Female Genital Mutilation

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Wednesday 4th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, it is a great honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Rendell, who has worked so hard for so many years on this subject. I want to pay tribute to my colleague Lynne Featherstone for having secured the resources within DfID for the £35 million regional programme for Africa and countries where this barbaric practice is prevalent.

I also pay tribute to the Orchid Project, an outstanding charity that works on this subject. It pointed out something extremely important: the prevalent coincidence of FGM and other conditions—such as early marriage and ill health—which damage women. Will the Minister tell us whether DfID, in its programmes abroad, and the MoJ and the Home Office here, will ensure that their programmes on forced marriage go in sync with the programmes on FGM, so that there can be a double benefit?

The Orchid Project pointed out quite rightly that FGM is not a religious practice, it is a cultural practice. However, it said that in attempting to overcome this, it is very important to get religious leaders within communities on one side. Therefore, will the Minister say whether, in the DfID programme, and in the programmes with diaspora communities here, we are targeting religious leaders—and, in particular, men who have influence in forming opinion in communities within which this practice occurs? If we do that, we will be able to support those very brave young women such as Leyla Hussein, who herself was cut at the age of seven in Somalia and who was so eloquent in that amazing documentary, “The Cruel Cut”.

Finally, will the Minister tell us whether, in the DfID programme, there will be a particular concentration on those regions of countries where there has been a significant move towards abandoning the practice? From that, we will learn what it was that enabled people—men and women within those communities—to build resistance to this practice, and this knowledge could then be transferred to places such as Somalia and Sudan and some parts of western Africa where, unfortunately, this practice remains all too prevalent, with all the horror and destruction for individual young women that that entails.