Wales is opening its first-ever female genital mutilation (FGM) clinic to provide medical and psychological help to victims of the practice imported from Africa and Asia.
Wales is the second-smallest of the Home Nations which make up the United Kingdom, with a population of only around three million and relatively low level of immigration compared to neighbouring England — which already has five FGM clinics.
Nevertheless, figures obtained by the BBC show maternity staff in Wales were discovering a new FGM case once every three days, on average, in 2016, with the Welsh Women’s Aid charity estimated that there are at least 2,000 victims in the country.
The emergence of FGM in Britain has been one of the unfortunate downsides of the embrace of state-sponsored multiculturalism following race riots in the 1980s.
The practice is most often associated with Islamic migration, being obligatory in the Shafi’i school of Islamic jurisprudence, which is influential in Africa and also strongly promoted by the Ulema Council in Indonesia, which is the world’s largest Muslim-majority country by population.
It is not unique to or universally accepted by the religion’s adherents, however.
The National Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) estimates there are as many as 137,000 victims of FGM throughout the United Kingdom.
However, the authorities have yet to bring a single successful prosecution for the practice since it was criminalised more than 30 years ago, with the police making a number of dubious statements with respect to the crime being “nuanced” and arrests “unlikely to benefit [the] child” — generating significant public backlash, but no observable changes.
The political class remains extremely keen on mass migration and multiculturalism, however, with high-level proposals by party leaders from the regional legislature’s Equality, Local Government and Communities Committee calling to transform Wales into the world’s first “nation of sanctuary” for “refugees and asylum seekers” — despite limited public support for such policies among the Welsh people.
Sixty-eight per cent of people in Wales said immigration controls should be tighter in a 2014 poll, compared to just 5 per cent who say they should be relaxed.
Forty-one per cent also said immigration has damaged Wales, with 18 per cent saying the damage has been “very bad”, compared to 22 per cent who said it had benefited Wales, with just 5 per saying the effects have been “very good”.
Wales voted for Brexit in the June 2016 referendum on European Union membership, 53 per cent to 47 per cent.