On 2 November we emailed a letter including a FOI request to the Home Office, the department with responsibility for the police. The FOI request:

1. 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 Home Office response ended with the following ‘kick into the long grass’:

The Department of Health leads on the issue of male circumcision. Your letter has been transferred there for an official reply.

We sent a follow-up FOI request to the Home Office, and a few days ago we received a letter from a woman at the Department of Health. It begged more questions than it answered, so we’re about to send her department a letter with five new FOI requests, details here. The document consists of:

– the letter with the new FOI requests
– a detailed critique of the woman’s letter
– our original letter and FOI request sent to the Home Office

If everyone who read this gave us just £1 – or even better, £1 monthly – we could change the world. Click here to make a difference. Thanks.

The Home Office response to our FOI request has led to five FOI requests to the Department of Health

/ Mike Buchanan / 4 Comments

4 thoughts on “The Home Office response to our FOI request has led to five FOI requests to the Department of Health”

  1. It is good to concentrate on the specifics. I may be wrong but I expect they will not in fact to respond easily on the factual questions you ask., because despite the easy assurances of the response there isn’t any monitoring of this that I’m aware of. Of course this is in itself important. I don’t know if this has been asked but a good follow up question may well be for any data on “repairs” or treatment on under 18s due to circumcision going wrong.
    It is very helpful to have a Doctor work with you as the NHS is very good at obfuscation through pretending not to “understand” the question, if the procedure isn’t accurately named medically.

    Like

    Reply

  3. Why isn’t MGM illegal? Because it isn’t comparable with FGM. Why isn’t MGM comparable with FGM? Because it isn’t illegal.

    Here we go round the mulberry bush….

    The more I read about the male foreskin, the more I respect my own; its removal involves the loss of up to 20,000 specialised nerve endings and Meissner’s corpuscles, the peripenic dartos muscle, the frenar band, part of the frenulum, lymphatic vessels, apocrine glands (producing pheromones), sebaceous glands, and Langerhans cells (a part of the defence system). As William Collins observes, if you are not fully familiar with the function of these structures, how can you recommend their removal?

    Collins helpfully provides some photographs of circumcised penises. If they do not represent wanton mutilation, I should like to know what does. They should be required viewing for all staff at the Home Office.

    Like

    Reply

Leave a comment