8. Debate by Individual Members under Standing Order 11.21(iv): Female Genital Mutilation — Postponed from 8 November

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:51 pm on 15 November 2017.

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Photo of Jenny Rathbone Jenny Rathbone Labour 3:51, 15 November 2017

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer, and thank you, Julie Morgan, for proposing this difficult debate, and also for showing the video, because I think the video very clearly demonstrates that most people do not know what FGM is. Therefore, it's very important that we articulate what FGM is so that the public at large is aware of this in order to gather support for stamping it out.

I'd just like to highlight an exhibition that's on at the moment at the national museum for Wales that is being curated by people linked to the Huggard homelessness charity. It's called 'Who Decides?' and it's questioning why it is official curators should be deciding on what is art and what we ought to be looking at, as opposed to ordinary members of the public, particularly those who have suffered acutely in their lives, which is what has brought them to homelessness.

I was extraordinarily moved by a series of etchings that are in the exhibition, which were chosen by somebody called Helen Griffiths, who wrote, 'I can empathise with needing to escape reality for a while, away from all the horrible things that have happened'. The images are very graphic in showing how women hold down the girl, and it is women who normally conduct this horrific operation. But also the last painting is one of the mother then cradling the child after it's had this dreadful thing done to it. I just think that is a really important way in which it brings to a much wider audience what female genital mutilation involves. 

This is not a new phenomenon. My great aunt was campaigning, along with other feminists, on this in the 1920s and we are still discussing it as opposed to stamping it out. Obviously, a lot has been done, and there's a lot of work being done by some of the diaspora communities that now live in the UK to change attitudes towards this being an appropriate thing to do to your girls. But we need to regard it as something akin to polio or smallpox or cholera. This is something that's so horrific. There is absolutely no benefit whatsoever in health terms, and it is just a way of suppressing women and girls' sexuality.

So, as Julie has already mentioned, we know that there are at least 200 women living in the Cardiff and the Vale area who have been the victims of FGM, because all women who become pregnant obviously become the focus of the support and the healthcare of the local health board, and I'm very pleased that Cardiff and the Vale has appointed a specialist FGM midwife whose job it is to set up a specialist clinic, which is due to open early next year. I'm very pleased that this clinic is not going to be at the Heath hospital; it's going to be at the Cardiff Royal Infirmary in Adamsdown, which is an appropriate place for it because it is easy for people in the communities involved to access it via local bus services and it is part of the community. So, that is a very good step forward and is absolutely essential, but obviously the work that we really need to be doing is to prevent women and girls from suffering from this abomination in the first place.