The NHS is offering to reverse female circumcision amid concerns that there are 500 victims a year with no prosecutions

Despite having been outlawed in 1985, female circumcision is still practised in British African communities. Police have been unable to bring a single prosecution even though they suspect that community elders are being flown from the Horn of Africa to carry out the procedures.

The advertisement will appear from next month on a Somali satellite TV station much viewed in Britain. It features Juliet Albert, a midwife who does the reverse operations, and promises, in English and Somali, confidentiality for victims of female genital mutilation.

The advertisement was expected to help to undermine demand for girls to be circumcised, and to popularise the reversal procedure, Ms Albert said. Thousands of such operations have been carried out at specialist clinics and hospitals around Britain and demand is growing slowly.

A study by the Foundation for Women’s Health, Research and Development (Forward), estimated that 66,000 women living in England and Wales had been circumcised, most before leaving their country of origin. The government-funded research also found that more than 7,000 girls were at a high risk of being subjected to genital mutilation in Britain.

Sarah McCulloch, of the Agency for Culture Change Management UK, said that every year more than 500 British girls were having circumcisions. A lot of them are done in the UK, but some still travel overseas, she said.

She said that a code of silence in Britain’s African communities had allowed circumcisions to continue and prevented arrests. The unqualified female elders, known as house doctors because they act in secret in a family home, are flown into the country: What the communities do is they gather together and collect money to pay for the ticket for a ‘doctor’ to come from Somalia, Sudan, or whatever. And when she arrives here, she goes to a house and has the girls brought to her.

A 19-year-old girl in Gothenburg has been awarded compensation after having been subjected to genital mutilation in Somalia as an 11-year-old.
The girl was awarded 390,000 kronor ($52,000) in damages for abuse and gross violation of integrity, the Crime Victim Compensation and Support Authority has announced.

Then 11-years-old, the girl was taken on holiday to Somalia in 2001. While there she was subjected to genital mutilation.

She was held down by her mother and two other women while her clitoris and inner labia were removed by a man in return for payment. The girl's vagina was then sewn up down to the opening of her urethra. The whole procedure was conducted without anaesthetic.

The girl's mother later explained in her court trial that the girl was taken to Somalia to be cleansed.

The mother was later convicted for the violation in the Court of Appeal and ordered to pay her daughter 450,000 kronor in compensation.

In its decision to award the damages to the 19-year-old the Crime Victim Compensation and Support Authority wrote that the genital mutilation resembled torture and was intended to limit her possibilities to have a normal sex life.

The authority will also later consider whether the girl is entitled to further damages for pain and suffering.

Four out of ten Somali and Ethiopian women who give birth in the Netherlands have been genitally mutilated. This is relatively few, Health State Secretary Jet Bussemaker said.

The figures were recorded by research organisation TNO after questioning midwives. The number of cases of female circumcision is fairly low, since nine out of ten women in the countries of origin have been circumcised, Bussemaker reasoned.

To obtain a better picture of female circumcision, the state secretary previously announced that midwives would be registering this form of mutilation. They will also be trained in how to discuss circumcision with families.

Some 700 Mali activists, mostly women, have marched in favor of the introduction of laws to ban the practice of female genital mutilation (FMG) in Bamako.

The demonstrators presented the request directly to parliament. The long overdue initiative, organized by the Coordination of women’s NGO’s in Mali, was repeated in other areas of the country, where more women also staged small gatherings.

The rate of FMG in Mali is very high, reaching some 92% said Nicola Giovannini of the No Peace without Justice NGO to MISNA. Giovannini said that in Mali, there is a strong political consensus for a law to ban the practice, but authorities have so far suggested that Malian society itself is not yet ready to penalize this terrible and very established practice. The participation in anti FMG protests suggests that there is an ever stronger – if long overdue - desire for change.

On the occasion of the International Action Day against Female Genital Mutilation, a representative empirical study on Female Genital Mutilation in Iraqi-Kurdistan is going to be presented on February 6.

The report summarizes the results of a one-and-a-half year empirical study conducted by the German relief organization WADI. The numbers presented in the report are alarming: A vast majority of women in Iraqi-Kurdistan have undergone FGM with some regions reaching a top ratio of more than 80%.

The study provides comprehensive evidence on the underlying dynamics of FGM and helps understand, why mothers who themselves experienced the horror of mutilation allow FGM to be practiced on their daughters.

A vast majority of women who adhere to the practice believe it to be a religious obligation in Islam. Others refer to tradition and state that it has always been like that.

The study also shows a clear correlation between the level of education and the attitude towards FGM. Still, the FGM rate amongst university graduates is around 30%. But it becomes clear that with an increasing social status, women are more likely to question harmful traditions and alleged religious obligations.

Between 6,000 and 8,000 women in Austria have been forced to undergo genital mutilation, according to Social Democratic MP Petra Bayr.

Bayr, a member of the Austrian Platform against Female Genital Mutilation, said today: Many parents believe they are doing their daughters a favour by forcing them to undergo it.

She said the only way to change such thinking was to engage in awareness-raising and make it clear to parents that genital mutilation was neither called for by religion nor a pre-condition for finding a husband.

Rather, she added, genital mutilation was a violation of human rights that left its victims mentally and physically damaged for the rest of their lives.

Bayr added that her group was working with health personnel, migrant organisations and religious leaders to try to change the situation.