Muammar Al Khadafi

The Metropolitan Police, in partnership with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, have launched a film called "Cut - Some Wounds Never Heal" as part of their ongoing campaign against female genital mutilation.

Currently it is estimated that 6,500 girls in London alone are at risk of being forced to undergo this barbaric and illegal practice, and there already exists an initiative called "Project Azure" which was set up specifically to deal with this imported problem.

A glance around Project Azures pages on the Met police site reveals some interesting information.

Their campaign information release tells us that "FORWARD estimates, based on data from The International Centre for Reproductive Health (2004), that within the UK around 279,500 women have undergone FGM and each year approximately 24,000 girls under 15 years are at risk of becoming victims of FGM"

Over quarter of a million people in the UK? There's a figure to make the jaw drop. And it is a figure from 2004, you can bet it has increased no end since then.

The Equalities Office factsheet included with the Mets blurb informs us that FGM is mainly practised in 28 African countries as well as a few in the Middle East, and that the "UK communities that are most at risk of FGM include Kenyans, Somalis, Sudanese, Sierra Leoneans, Egyptians, Nigerians and Eritreans. However women from non-African communities that are at risk of FGM include Yemeni, Kurdish, Indonesian and Pakistani women."

In a rare moment of honesty and admission that we have entirely imported this problem and that it did not previously exist here before the same Equalities Office factsheet states "With increased immigration, the practice has spread to Europe, North America, and Australia."

Should we be left in any doubt as to the practitioners, the posters for the campaign are in three languages - English, Urdu, and Arabic.

There's an interesting statement from Waris Dirie, former model who now campaigns against female genital mutilation, included also.

"Even though more than 500,000 women in Europe of African and Asian origin have become victims of this crime, and every year, especially now during the holiday time, thousands of girls in Europe are threatened by it, many politicians do not take this cruel ritual performed on small girls seriously enough"

Over 500,000? How far over? Because, we've supposedly 279,500 victims of it here in the UK alone. That surely doesn't add up, at least unless either Britain has found itself far more enriched by the practitioners of FGM than other European nations, or one of the two figures is hideously over (or under) stated.

Whatever the true figures, it's a certainty that there are staggering numbers suffering from this practice, and that the issue is solely an imported one, it exists among certain groups of immigrants and their descendants and was not an issue in our nation before.

Waris Dirie goes on to say that "Female Genital Mutilation has nothing to do with tradition, culture or religion".

Sorry, it does have everything to do with those. It didn't exist in our British culture or tradition before, but now we have well in excess of quarter of a million cases of it, with an estimated 24,000 girls at risk each year. Even the Met Police seem to agree that it is cultural, with a statement that "FGM is administered both in the UK and abroad by the perpetrators for what is considered in many cases to be cultural reasons"

The cost of dealing with it all - Police, medical care, campaigns, support groups, heaven alone knows what else? They'll never tell you, they probably don't even know themselves, it's better that way since nobody can let it slip by accident.

Welcome to the new Britain, importing barbaric practices from the world over, giving them a new home, and leaving us picking up the pieces and paying the bills.

Project Azure