Zero Tolerance of Zero Tolerance for FGM

Sheffield hosted an important but different event on 5th February 2023,the 11th anniversary of the UN General Assembly’s designated International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation. But rather than rehearsing the usual arguments, this event questioned the premise of the zero tolerance approach.

FGM: the reality refuses to live up to the scaremongering

A new dataset on female genital mutilation (FGM) in the UK, released by the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC), created a flurry of media excitement recently.

The FGM show trail: This case should never have come to court

The trial that exposed how unhinged anti-FGM crusading has become.

A jury in the UK found Dr Dhanuson Dharmasena not guilty of carrying out female genital mutilation (FGM) on a newly delivered young mother. Another man was cleared of abetting Dr Dharmasena. The jury of 12 concluded, in less than 30 minutes, that the evidence offered by the prosecution, representing the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), was wholly lacking in conviction. All I can say is: three cheers for juries!

Read what I wrote in full here

The dangers of the anti-FGM campaign

On Saturday, Oct 18th, I will debate The FGM Controversy at the Battle of Ideas festival. In preparation, I wrote an essay The Emperor's New Clothes? The dangers of the anti-FGM campaign, which can be accessed here.

http://www.battleofideas.org.uk/BiP_2014/BiP_FGM_Brid_Hehir.pdf

The motivation for the debate reads as follows: 

Over the past year, female genital mutilation (FGM) has rarely been out of the headlines, from Channel 4’s Cruel Cut video, to high-profile campaigns by the Evening Standard and the Guardian. In December 2013, the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee set up an inquiry into FGM; the former education secretary Michael Gove wrote to schools urging them to protect girls from ‘this very serious form of child abuse’. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers has called on school staff to watch for signs of FGM and to scrutinise holiday requests from members of communities that practise FGM. In May, police and border officials ran an awareness-raising campaign at airports, intercepting families suspected of going abroad to inflict FGM on their daughters. What has prompted all this? While FGM is practised in some African, Middle Eastern and Asian countries, there is no evidence that it is widespread in Britain. It has been prohibited in the UK since 1985, and it is also illegal for British citizens abroad. Nevertheless, it has only recently become the focus of widespread political concern. The first criminal charges for performing FGM came only in March 2014.

Female Genital Mutilation

FGM is declining globally. That’s probably not a headline you’ve seen much of recently, but according to a 2013 UNICEF report ‘the dangerous centuries-old tradition is now on a slow but steady decline in key areas around the world’. What great news that is. But it’s not what we heard on International Day of Zero Tolerance, an annual UN sponsored awareness day, when the European Parliament’s Gender Equality Committee proposed that Europe should toughen its stance against FGM and that ‘cutting’ practitioners should be prosecuted.