Our thanks to Dougie for this piece in today’s Guardian. The headline (above) is misleading. An extract from the piece:
“The draft CPS guidance states that, unlike female genital mutilation, “there is not a specific criminal offence of carrying out male circumcision”. [J4MB: This is knowingly disingenuous, as we would expect from the CPS. There is no ‘specific criminal offence’ of hammering a chisel into a person’s eye, but there doesn’t need to be. It would be an example of GBH, as is male circumcision.]
“However, this can be a painful and harmful practice, if carried out incorrectly or in inappropriate circumstances. [J4MB: Again, knowingly disingenuous. It is always painful where effective pain relief isn’t provided, and always harmful.] It may be a form of child abuse or an offence against the person,” it adds.” [J4MB: It already is an offence under OAPA1861, regardless of pain relief, the ‘correctness’ of the procedure, and the ‘appropriateness’ of the circumstances, being GBH, and it’s self-evidently a form of child abuse. No exemptions to the law are permitted on cultural or religious grounds, other than this one, to the best of my knowledge.]
If you’d like email notifications of our new blog pieces, please enter your email address in the box near the top of the right-hand column and click ‘Subscribe’.
We shall shortly be posting this piece on our X channel.
Our YouTube channel is here.
Justice for Men & Boys 
“No exemptions to the law are permitted on cultural or religious grounds, other than this one, to the best of my knowledge.” Exactly and I’m sure the Rabbi is right when he expects these lines to be left out of the final CPS Guidance. Even though there are two statutes about FGM (now 4 decades old) in fact there have only been 6 cases prosecuted in all that time . It seems in reality the facts that “perpetrators” are female (mothers, aunts and cousins), brown and mainly Muslim means that even with specific legislation, there is little will to tackle powerful “religious and cultural” interests.
Such logical ideas as: “Gordon Muir, a London-based consultant urological and andrological surgeon, argued that the procedure is “unnecessary and will not do any physical good”. “I think it is a form child abuse and the correct thing to do would be to wait until the child is 16 or more and is able to make a rational decision about it,” he said.” Are decades away.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks Nigel. The perpetrators are female but not sure about “brown and mainly Muslim”. Both brown and black African, and not only Muslim. I wouldn’t be surprised if a minority were Muslim.
LikeLike
Apologies. I meant literally brown, trying to encompass the regions in Africa, Red sea and Gulf where the Islamic world merges with African world. Following the second piece of legislation the NHS kept records on this for many years (it may still do so). Generally cases came from the areas of Sub-Saharan Africa specially into east africa and the coast long under Arabic influence. Assumed to be a tribal practice pre dating Islamic influence it is strong in areas that are nominally Muslim though often considered heretical or apostate by Muslims of a more militant sort (the series of wars from Somalia to Niger and northern Nigeria are often reported as clashes between IS and the like and Christians (as in the school kidnappings and murders) but other targets are tribes/groups considered to be heretical or apostate even though identifying as Muslim.
The first person convicted was an Iraqi the second from nominally Muslim community in West Africa, there have only been three successful cases. But that’s very thin data I admit.
Where there have been campaigns about this in East Africa (usually UN) tribes tend to equate MGM and FGM and so maybe the importance of MGM in Islamic teaching makes it more acceptable, certainly Christianised areas (southern Nigeria, Southern Sudan for instance) see both practices fade.
One of the problems in the data (in my day it was estimated from the NHS to be 137,000 cases) is that FGM actually includes a variety of actual procedures.
At that time (now nearly 8 years ago) British modern Muslims in the NHS were keen to distance Islam from the practice.
Bit long winded response but I suspect that if action was taken on a big scale probably the majority would be from cultures that describe themselves as Islamic, even if other Muslims wouldn’t.
One way or another the complete lack of success in actually prosecuting anyone in 40 years suggests either incompetence or conscious decisions not to rock too many boats. I sniff “not in the public interest”.
LikeLiked by 1 person
For info Prevalence of female genital mutilation – Wikipedia Of course the numbers and communities in the UK depends on the pattern of immigration. All this reminded me of a film we were shown as part of “training” on this. It was of a UN project in northern Kenya. In this case it was a puberty rite . At 12/13 the girls went to a women’s “house” for some time and their contemporaries boys to a men’s “enclosure”. As part of a number of tests the boys were circumcised while the girls were circumcised in the women’s house. At the time my “take away” was that it was women who do the FGM. But looking back another interesting feature was the UN funded workers asked the boys what they thought about the Girls being circumcised, unsurprisingly they expressed views that it mirrored their rite. Of course this was presented as their sexism against Girls. What just struck me was they never asked the Girls the same question about the boys. Really an indication that MGM didn’t matter. In this film the boy’s experience was in fact more “public” in that after the circumcision they were out of the male enclosure and by blood on their white shift it was clear they had been “done” to the village. the girls remained secluded for some days. In a sense an example of males having to “prove themselves”.
LikeLiked by 1 person