Question: What does the anti-gay legislation Section 28 have in common with the 1985 prohibition on Female Genital Mutilation. The answer is that up until today the anti-FGM act had, like Section 28 been an offence for which nobody was prosecuted.

Although it is good that two people (one of them apparently a Muslim surprise,surprise) have been charged with either carrying out this surgical abuse or encouraging it, this doesn’t excuse the lack of action by the authorities for all this time. During this time thousands of women who were either British citizens or were foreign women resident here had their genitals mutilated and even though it was against the law, not a damn thing was done about it.

Sky News said:

“A doctor and another man will be charged in the first UK prosecution for female genital mutilation, the CPS has said.

Dr Dhanoun Dharmasena, from the Whittington Hospital in London, and Hasan Mohamed, who is not a medic, will be charged under the Female Genital Mutilation Act.

Dr Dharmasena, 31, from Ilford, Essex, allegedly carried out the procedure on a woman who had given birth at the hospital in November 2012.

Mr Mohamed, 40, from N7, London, encouraged and helped him, it is claimed.

The pair will appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on April 15.

John Cameron, NSPCC Head of Child Protection Operations, said: “This is great news for the fight against female genital mutilation.

“The fact that we hadn’t previously had a prosecution in the UK for this child abuse despite it being a crime for almost 30 years is unacceptable.”

Prosecutors also looked at four other cases of female genital mutilation.

One was a new case and three were reconsidered after decisions to take no further action.

The CPS found there was insufficient evidence to bring charges.

One of the old cases involved a man calling a female genital mutilation helpline, intended for victims, to ask for the procedure to be carried out on his two daughters.

The new case involved two parents accused of taking their daughter abroad to have the procedure.

The CPS is also considering four other cases.

Female genital mutilation was made a criminal offence in the UK in 1985.

In 2003, the maximum sentence was increased from five to 14 years in jail.”

I wonder if anybody apart from me will be appalled that one of those accused is an NHS doctor. It should make us all wonder if NHS facilities have been used by mutilators to carry out this procedure and that a conspiracy of silence has let it continue? 

I really don’t buy some of the excuses for inaction trotted out by the Director of Public Prosectutions, Alison Saunders in various media statements. I can understand the difficulty in getting girls or young women to grass on their parents, but surely if a child is being presented to a doctor for unrelated reasons and FGM damage is found during examination, and the child is in the custody of the parents, then why not charge the parents with either encouraging or allowing this to happen. If this was a child presenting with non-accidental bruising to the face for example then it would automatically be looked at closely by police and social services. Why was not this course of action taken when the problem is non-accidental damage to a girls genitals?

I can’t but help but wonder whether political correctness and Islamo-pandering by those in positions of authority such as police, medical staff and social workers has allowed this disgusting and barbaric practice to continue to be inflicted on vulnerable girls and young women? If that is indeed the case then it is a terrible dereliction of duty on the part of those who work in those areas.

We must see a sea change in how FGM is dealt with in Britain. Medical staff should routinely check for FGM and pass on their findings to the police. There is a also a case for specifically targeting for examination those girls who come from the communities where this abuse takes place and is one of those situations where religious, racial and cultural profiling would be not only useful but also morally justified.

This abuse of the bodies of girls and young women in Britain has gone on for far too long and what is sad is that the powers that be would have let this continue but for the campaigns that have been started to end this bestial practice, that has no purpose apart from controlling women and controlling their sexuality.

It is right and proper that we are starting to see prosecutions for this but it is a scandal that the authorities had to be shamed into action, just as they had to be shamed into action over the problems of Islamic Grooming Gangs.

Let us hope that we see more prosecutions for FGM, and that the backlog of ignored abuse of girls and young women will at last be dealt with.