A judge in Manchester has issued an FGM protection order to stop a mother who took three girls to India to be mutilated from doing the same to a fourth.
Family court judge Robert Jordan issued the Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) Order at the request of social services, the Bicester Advertiser reports.
“The effect of the cultural pressure overrode the mother’s maternal instinct,” the judge speculated.
“As a consequence of religious and cultural pressure the mother facilitated the mutilation of her children.”
He added: “That cultural pressure still exists in their country of origin – and undoubtedly in this country.”
Judge Jordan said FGM was “utterly unacceptable” and a “gross abuse of human rights”, and was clear that the mother had “facilitated” the mutilation of the three sisters of the girl the protection order applied to — yet reports give no indication that Greater Manchester Police have pressed any charges or asked the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to take up the girls’ cases in court.
The United Kingdom is a notoriously soft touch on FGM, having achieved precisely zero convictions for the crime, despite it being outlawed more than thirty years ago. Only a handful of prosecutions have even been attempted, with the most recent collapsing in February 2018.
With the number of victims of FGM numbering in the tens of thousands, this long-running failure is a source of considerable public anger — considering neighbouring France has secured dozens of convictions, sentencing more than a hundred abusers in 2014 alone.
The reason for Britain’s relative lack of success in tackling FGM may be found in its police forces, which have frequently let slip that they do not believe charging parents is in the public interest.
West Midlands Police — famous for its zero-tolerance approach to so-called ‘hate speech’ online, increasing arrests for ‘offensive’ comments by an astonishing 877 per cent between 2014 and 2016 — tweeted that “Prosecuting/jailing parents [for FGM is] unlikely to benefit [the] child” in February 2017.
Ivan Balchatchet, the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s lead on ‘honour’ violence, female genital mutilation, and forced marriage, has also dismissed concerns about the lack of prosecutions for FGM, telling a concerned member of the public: “There are many nuances to this crime type, which even third-sector charitable organisations, do not claim to share a nexus with your rationale of concerns for the lack of successful prosecutions [sic].”
Police authorities have tended to apologise and “clarify” their positions on FGM after their statements have prompted public criticism, but they are not always so conciliatory.
For example, Surrey Police responded to social media users who took it to task for its failure to secure any convictions by threatening to investigate them for “Islamaphobic [sic] abuse”.
FGM is not unique to Muslim communities, although it is obligatory in the Shafi’i school of Islamic jurisprudence, and strongly supported by bodies such as the Indonesian Ulema Council — the highest Islamic clerical authority in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country.
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