The (evangelising) FGM Detectives

The FGM Detectives,* a Channel 4 TV documentary broadcast last night (27 Feb 2017), was illuminating and timely. The TV reporter, Cathy Newman, had filmed over two years to investigate FGM. The blurb reminded us that despite being banned, ‘FGM is still practised in some communities in the UK, where 20,000 girls are thought to be at risk each year.’

But the successful prosecution she no doubt hoped to celebrate in the well-timed programme wasn’t to be. She reminds us (see below) in a Huffington Post piece that the Bristol trial, where a father accused of an FGM-related child cruelty offence, had collapsed last week.

That it went to court at all should be the surprise considering the lack of factual and medical evidence there was in support of the case. The personal relationship between the main witness and the investigating police officer, which to any objective eye, represented a conflict of interest, was only casually mentioned in the programme.

The Police Officer, Leanne Pook, is a trustee of the charity, Integrate UK and like many anti-FGM campaigners is passionate, almost to the point of being evangelical, about the issue. The main witness is an employee of the charity and an equally passionate anti-FGM campaigner. They are friends. Yet she was allowed to take his witness statement.

That this conflict of interest was considered acceptable to the Avon & Somerset Police, the Charity and the CPS, is more than surprising. All are no doubt now (privately) embarrassed, despite the brave (public) faces and statements issued afterwards. They will hopefully be asked some tough questions in the enquiries that must follow.

This is the second trial the CPS had sanctioned for a criminal investigation and the second not to get the desperately sought after first conviction for ‘FGM’ since being made illegal in Britain in 1983.

The documentary focusses primarily on Leanne Pook, a Detective Chief Inspector, and her awakening to the problem ‘FGM’ is believed to represent in Britain. Reported with admiration is her avowed lifetime commitment to the anti-FGM cause, her work with the local community over the past six years and her efforts to keep them onside. As well as her stoic response to the trial’s collapse, one which would’ve made legal history had it been successful.

The DCI says her relationships with the community are very important to her, and she hopes they’ll be sustained notwithstanding the two year investigations in the lead up to the trial and its outcome. But she must be naive to think these relationships will not have been damaged. The community is very angry about the damage caused to the family who were subject to intense scrutiny during the investigation. As well as by the ‘systematic abuse and the harassment faced by Somali parents with young daughters in the city’ generally.

The Bristol Somali Community statement, reproduced below, details this and why. It concludes by asking community leaders and organisations to inform schools and service providers not to allow Integrate UK and their representatives to work with or approach Somali children and their parents and families.”

But anti-FGM campaigners have not lost hope. Soon a London man will face trial, accused of inflicting FGM and they are no doubt now hoping for a ‘third time lucky’ verdict.

It never seems to cross their minds to consider ‘FGM’ may not be happening here. That people’s attitude to the practice change after migration. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that they abandon the practice.

The current justification for not finding any cases is that families are changing their traditional practices and are having their daughters undergo a ‘Type 4’ instead (pricking, piercing, nicking the clitoris/clitoral hood), thus making detection harder. DCI Poke’s explanation and demonstration to colleagues in the film was memorable!

The cases being reported by the NHS, the only vaguely accurate data that exists, are predominantly historic and occurred before the girls/women came to the UK. The few new cases being reported are genital piercings, which by law are viewed as Type 4 FGM and therefore illegal. But the obsession with protecting children from ‘child abuse’ which all types of FGM including Type 4, are considered to represent, drives their evangelical approach. And because, like the Avon and Somerset police, they just ‘know these harmful procedures are happening in this country right now.’

A number of statements were published after the Feb 22nd trial.

This from Bristol Somali Forum – ‘The Failed FGM Trial’ on Twitter
26 February 2018

“We, the Somali community in Bristol, neither condone nor support Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) because it is against the law and our Islamic religion. We completely support the campaign to eradicate FGM, and we also agree anyone who breaks the law by practicing this barbaric custom should be prosecuted.

