Authors: Hibo Wardere
Funke was a survivor of FGM, which was carried out when she was in her teens at the request of the family of the man she would be forced to marry back in Nigeria. She was forced to undergo the
Type 2 procedure, and had her clitoris and labia removed against her will. The wounds never properly healed, and would usually open up again after sexual intercourse, causing her horrific pain each
time. Given her suffering, she was adamant that her daughters, who were aged twelve, nine and six, would not experience the same agony. Her children were born in Nigeria, but have had British
residency since Funke divorced their father and moved with them to the UK. She was well aware that her ex-husband, who has a history of violence, had always been keen to get the girls cut. Early in
2015, he started applying pressure on her via telephone calls and texts from Nigeria, demanding that the girls undergo circumcision. Funke knew her ex-husband viewed mutilating the girls as both
‘inevitable and necessary’ and, despite the fact that FGM was outlawed in Nigeria in May 2015, he ordered Funke to prepare the girls for travel in the summer holidays.
Here, in a family court transcript, as she made a request to the judge to ban the girls’ father from cutting them, she describes what she was up against.
In February 2015, he sent the ceremonial robes from Nigeria in preparation for [the cutting]. Now the school holiday is upon us he has told me, via messages, that he
expects to see the children immediately. He has requested that the two elder girls be sent now. He is angry because the eldest is over ten years old and past the usual age for the procedure to
happen . . .
She goes on to describe how he also requested the umbilical cords and first teeth of the children to be used as part of the ceremony. Upon hearing her testimony, the judge granted Funke a FGM
Protection Order. This is a civil measure that can be requested by either the female in jeopardy, a relevant third party or any other person with the permission of the court, which offers
protection to victims and potential victims of FGM, the breach of which is a criminal offence. The order came into effect immediately, and was then served on their father in Nigeria, along with
injunctions that stopped him coming within 100 metres of the girls’ mother, their home or their school.
The situation that Funke found herself in is far from uncommon – there must have been thousands of mothers before her who were desperate to protect their daughters but lacked the
knowledge, resources and, until 2015, law to make it happen. However, just as the legal system adapts to try to protect children like Funke’s daughters, the face of FGM in Britain is also
changing to evade it. With the price of airline tickets soaring, families in the UK are now holding what are referred to as ‘FGM parties’, whereby relatives can avoid the cost of
sending a group of girls back to villages where they will be cut by clubbing together to pay the cost of one single village cutter to travel to the UK instead.
Imagine the scene: in a suburban living room in Bristol, eight girls line up alongside their cousins. They are not sure why, but a buzz of excitement has been building all week. They are wearing
special clothes which have been bought for the occasion, and their favourite foods have filled the family home for days. Their extended families have gathered, and everyone seems happy. The girls
don’t know what is about to take place, or who the strange woman with wrinkled hands is, although she seems to be someone of great importance, and each of their parents makes a point of
thanking her in turn for undertaking the journey alone. All the eight girls understand is that whatever is about to happen to them will prepare them for being a woman. An hour later the living room
smells of fear and blood, and hot tears streak the girls’ faces, as the stranger wreaks havoc on their young bodies with the razor blades their parents have bought for the job.
The cutter herself will be on a plane home before there is any chance of her being detected, her bags heavy with the money that exchanged hands for her trouble. After all, an elderly woman
travelling alone, claiming to be visiting family, would be no cause for concern to Border Agency staff. With the cutting done at the beginning of the summer holidays, by the time the girls are fit
and recovered enough to return to school in September, the last thing they will want to do is alert anyone and go over the awful events of that day. Instead, they say nothing, and neither do their
parents, and another case of FGM in Britain goes unprosecuted.
Families have changed tack now that the authorities have cottoned on to the practice of taking girls out of the country to be cut, intercepting them before they can make the journey abroad.
Instead, girls are being cut in living rooms up and down the country. Such is the secrecy of this practice that it goes undetected, until, that is, a girl shows up years later in an antenatal ward,
pregnant herself, when it is impossible to tell when – let alone where or how – she was cut, and at which stage she’s unlikely to want to see her parents jailed for their actions,
or to rake up the past that they have long buried. And so it continues.
It is, of course, impossible to get anyone to go on record with firm evidence of these FGM parties. There are rumours of them in any community where families have been practising FGM for
generations, but the minute the police press anyone for further details about who is involved and what takes place and where, all conversations are shut down. No one will give specific details;
they only insist time and time again that it happens.
This is the problem that the police, social services and healthcare workers in the UK face constantly. Aniso was a young teenage girl living with her mother in London, in neglectful conditions.
Her relationship with her mother had broken down and so she contacted social services. She was placed with a foster family and went on to tell the welfare officers that she had been a victim of FGM
and that it had been arranged by her mother. An investigation by the Metropolitan Police and social services was opened immediately, and after interviews, it was agreed that there was enough
evidence to bring the first criminal case against FGM since the legislation was passed in 1985. But during the investigation, presumably when officers told Aniso they were ready to prosecute her
mother, she changed her mind and refused to co-operate with police. She told them she feared the community would ostracise her if she testified against her mother in court.
The officers were perplexed: she’d come to them to report this, and she’d seemed happy to give a statement when their investigation started. They tried to convince her to change her
mind, offering her support from both the police and third-sector agencies, and impressed on her the importance of standing up to a practice that amounted to child abuse. But Aniso refused; she told
them that if they made her go to court she would kill herself.
