A woman was found guilty in London on Thursday, October 26 of submitting a 3-year-old British girl for female genital mutilation during a trip to Kenya, British authorities said.
The Crown Prosecution Service said a jury convicted Amina Noor, 39, of assisting a Kenyan woman in carrying out the procedure 17 years ago.
It was the first time a person in England was convicted of female genital mutilation offences committed abroad, U.K. prosecutors said.
The case came to light in 2018 when the girl, then a teenager, told a teacher that as a young child she had undergone the cutting procedure, which involves the partial or total removal of external female genitalia.
London’s Metropolitan Police launched an investigation and found that Noor, a Somalia-born British citizen, had travelled to Kenya with the girl in 2006, and while there took her to a private house where the procedure was performed.
Noor told police she thought the child would just get an injection and didn’t appear to be in pain afterwards. But medical experts who examined the girl found she had her clitoris removed, and prosecutors alleged Noor had encouraged and assisted in the offence.
Senior UK prosecutor Patricia Strobino said it was often difficult to uncover such cases because they occur in secrecy and victims are afraid to come forward for fear of being shunned by their communities but stressed that British authorities would seek to prosecute female genital mutilation practices no matter how long ago or where they occurred.
“We want to send a strong message that this crime does not have to be carried out in the U.K. for perpetrators to be prosecuted,” Strobino said in a statement. “We will seek justice for victims regardless of where in the world it is committed, and offenders should be clear there is no hiding place.”
The United Nations aims to eradicate female genital mutilation, which is still widely practised in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, by 2030.
UNICEF, the U.N.’s children’s agency, estimates that at least 200 million women and girls in 31 countries are living with the aftermath of the practice, which can cause excessive bleeding or death in some cases, as well as pain during sex and childbirth complications.
Noor is set to be sentenced in December and faces a maximum sentence of 14 years.
The only other successful prosecution in the U.K. to date was in 2019 when a Ugandan woman from east London was jailed for 11 years for performing the procedure on a young girl