The collapsed FGM trial has highlighted the systematic abuse and the harassment faced by Somali parents with young daughters in the city. The steps taken by the witness to get information from the defendant, a Somali taxi driver, understandably is a component of the institutionalised harassment project which has terrorised many families in Bristol since the FGM campaign has started. This raises a serious concern, however.

We now know that the father was found not guilty because the evidence was riddled with “inconsistencies”; evidence which was influenced by Integrate UK’s working culture and their commitment to get a conviction by any means. A case in point is the failure to manage conflict of interests – as the Sunday Mail revealed yesterday (25 February 2018) – and the close working relationship that developed between Integrate UK and Avon and Somerset Police, particularly the FGM lead officer, was based on nothing but systematic marginalisation and locking up people from the target communities.

More importantly, it seems the police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) have been very excited about the race to get a first conviction, which has shamefully resulted wasting much needed public money to an ill-advised case. As tax payers, we demand answers from Avon and Somerset Police and the CPS – and the Government. The law was designed to protect children, and the public, but regarding the campaign to eradicate FGM, the law and the safeguarding procedures have been used otherwise.

The targeted aggressive approach of the professional FGM campaigners has caused stress to many Somali families with young children in Bristol. We are very concerned about the number of young girls being examined without evidence. In fact, the human rights of many young Somali girls in the city has been breached by safeguarding officers; the campaign aimed to eradicate FGM is not currently serving the interest of the children.

We, therefore, urge relevant authorities to launch a public inquiry to understand the drivers of the systematic abuse within the FGM campaign, the way the NHS collects and records FGM cases, and how the welfare of the children and their families can be strengthened. We also sincerely request members of the Somali community to stay calm and be patient in this painful time.

Community leaders and organisations should inform schools and service providers not to allow Integrate UK and their representatives to work with or approach Somali children and their parents and families, meanwhile.”

Avon and Somerset Constabulary published this statement.

A 29-year-old man from Bristol charged with an FGM-related child cruelty offence has been acquitted today following a ruling by the trial judge at Bristol Crown Court.

DCI Leanne Pook, our force lead for FGM and lead officer for this case, said after the ruling:  “Our priority from the outset of this investigation has been to safeguard any vulnerable children and protect them from harm.

“We carried out a challenging two-year investigation, supported by professionals from a range of partner agencies, which resulted in evidence being passed to the Crown Prosecution Service and a charge being authorised for a child cruelty offence.

“We accept the findings of the court and will continue, as always, to work closely with our communities to protect those at risk of FGM, and our wider network of partner agencies and inspiring charities to raise awareness of and develop our responses to this important issue.

“FGM remains a deeply entrenched practice and we know these harmful procedures are happening in this country right now. I’d like to reassure the public that we’ll put as much energy, dedication and care into investigating FGM as we would do in any inquiry where a child is at risk of harm.

“We will continue to thoroughly investigate all potential offences of FGM. Alongside this we will maintain our focus on preventing FGM from taking place in the first place, working with our partners and communities and using all the legislative and safeguarding powers at our disposal.”

Police and Crime Commissioner Sue Mountstevens: “The police take reports of FGM seriously as they would any form of abuse against a child.

“It’s important that the police continue to work with partner organisations and charities and we all continue to raise awareness of this unacceptable practice. I am very proud of the fantastic work in Bristol as part of the ‘Bristol Model’ to tackle FGM and supportive of the ambition to end FGM in a generation by working with young people.

“As the national Police and Crime Commissioner representative for honour-based abuse, forced marriage and FGM, I am committed to protecting the most vulnerable from harm.  Working with the police, partners, and affected communities to challenge the practice of FGM and be very clear, that it is child abuse and against the law.”

Integrate UK‘s statement is not reproducible here but can be viewed on their website.

Their new obsession with Type 4 FGM should keep them busy for the foreseeable future as they try to convince us that it is abuse, no matter what.

April 2023

This video from  the Police Superintendents’ Association conference in September 2017 also depicts police in an evangelising role. Gillian Squires is a Detective Constable, Birmingham Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub who is passionate about her ‘life goal’ of ending FGM.

She is ably supported by ‘survivor’ and campaigner, Sarian Karim-Kamara who, like many campaigners, supply anecdotal accounts which the detective and others proudly relay as “personal accounts, not facts.”

