FGM in the UK

@PotholeParadies

And I bet the numbers are much higher than that, but it’s impossible to know, especially if these girls haven’t been in school for months. We’ve been trained in spotting signs but that’s impossible to do over teams

The government will have to factor in "the pandemic influence". Or be told loudly to.

They must keep funding high.

I don’t understand why the parents aren’t routinely prosecuted?

It’s so unbearably sad that in the U.K. today the sources of support for these victims are shrinking all the time. Why would any girl or woman in these communities reach out to a wider society that’s fighting a rearguard action to classify a woman, and where women in prisons are legally allowed to be raped?

Thanks for bumping.

I learned from another goady thread that Hibo is selling t shirts to help fund her campaigns. She's a

Hibo is an absolute star, she shares her story regularly to highlight the practice.

I do remember seeing on Twitter about a woman who had grown up in the Middle East but was married to a man in Africa as a second or third wife where he wanted her to be subjected to infibulation because he preferred having sex with that barbarity having been carried out.

Thanks for the thread, OP. Such a difficult topic, and so hard to know how to even start to challenge it.

The fact that procuring FGM has been a criminal act since 1985 with so few prosecutions and just one conviction is depressing. As has been so clearly explained, parents believe that FGM makes their daughters more marriageable. Changing that mindset seems so difficult and that's why supporting courageous women like Hibo Wardere and Nimko Ali is so important.
It is depressing that arrogant activists believe they can lecture these women about wrongthink while completely ignoring the terrible damage done to women.

It is just horrendous.

QuentinWInters, in Sue Lloyd-Roberts' book 'The War on Women', there's a chapter on FGM where she interviews some UK men with heritage from cultures that practice it,and she says they 'did not seem to care much either way', but mothers etc say their daughters couldn't get married without being cut. But some powerful men she spoke to (imams, even Presidents) were very pro-it. She seemed to think one reason it was done was to curb 'women's natural inclination to enjoy illicit sex'.

Thanks for bumping this thread. For those of us not from a community where FGM is practiced it does seem like how do you fight against this, practically speaking. I’ve read survivors testimony to learn about it, support and share content online, donated when I have seen stalls etc.

What else can we do?

I have just found this link on the Forward site www.forwarduk.org.uk./forward-publications/fgm-safeguarding-bristol-study/ going to read it in detail now, it’s a small sample size and seems to be self-reported research but the claim is U.K. safeguarding policies against FGM may actually be counterproductive, which is very concerning.

I’m going to have a bit more of a read in detail.

I work in a school where before all holidays we subtly try and find out where the girls are going on holiday and if at all concerned we report. The police have confiscated passports before. Whereas, now it’s harder as even if the passport is taken away it’s happening in the U.K.

There is an utterly heartbreaking episode of Storyville, 'Defying the Cutting Season'. It is horrendous watching the girls struggle to comprehend how the family that they love would want to hurt them like this.
It's very difficult viewing, but there are some courageous stories being told.

I recognise that perhaps it may not always be in a child's best interests to prosecute, but all of them?

'Practitioners' who aren't the parents presumably should always be prosecuted.

I don't know about parents - if they knew that it will be prosecuted, that it is completely unacceptable, would that be a deterrent? If not, is there ever any way of prosecuting but delaying custodial elements of the sentence until the child is an adult?

Seems counter intuitive to make it worse for the woman. Unless they don’t have a choice in having sex too?

I admire HIbo so much, she's an absolute warrior. So depressing it is still so rife. My cousin left her husband after he tried to send their daughter abroad to be cut. She was 10.

@stumbledin You are correct that Orchid Project's work in the UK is mainly about advocacy. I think it is worth funding this work because aside from getting it onto the UK press agenda and foreign policy agenda, the advocacy has helped to secure at least one large grant out of DFID (£50 million in 2018) to fund field programmes aimed at reducing the incidence of the practice in countries where it is common. Hopefully this can be repeated even after the organisational changes that have occurred with DFID.

In the field, some anti-FGM charities focus on providing a refuge so that an individual girl who does not want to be cut can go somewhere to avoid that. That is laudable, but it requires any such girl to give up her home, her family relationships and her community, and it does not change whether the practice continues to occur in her community. So those charities can help a few girls choose to make a very difficult individual decision, but they do not try to stop the practice from occurring in general.
For this reason, I think it may be more effective to support charities who are trying to stop the practice at the level of an entire community As a Western charity, Orchid Project does not directly go into communities and tell people what to do, nor should it, but Orchid Project does provide financial, technical and organisational support to in-country grassroots organisations trying to drive that sort of change. Based on their accounts, I believe that sort of effort accounted for about 40% of their budget in 2018/2019.
In order to support them, one does have to believe that their staff is doing worthwhile work, because staff were 40% of their budget, and rent and general/admin were another 10% (with the residual 10% being advocacy programmes and communications). The staff are mostly doing the actual work of creating and sharing knowledge about the practice, and creating advocacy, training and communications programmes to make it stop.
I do personally believe in the approach or I would not have supported them. My only personal affiliation with them is as a donor who has been supporting them for almost ten years.

The main reason I have posted here is not about Orchid Project. It is rather to illustrate that there is something that women and men can do about this, which is to research, identify and then financially support organisations such as Orchid - and I am sure there are others - who are doing serious work to try to make this stop. The sums involved are really not that large: Orchid Project had an annual budget of £1 million in the most recently reported year. So it would not take that many donors to meaningfully increase the strength of the effort to make this stop.

Most are too young to seek help... just children and so defenceless

Just unbearable.