Political interview with Jane Ellison: ‘FGM is child abuse but because of cultural sensitivity we’ve failed to protect vulnerable young girls’

 
25 October 2013

The passion is clear from the moment Jane Ellison starts talking about what she aims to achieve as David Cameron’s new public health minister, charged with preventing one of the country’s most secretive and barbaric practices.

“Female genital mutilation is child abuse. There is no question,” she says, wincing, before continuing to explain why she is so determined to end decades of failure to protect victims.

“For girls who have suffered the most extreme kind, you are looking at a life of constant pain. Every time I talk to somebody in a school or a community group who tells me about a girl who

is going to be taken off to be cut, I think this is why we have to make progress.”

As Tory MP for Battersea — where one maternity unit recently revealed it had treated more than 1,000 victims — Ms Ellison is one of the Commons’ best informed members about the impact of FGM and the challenges of trying to stamp it out. Until her appointment to the Government earlier this month, she chaired the all-party parliamentary group on FGM, which she set up two years ago, and has campaigned relentless to raise awareness and secure action on the issue.

Now, as public health minister, dealing with the problem is one of her key tasks; a challenge she says she relishes as she sets out the measures she and her colleagues hope to take.

“I was delighted that FGM was in my brief. It was in the back of my mind when the Prime Minister called me.

I thought: ‘If he’s going to offer me a job will I be able to continue to campaign on FGM?’ So it’s great that the brief does include it. The priority is to look at what’s happening in health, and it’s down to me to make progress.”

The first steps will be to improve hospital recording so that the scale of FGM in Britain can be measured properly, while at the same time ensuring that victims — who are often reluctant to come forward — receive proper care.

“A real issue, as the Evening Standard has highlighted, is the lack of accurate information,” Ms Ellison says. “There’s a technical challenge around how we record FGM in the NHS. That’s a definite priority. Until you know the scale of the problem it’s hard to assess the resources you need to tackle it.”

Similarly, there is the problem of hidden suffering. “One of the challenges for the NHS is that we’ve got quite a large number of women who are living with the chronic mental and physical effects of FGM.

“So much of public policy is driven by people identifying an issue, talking about, campaigning on it. But here no one is campaigning to say ‘I need attending to’ because of the sensitive nature of it, because it’s illegal. So we’ve got to be more imaginative in understanding how we rise to that challenge.

“We’re not going to have thousands of people self-identifying, but I know from talking to female activists, talking to GPs who see women on a regular basis, I know this a problem we are facing.”

Ms Ellison, an Oxford graduate who worked for John Lewis before entering Parliament at the last election, is clear about why FGM has continued, despite being outlawed as long ago as 1985, and is determined to end the overly cautious approach which she blames for leaving victims exposed.

“Since FGM was made illegal in this country, we have ended up failing girls, we haven’t protected them,” she warns.

“It’s for the strangest of reasons. Some of that is because people were very sensitive to the issue: they didn’t want to seem to be culturally insensitive, they didn’t want to tread where they didn’t feel comfortable in terms of understanding the people and the countries where some families came from. But because of that caution, bizarrely we’ve ended up protecting these vulnerable girls the least.

“Across government we’re anxious to remind people that these are young girls, this is a safeguarding issue and everything else is secondary to that.”

Other tasks for Ms Ellison include improving the way the NHS passes on information about victims and those at risk of abuse. Official guidelines state that when a new mother is found to have undergone FGM, health visitors should be alerted because of the danger that any daughters will suffer the same fate.

Ms Ellison adds: “One of my big priorities is to understand: if that’s not happening, why not and what are the barriers there? There are lots of steps to take to safeguard that child. If the mother has undergone FGM, it’s not suddenly like the police are round to take the child away, which might be in the minds of some professionals. If someone has undergone FGM and they have a little girl, then the health visitor should be told.”

Inevitably, other ways of tackling the problem lie beyond the remit of Ms Ellison’s department. Here, as befits a new minister wary about treading into the territory of colleagues, she is more cautious.

On education, for example, a recent Crown Prosecution Service round-table on improving action against FGM — which Ms Ellison attended as a backbench MP — heard criticism of the failure of schools to alert others in authority about victims or girls at risk of being taken abroad for “cutting” during holidays.

Ms Ellison says she is aware of such problems, but emphasises that responsibilty for the issue lies with Michael Gove’s Education Department. She adds: “As a constituency MP I have spoken to teachers who have got girls from at-risk communities in their school but didn’t know about FGM.

“Knowledge is patchy, we know that from an NSPCC survey earlier this year: large numbers of teachers don’t know about FGM — but that’s obviously something I will be working on with colleagues across government.”

She is optimistic nonetheless, and believes that ministerial desire to stop mutilation is greater than ever. “There has never been this much will to make progress at government level,” she insists.

“The Home Secretary is committed, and you’ve got Justine Greening and Lynne Featherstone at the Department for International Development with the biggest-ever pot of money that any country has put aside to fight FGM.

“We know there is a close link between what diaspora communities are doing and what people are doing throughout the world. So we have to take a lead from Africa. There’s some wonderful work going on there.

“Kenya has made really good progress and seen an inter-generational drop-off in FGM. Breaking the chain is really important.”

Ms Ellison is clear, however, that gov-ernment alone cannot solve the problem. The work of grassroots campaigners, some of whom have braved threats to raise their concerns, remains critical, along with efforts from local government and other organisations.

Nor does she think solutions will come quickly. “We’re all realistic — those of us who have campaigned on it for some time — that when something has been around for thousands of years you can’t just wave a magic wand in Whitehall and make it go away. But equally we do understand a lot more now, and there’s been some really great work by grassroots organisations around what works and breaking the chain.”

But she concludes by emphasising her determination to achieve change. “One of the things that got me out of bed when I was first campaigning on this was thinking that if any small thing I did would protect even a few girls then it was worth doing,” she says. “I still feel that way. This shouldn’t be happening in the 21st century.”

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