The pair have continued to work closely together and their work has been recognised and honoured.

In 2018, the Detective Constable received an MBE award in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. She was described as “a vastly experienced child abuse investigator who, in recent years, has dedicated much of her professional and personal time to raising awareness of and tackling Female Genital Mutilation.

Sarian Karim-Kamara was awarded the honour of batonbearer for the Commonwealth Games Queen’s Baton Relay in England in 2022

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Because old links such as the one about The FGM Detectives* are sometimes removed, this piece by Cathy Newman in The Huffington Post has been added here to ensure the story is better illustrated.

02 March 2025

Thirty Years After FGM Was First Outlawed, A Successful Prosecution Will Have To Wait

Despite trial collapses, police remain determined to help stop the scourge of female genital mutilation in Britain

By Cathy Newman Presenter for Channel 4 News

27/02/2018 08:51am GMT

Detective Chief Inspector Leanne Pook has spent her entire career putting criminals in the dock. Now she has to defend herself in the court of public opinion after the collapse last week of a trial accusing a father of mutilating his daughter. The judge ordered a non-guilty verdict.

It’s been a turbulent week for DCI Pook. But she insists she remains just as determined to help stop the scourge of female genital mutilation in Britain as she was six years ago, when she had what she describes as a life-changing encounter with one of the Bristol Somali community, with whom she has since forged close links.

After dedicating much of her career to child protection in Avon & Somerset, she’d been tasked with leading work in the region not only to prevent British women and girls being cut – but also to bring the perpetrators to justice.

She’d attended an event at Bristol University, along with 400 other people – when a 15 year old boy, Mukhtar Hassan, stood up and addressed the audience passionately. Why, he asked, was he, as a boy, concerned about FGM? His answer, DCI Pook recalls, was simple: “He said, ‘I may be a man, but I’m somebody’s son, I’m somebody’s brother, I’m somebody’s friend, and one day I will be somebody’s father.’”

This seasoned police officer says it moved her to tears. “It blew my mind,” she remembers. If 15 year-old Mukhtar had the guts to stand up in front of an audience of hundreds and tell them FGM needed to end, DCI Pook felt she owed it to him – and all the thousands of women and girls mutilated up and down the country – to do everything she possibly could to put a halt to the practice.

For more than three decades, FGM has been illegal in the UK, but no one has ever been successfully prosecuted. One Spring day in 2016, DCI Pook took a call which might have changed the course of history.

A Bristol-based charity, Integrate – of which DCI Pook is herself a trustee – informed her one of their activists had witnessed a local taxi driver apparently admitting that he’d had his daughter cut.

DCI Pook and her team swung into action with an investigation, which was to prove highly controversial. They identified the taxi driver, and discovered he had several children, including a six-year-old girl. A medical examination carried out by a Bristol-based paediatrician revealed an injury to her clitoris. But it’s so small – a 2-3mm lesion – it’s described as a possible “type 4” cut – so there are immediate question-marks over whether, legally, it amounts to mutilation.

It’s the first of many setbacks in the case.

Some have claimed that type 4 FGM should be permitted as a cultural practice. DCI Pook has little patience with that argument, suggesting that because many of the victims of FGM are from black and minority ethnic communities, a subtle kind of racism is at play here. “I just think…if we had a little white girl here and we took off the very tip of her finger, there would be bloody outrage!” she says.

Her colleague Dave Evry agrees: “People need to know that these girls are held down by, often, their mothers and their aunts and their grandmothers. Just because something can be minor, a minor nick or a pinprick or a cut to the clitoris or, you know, parts of the vagina – any cut is painful.”

Muna Hassan, Mukhtar’s sister, a passionate anti-FGM campaigner working for the charity Integrate, where DCI Pook is trustee, highlights the controversy of FGM within the Somali community.

Not all men in the Bristol area are as supportive as her brother. “Men can somehow find a way to be a collective when it comes to talking about the vaginas,” she says, adding that if people feel targeted by the police, they need to start the kind of dialogue she and her family have with DCI Pook. “We have to be really honest to ourselves, FGM is still something that is happening in the UK, and if communities feel like they are being targeted and attacked, have those conversations with the police. Sit down with each other.”

