Female Genital Mutilation

(asked on 11th April 2019) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how his Department measures the efficacy of funding to prevent and protect girls and young women from female genital mutilation.


Answered by
Victoria Atkins Portrait
Victoria Atkins
Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
This question was answered on 24th April 2019

Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is a crime and it is child abuse. The Government is clear that we will not tolerate a practice that can cause extreme and lifelong suffering to women and girls.

In March 2019, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government allocated £375,000 for 37 local authority areas to fund locally-driven out-reach, engagement and communications on the practice of FGM. It is for Local Authorities to determine how best to utilise funding to combat the practice of FGM in their areas.

Data on FGM includes a 2015 City University and Equality Now study, part funded by the Home Office, which estimated that 137,000 women and girls who had migrated to England and Wales were living with the consequences of FGM, and approximately 60,000 girls aged 0-14 were born in England and Wales to mothers who had undergone FGM. The study also provides a breakdown of FGM prevalence estimates by local authority area which is available online at http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/12382/.

In addition, NHS Digital publishes data on the prevalence of FGM within the NHS in England. The most recent quarterly statistics were published in February 2019. A detailed breakdown of these statistics, including by local authority and age, is available online at https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/female-genital-mutilation.

To improve understanding of the prevalence of so-called ‘Honour Based Abuse’ (HBA), we introduced a mandatory HBA collection to the Annual Data Requirement (ADR) of police forces in England and Wales. This requires police forces to record where a crime has been committed in the context of preserving the honour of a family or community. This new collection is also capturing police recorded offences of FGM which were initially reported to the police under the mandatory reporting duty https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/mandatory-reporting-of-female-genital-mutilation-procedural-information

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