Campaigners against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) are concerned that female babies are being subjected to this barbaric, dangerous practice, illegal in the UK, before they can speak, so that they cannot tell anyone what has happened to them.

Accordingly staff at two children’s centres in London, who work with pregnant women and new children, are being trained to spot the signs that FGM has been carried out. In its worst form it involves cutting off the clitoris and sewing up the vagina to give the child a guaranteed virginity to men when she is old enough to be forcibly sold into a marriage, sometimes a violent one and sometimes as young as five years old.

Campaigners Plan are running a programme straplined Face up to Violence Against Girls and want to end FGM in a generation. It has been estimated that 140 million girls worldwide have already suffered FGM, with another 3.5 million at risk this year, 65,000 of them in the UK.