The longer the investigation continued, the harder DCI Pook had to work to keep the community onside, and the police and other agencies were to face questions about the delays.

And then there was a development which the police officer would later describe as a “hammer blow” to the case.

A senior doctor, the UK’s leading FGM specialist, consulted about the photographs from the medical examination of the little girl, thought there was suggestion of a small lesion but said the images were simply too blurry to be sure.

She carried out her own investigation several weeks later. And this time the doctor couldn’t see the injury.

DCI Pook’s colleague Dave Evry tears up as he reflects on what they all knew was “a big knock back”.

“I thought we’d lost it all. I thought the case was out of the water then…And also then you start to question, you know, what have we done? You know, have we unnecessarily disrupted this family, have we unnecessarily put this girl through something she didn’t need to go through?”

Should DCI Pook at this point have given up? Her detractors in the community believe so. But, remembering Mukhtar Hassan, and all the activists she’s come to know and love, she pressed on.

The second medical expert’s full report said if there was an injury, it was possible it may have simply healed.

So the case proceeded. After investigating for nearly a year, the Crown Prosecution Service agreed with DCI Pook and her team that there was enough evidence for criminal charges. The CPS advised the police the limited nature of the potential injury meant that instead of using the dedicated FGM legislation, they should instead charge the girl’s father with child cruelty, for allowing or arranging for her to be mutilated.

On the first day of the trial, February 19, nearly two years after she first started investigating the case, DCI Pook felt the burden of what she believed would prove to be an historic moment. “We’ve had 30 something years of FGM legislation and nobody had been prosecuted successfully, and so there’s this kind of overwhelming sense of ’Oh my word, we’re here now, this has happened. The next four days are really, really massively important.”

It would turn out to be a prophetic comment.

Because as the prosecution outlined the evidence, the judge soon made clear he was concerned that the account relied on was ‘internally inconsistent’. Sami Ullah, the key witness said that the taxi driver and father of the little girl had described FGM more broadly as “very wrong”, and suggested to Mr Ullah that his daughter had only had the “small” cut. The judge said there was a risk of misunderstanding as a the defendant’s “English was broken”. While the judge accepted, Mr Ullah gave his evidence honestly, he stated that he had been “influenced” by his views as an activist at the charity Integrate.

The case began to unravel.

The judge directed the jury to acquit the taxi driver, saying he found the case against him “deeply troubling”. The medical evidence, he said, was “wholly inconclusive at its highest”. The equipment used in the first examination was 15 years old, and the photographs so blurry they were “of no value clinically or forensically”.

The CPS said they accepted the decision, but argued that this was “an unusual and unprecedented case”. They insisted there was sufficient evidence to prosecute, and the case was in the public interest.

And just days after the acquittal, the very links with the community DCI Pook had spent years nurturing exposed her to scrutiny. Questions were asked about why she’s been allowed to lead the case and interview the only witness, despite their mutual involvement with Integrate. The local MP suggested there was a conflict of interest – an allegation DCI Pook denies. Her appointment as a trustee for Integrate was cleared by Avon & Somerset Police.

DCI Pook is bitterly disappointed with the outcome of the case. But this isn’t the end of the story which began with that speech from 15-year-old Mukhtar Hassan.

“Very soon after I got involved in this work, I knew that my commitment to ending FGM would last a lifetime. While this issue continues to affect women and girls, I will get out of bed every single day determined to do everything I possibly can to stop it,” she says.

Thirty three years after FGM was first outlawed in the UK, a successful prosecution will have to wait. Just how long depends on the determination and trust of people like Mr Hassan, and the dedication of officers like DCI Pook.

Within weeks, a London man will face trial, accused of inflicting FGM. DCI Pook and her colleagues will be watching that case with interest.

Cathy Newman is a presenter on Channel 4 News. The FGM Detectives (link no longer live) will air on Tuesday 27 February at 10pm on Channel 4