A mother has been banned from flying her baby daughter to India for genital mutilation after social workers learnt three other girls in the family had been subjected to it.
A judge at Manchester County and Family Court ruled that the child, who will turn two in the summer, was at risk of the ‘utterly unacceptable’ procedure because religious and cultural pressure had overridden the mother’s ‘maternal instinct’.
Female genital mutilation, formerly known in the UK as ‘female circumcision’, involves ritual intimate cutting, sometimes without anaesthetic, and has been linked to a raft of lifelong health complications.