Understanding State Responses to Female Genital Cutting/Mutilation

Since the Istanbul Convention in 2011, European countries have stepped up their responses to female Genital Cutting/Mutilation. Although not ratified by the UK until 2020, the UK government sought to strengthen its legislative provisions against FGC/M through the introduction of Serious Crime Act 2015. Previous work undertaken by members of the research team uncovered a woeful lack of data in the public domain on measures to tackle FGC/M (Karlsen et al. 2022). This project involved making a series of Freedom on Information requests on:
(i) Mandatory Reporting – trends in Mandatory Reporting by police force area and reporting organisation
(ii) FGM Protection Orders – trends in successful applications for FGMPOs by family court and Applicant type
(iii) Powers under the Children’s Act – trends in the use of powers available under the Children Act 1989 by local authority

By ‘studying up’, the project uncovered the scale and nature of state interventions to tackle FGC/M since 2015. We found that few ‘known’ cases have been reported to the police by regulated professionals, but each year there are a significant number of safeguarding referrals made to social work teams. Many of these referrals led to no further action. We also found that the use of FGMPOs varied across regions.