Services aimed at eradicating female genital mutilation in the UK are at risk of cuts because there is insufficient data available to analyse the problem, campaigners have told politicians in Manchester.
Activists also complained to members of Labour’s shadow cabinet that while £35m has been pledged by the government to eradicate FGM abroad, just £1m has been allocated to tackling the problem in the UK.
The issues were raised at a fringe meeting during Labour’s party conference in Manchester attended by FGM survivors as well as doctors, teachers and councillors trying to prevent the practice, which is estimated to have affected 170,000 women and girls in the UK.
Ellie Robinson from Newham council in east London, which was recently given £80,000 from the mayor of London to provide an FGM service, said she feared the problem was vastly under-reported.
She said: “30% of our residents were actually born elsewhere and if you think about what that must mean for FGM you would expect very high numbers, but in actual fact in 2013 we only had five cases that came to our children and social care [department] and we had just six reported to the police. So at the moment we just don’t have the data. We don’t know what the problem is and we can’t analyse trends, we can’t get into the communities because we don’t know what we are dealing with.”
She warned that without better data, the limited funds currently available for tackling FGM were very vulnerable to cuts. “Especially at the moment we are having to make huge cuts … so every intervention that you do, you have to prove there is a need for it and you’ve got to prove that your intervention would work. At this stage I can’t prove there is a need for it and I can’t prove the intervention will work because it’s not been done in many places.”
Asked repeatedly by the Guardian whether Labour would commit more money to preventing FGM in the UK, Seema Malhotra MP, shadow minister for preventing violence against women and girls, refused to answer the question.
Survivors in Manchester told Malhotra that primary school children, both girls and boys, should be educated about FGM. Asked whether she thought FGM should be on the sex education curriculum, the MP said: “We are talking about age-appropriate sex education right from key stage 1.”
Also present at the meeting was Luciana Berger, the shadow minister for public health, who said: “I’m particularly interested in how we can train and support everyone working in the health services – doctors, nurses, health visitors, midwives, social workers – and how right at the start of education this is something we need to be talking about.”
Last week the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, said Labour would introduce FGM protection orders, giving legal powers for civil courts to intervene and prevent the practice, including by preventing taking a child at risk abroad.