The officers, who had spent many man-hours on the case, were left with no other choice but to abandon it, and the paperwork was placed at the back of a file, another potential prosecution lost
to them. Unfortunately, this is not an unfamiliar story for the law-enforcement agencies. Girls and young women refusing to testify against their parents is one of the major reasons why there has
not been one single successful prosecution in thirty years.
However, this does not mean that the police are not trying to change this situation. Since 2012, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has decided that no further action should be taken on
thirteen cases of FGM that the police have brought before them.
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That’s thirteen files, all those man-hours, all those officers, all those statements and, most
importantly, thirteen children who have not had any justice for the child abuse that was carried out on them. Imagine all the other cases that came before 2012 which were also dismissed.
Too often the finger of blame is pointed at the police for not having secured any successful prosecutions, and, given this fact, some have questioned whether FGM is even a problem in Britain
today. Sadly, this isn’t the case. I spoke to a detective who has been investigating child abuse for the last eleven years. She works as part of the Metropolitan Police’s Project Azure,
a specialist unit set up to investigate incidents of FGM in London.
If we take a case to court, we have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that someone is guilty. We know FGM exists, but as police officers we deal in evidence and we often
have none. Much of the information we receive is anecdotal. It’s very frustrating. It’s like all child abuse – children will tell you they’re being sexually abused
because they want it to stop, not because they want their parents prosecuted. Your mum is still your mum.
I can understand that more than anyone. Given the chance, would I have seen my mum sent to prison for what she allowed to happen to me? Would I have testified against her and seen her taken from
the family home, and with her everything I’d ever known? No. As much as I hated her for what she did, as great as the damage it did to our relationship, I wouldn’t have wanted to
condemn her to prison. And it’s those kinds of mixed feelings that the police investigating teams are faced with each day. Add to that the fact that many children might not even know they
have been victims of abuse, particularly if they were cut as a baby and have no recollection of it at all. To suddenly make that leap from thinking you’d grown up in a completely loving
family to the notion of your parents being child abusers is a difficult, if not sometimes impossible, transition.
Project Azure detectives work with many ‘community champions’ – advisers who act as a ‘go-between’ for the community and officials – who tell them that FGM is
happening in the UK, but when questioned further for more detail they are met with a closed door and no amount of pushing will gain access to further information. Without evidence, the police are
unable to arrest anyone – and the person they want to arrest is the cutter, not a poor, uneducated mother who may not realise that the practice is illegal in this country. This, sadly, is the
situation facing UK police forces across the country.
These detectives recognise that FGM is a complex issue. Not only is there a lack of people willing to testify and a veil of silence surrounding the abuse, but it’s not always clear who the
perpetrator is. Some mothers are entirely against FGM but their relatives carry it out regardless, sometimes without the mother’s knowledge. Who should be prosecuted in such instances?
‘If a person were to travel back to their country of origin, that child might not be at risk from their family, but from the wider community,’ explains one detective. ‘We know of
stories where parents have found out their children have been cut unbeknownst to them – that must be devastating. The communities that practise it might not even know that what they have done
is against the law in the UK, and that’s why education is paramount.’
Notwithstanding all these difficulties, the police continue in their attempts to act on any case of FGM that is brought to their attention, whether the CPS decides to pursue it or not, and to
focus on the goal of prevention and not just on prosecution. Since 2009, a flag is raised at Project Azure whenever an incident is reported to the Metropolitan Police that has even a suspicion of
FGM, which means that detectives monitor the prevalence of FGM across London, and pass on information to the relevant authorities to make enquiries. Since 2014, FGM training has become mandatory
for first-response officers in the Met. The number of flags made to Project Azure is rising, and hopefully this is down to the greater number of officers who have been educated about what female
circumcision is and what they need to look out for. The police have been working with social services on drawing up safeguarding arrangements, contributing to local-authority assessments that might
result in a child being removed from a high-risk situation and confiscating passports from families to prevent them from travelling abroad. ‘We would rather a thousand children were protected
rather than one person prosecuted, even though our job is to investigate,’ says another detective. ‘We always say that prevention is better than cure. We do a lot of small talks to
training groups and big talks at conferences. And if you’ve spoken to a group of thirty people and you see the lightbulbs start flashing as you educate them about FGM, you know that while you
may not have directly protected a child that day, you’ve spoken to people who can.’
As well as training police officers, detectives from Project Azure liaise with community projects, the Department for Education, the Department of Health and of course the Home Office, advising
them on what protocols will help support and identify victims of FGM. They also work with the Border Agency at airports, speaking with and educating people who have arrived on flights from
countries where FGM is prevalent, in case they have been cut and are in need of support – though, of course, it is not necessarily easy to identify a girl who may or may not have been cut
– or in case they could identify a cutter, although that is also a near-impossible task.
Recently the law was changed, making it mandatory to report any suspicions of FGM to the police. This means that any health or social-care professional – including doctors, who must
usually abide by doctor-patient confidentiality – or teacher who hears of a cutting taking place has a legal duty to report it as a crime. However, this has met with some resistance, the
concern being that it might deter women from seeking medical assistance, for fear that there will be wider repercussions as a result. But other amendments have been made to the Serious Crime Act,
such as extending protection to both British and non-British citizens, providing anonymity to victims, and making it the duty of any person who is responsible for the girl (defined as those having
‘frequent contact’) to protect her from FGM, with a possible prison term of seven years for failure to do so. Certainly, the greatest move towards ensuring the protection of children at
risk of FGM in Britain has been the introduction of the FGM Protection Order that Funke was able to request.