Can one conviction end FGM in the UK?

Beyond Today

BBC

News

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 February 2019

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A mother was convicted last week of mutilating her 3 year old daughter’s genitals. It’s been illegal for more than 30 years, but the women, who can’t be named, is the first person to be convicted of FGM. She’ll be sentenced next month. Anna Collinson and Jessica Furst work for the Victoria Derbyshire programme, they tell us how they got caught up in the story when they received an email about the case. We also hear from Nimco Ali, who is a leading campaigner against FGM. She tells us about her experience and why she believes this case is so important.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:06.4	Hello, I'm Matthew Price.
0:08.1	This is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4,
0:10.8	a space to ask one big question about one big story.
0:14.0	Today, can one conviction end FGM in the UK?
0:27.0	There are some stories where you feel as if you've heard it all before and for decades in a sense the story of FGM female genital mutilation barely seems to have moved on.
0:43.7	Until last Friday, when someone was found guilty for the first time ever in this country
0:49.9	of carrying out FGM, and two BBC journalists ended up right in the middle of the story.
0:55.8	They work for the Victoria Derbyshire programme, one's the reporter Anna Collinson
1:00.2	and the other the researcher Jessica First.
1:03.0	Now one of her roles is to...
1:05.0	Keep an hour in our inbox.
1:06.0	We get a lot of emails with people telling us their stories
1:10.0	and I was just checking it and received an email from a woman saying that she'd been accused of FGM on her child and that the authorities were trying to'd fallen on a on a cupboard and that it wasn't true
1:26.2	she'd fallen on a cupboard and that's how this girl had got injured.
1:30.5	What did you think when you saw what she was writing? She was basically saying she was being
1:34.4	falsely accused. I mean like I said we got a lot of emails so I emailed her back, asked for her
1:40.2	number so that we could speak and had a brief conversation with her where she went
1:46.8	over the same details and said that her daughter hadn't undergone FGM.
1:50.7	She'd fallen on a cupboard in the kitchen and it was all lies and how could we help her as a program?
1:56.8	So Jess spoke to this woman's lawyer and we arranged a time for me to meet them. But when I arrived, her
2:07.6	attitude had completely changed. She did not want to talk about what happened and
	...

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