Regular followers of this blog may recall FOI requests we’ve sent to numerous goovernment departments on the issue of MGM, mostly focusing on the demonstrable illegality of it. The responses were invariably full of weasel words and obfuscation, and when Theresa May MP was Home Secretary we had one or two such FOI responses.
We thought it was time for another FOI request, so on 2 November we emailed a letter to her appointed successor, Amber Rudd – here. After spelling out the evidence that MGM is clearly illegal in the UK, the letter ended with this:
My Freedom of Information request consists of the following:
- Do you accept that MGM is illegal in the UK? If not, what makes it legal?
2. If you accept MGM is illegal, why are the police not bringing prosecutions?
The deadline for the Home Office to respond to my FOI request was two days ago. In the absence of a response, I emailed them yesterday. This morning I received their response:
Mr Buchanan
Thank you for your enquiry of 1 December about your Freedom of Information request.
Section 8(1)(c) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires that a request for information must describe the information requested. As it stands, your letter does not do this as you are asking for opinion rather than information held by the Home Office. [my emphasis] We are therefore refusing your request because it does not meet the requirements for a request for information under the Act.
The Department of Health leads on the issue of male circumcision. Your letter has been transferred there for an official reply.
Yours sincerely
Crime, Policing and Fire Group
Home Office
2 Marsham Street, London, SW1P 4DF
Once again, and in common with other government departments, the Home Office – with its responsibility for the police – is not claiming that performing MGM is legal. This evening we’ll send another FOI to the Home Office, and one to the Department of Health.
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Justice for Men & Boys 
Delay and obfuscation as you suggest.
But then officialdom could not manage without it – as we all know.
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I wonder if anyone has ever reported the hospitals carrying out MGM to the police, it would certainly be interesting to see. Perhaps someone could protest outside of such a venue and then engage with a police officer at some point to report these crimes taking place nearby.
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By a strange coincidence, I was reading Re B and G (Children) (No 2) [2015] EWFC 3 this morning (as you do) with a view to writing a blog post about MGM. This was the case in which a local authority sought to take two children (a boy and a girl) into care on the grounds that the girl had been illegally circumcised. The LA failed to prove its case, and the evidence of one expert witness was dismissed as “remarkably shoddy” and “exceedingly unsatisfactory”. The irony was that the degree of FGM, if it had been proved, would have been relatively minor and, on the scale of severity, some way below that of standard male circumcision. The boy would, in due course, be circumcised, but there was no suggestion that this would have resulted in an application from the LA, and yet, had the far less traumatic injury to hs sister been proved, he would have been taken into care.
Lord Justice Munby starts well in his judgment by highlighting this profound legal anomaly, but then tries to justify it, as is his duty as President. The question he must answer is how FGM – in any form – transgresses the “significant harm” threshold established by Section 31 of the Children Act 1989 while MGM does not. Munby goes so far as to accept that “In my judgment, if FGM Type IV amounts to significant harm, as in my judgment it does, then the same must be so of male circumcision.”
To cross the threshold, however, significant harm must be accompanied by unreasonable parenting; this gives Munby his opportunity for logical gymnastics. FGM has no medical justification or benefit, so it can never be part of reasonable parenting; MGM, however, is tolerated by society and the law and some people think it has medical benefits, so it can be a part of reasonable parenting.
This, for Munby, establishes a “very clear distinction” between the two practices.
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Thanks. Of course the medical ‘benefits’ claimed for MGM are unsubstantiated and often ridiculous e.g. it reduces the incidence of penile cancer. Well, amputation of the whole penis would reduce penile cancer by 100%, so let’s do that! (Breast bud removal in female babies would reduce risk of later breast cancer to zero, removal of one kidney would probably reduce the risk of kidney cancer by 50%…). And as for problems with dirty fingernails, let’s just cut off fingertips at birth. I recommend William Collins’s piece on MGM at http://mra-uk.co.uk.
I don’t know of other alleged medical benefits from MGM that wouldn’t also apply to FGM, but of course nobody would ever excuse FGM on such grounds, quite rightly.
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Asking if something is illegal is NOT a matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact.
Lies and more lies is all you ever get from the fantastically corrupt government.
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I suspect that one would have to ask if there has been any prosecutions under a specific act. The Mumby Judgement referred to above is interesting. In this case the judgement is about care proceedings not the procedure itself. However the Judge has pinpointed legal anomalies in the treatment of GM according to sex.
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And then tried to justify the anomaly, which ties him in knots of logic. The unjustifiable cannot be justified. There were – I think – no prosecutions under the Female Circumcision Act 1985. It was then repealed, renamed and re-enacted in 2003 as the Female Genital Mutilation Act and there has been one prosecution which was ill-conceived and rightly failed. The unfortunate medic was not a practitioner of FGM. As Mike has pointed out, there was no need for specific legislation, grievous bodily harm of a child can be prosecuted under existing legislation, which means, as he keeps reiterating, that MGM is illegal, but tolerated. This avoids offending Jews and Muslims – who perform about 12,000 – circumcisions in the UK between them, but most – about 32,000 – are performed “for medical reasons”.
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Thanks. The vast majority of the non-therapeutic circumcisions of male minors – and maybe men – are medically unneccessary. Students are taught little to nothing about the functions and histology of the foreskin at medical school, and circumcision is a quick and cheap ‘solution’ to some conditions. Better alternatives take time (= money) and effort, so – the patients being male – they are not carried out. I’m told in some countries – Finalnd is often cited – MGM is all but unknown.
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I inquired of the Department of Health a couple of years ago, in respect of equality duties to record male, as well as female, genital mutilation.
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/requirement_to_report_on_genital
They gave me a good run around then, too. The final position was totally illogical but they insisted it was policy, so I took up at a political level with my MP as an individual. (To my shame, I don’t recall what became of that .. presumably nothing useful.)
Mike, you will see that they clearly stated on 30 May 2014 that “male circumcision is not illegal”. You are obviously free to work their responses to me into a future FOI of yours, or send me an email if you think I can help by pressing more on that angle, or even just getting an update on their position.
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