The House of Commons Home Affairs Committee’s Female genital mutilation: follow-up. Sixteenth Report of Session 2014–15 was published in March 2015.
The report identifies a need to raise the profile of female genital mutilation (FGM):
- The work that has been done by the media, politicians and most importantly by survivors and campaigners has raised the profile of FGM, so that many more people are aware of this horrendous form of child abuse. However, it is still the case that there have been no successful prosecutions for FGM in the UK in the last 20 years.
- In Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham alone, 1,500 recorded cases of FGM were recorded over the last five years, with doctors seeing six patients who have undergone the procedure each week.
- There seems to be a chasm between the amount of reported cases and the lack of prosecutions. Someone, somewhere is not doing their job effectively.
