This week’s FGM prosecution raises deep questions which cannot go unaddressed

The first successful prosecution in the UK for the crime of female genital mutilation (FGM) has been widely covered. Not least because the laws that made this barbaric practice a crime have been on the books since 1985 without a single successful prosecution until this week. So the fact that a 37-year old mother from east London was convicted of the crime at the Old Bailey this week is significant. But there is something about this case that still needs to be noted.

Campaigners against FGM are rightly saying that they hope that this prosecution will lead to more people coming forward to report the crime. One of the reasons why it has been so hard to prosecute the tens of thousands of such cases that are known to have happened is that by necessity in this case prosecutions largely rely on people being willing to report on – and possibly testify against – close family members.

But there is also a lesson in all this about the difference between law and custom. Over recent years if a critic of lax multiculturalism pointed to the example of FGM and what it told us about our society the response would often be ‘well it is already illegal’. And that is true. In the same way that it is illegal to groom and gang-rape hundreds of girls. Yet that too turned out to be widespread in the UK over recent decades. Whenever you raise matters such as these with, let me say for shorthand, Economist types, they are always ready with this happy solution. It is already illegal to do this. We already have the technocratic aspect all stitched up. And indeed in one way we do. But something may be against the law and yet still become a custom.