Children Act 1989 (Amendment) (Female Genital Mutilation) Bill [Lords]

Debate between Maggie Throup and Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Monday 11th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Zac Goldsmith]

My hon. Friend raises an important point. Had we been having this debate two weeks ago, I would have said that I hope so. There have been subsequent announcements—I think we had an announcement from the Department for Education on the day the Bill was in Committee—that that is exactly what will happen, with education being introduced at the appropriate level so that children, both boys and girls, know that FGM is a practice we should not tolerate.

[Maggie Throup (Erewash) (Con)]

My hon. Friend describes the horrors of FGM vividly. Does he agree that, in a way, it is a form of child abuse?

[Zac Goldsmith]

I could not agree more vehemently with my hon. Friend. FGM is not just a kind of child abuse; it is child abuse by any definition or metric.

I said earlier that FGM has no basis in medicine and, despite what we are often told, nor does it have any basis in any religion. The practice is often wrongly blamed on Islam—this can particularly be seen on social media—both by extremists who want to justify or, in some cases, even advocate FGM and by others who wish to use FGM as a stick with which to bash the religion itself. In fact, the practice predates Islam, and the Koran neither advocates nor justifies it in any way at all.

The consequences of FGM can be extreme. It can lead to severe pain, excessive bleeding, infection, menstrual problems, pain during sex and childbirth, and deep, long-lasting psychological trauma. In fact, the effects of FGM can, and often do, last for the duration of a person’s life. It is estimated that, around the world, at least 200 million women and girls alive today have undergone FGM. In England and Wales, shockingly, the figure is around 137,000, although not all of them were subjected to FGM in either England or Wales.

I apologise to those of a sensitive nature, but during a recent urgent question on this issue, after the Bill was blocked by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope), a number of colleagues raised concerns about male circumcision as if there were some kind of comparison between the two. Whatever our views on male circumcision, it must be obvious that it does not compare to FGM. The male equivalent of FGM would not be circumcision; it would be the removal of the entire head of the penis and much of the shaft, too.