young pregnant women whom they are examining that they believe their mutilated condition to be normal. When told that, after their babies are born, their FGM can be reversed and their condition restored to something approximating to normal, the reply has been that they are normal and it is women who have never been cut who are malformed. Sadly, they were so young—some of them babies under a year old—when the mutilation was done that they have no memory of a state prior to their being mutilated. Reversals are increasingly being done and even if, with the current state of medical science, these procedures will never restore a woman’s genitalia to their full natural function, they are still an enormous advance on what came before. Women must be urged to have reversals carried out. This restoration function will not only enormously improve their sexual and reproductive health but will also show what an enhanced level of married happiness and life itself they can confer on their daughters by resisting attempts to mutilate them.