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Female genital mutilation: a UK crisis

Last Modified: 25 Jan 2008
By: Nina Teggarty

According to department of health funded research, over 20,000 young girls in Britain are at serious risk of it.

Female genital mutilations are illegal in Britain, with a possible 14 year sentence for practitioners.

And yet there are no national statistics kept on the scale of the problem. There have been no prosecutions and there's not even any evidence that a single girl has even been checked for it.

Many social workers we've spoken to complain of a conspiracy of silence on the issue fuelled, they say, by a misplaced sense of political correctness and cultural relativism.