Paul Harris
Observer

Sunday September 24, 2000

A sudden rise in the number of illegal female circumcisions being carried out in Britain has raised alarm and could lead to a review of current legislation.

The Observer has learnt that an all-party parliamentary group looking into the practice will recommend a tightening of the law. In particular, it wants to close a legal loophole that allows girls to be sent abroad for circumcision. The report will also recommend that a national survey should be carried out to determine the scale of the problem and seek more government funding for projects to combat the practice.

Researchers believe more than 3,000 young girls in Britain may be being mutilated each year, a sharp increase resulting from a recent influx of refugees from the Horn of Africa, where female circumcision is commonplace.

Though most girls are sent abroad, the crude operations are increasingly performed at home, often during school holidays to give the children time to recover and escape the notice of teachers.

The illegality of the procedure means researchers and activists meet a wall of silence in the refugee communities. 'Nobody will ever tell you they sent their children abroad for circumcision, but it is known that they do do it,' said Zeinab Mohamed, who has studied the Somali community in Manchester.

The people who carry out the operations are nearly always members of the refugee communities and usually doctors, nurses or midwives. No one has ever been prosecuted in Britain and campaigners and health workers usually only hear of rumours of their actions. Recently a Somali girl in Southall, west London, tipped off social services about nurses coming to circumcise her younger sister. But when the news leaked out the nurses disappeared.

Circumcision, which varies in severity from cutting the clitoris to removing the labia and sewing up the vagina with thorns, occurs across the Horn of Africa. Last year alone, the number of asylum applications from Somalia, where virtually all young girls are severely mutilated during circumcisions, topped 7,400, compared with 1,780 in 1996.

However, fighting circumcision is difficult. The tradition is entrenched and mothers face enormous pressure from family and friends to have daughters circumcised. If they do not they face being ostracised or divorced.

The depth of belief in the practice is revealed in answers to an anonymous survey being conducted among Horn of Africa refugees living in London. The main protagonists behind the circumcisions are frequently elderly women, usually grandmothers.