Police urge home secretary to ban FGM practitioner from entering UK

Scotland Yard is urging the home secretary, Amber Rudd, to intervene in the case of woman from Sierra Leone who carries out female genital mutilation and is said to be seeking entry into the UK.

The Metropolitan police applied to the court for a female genital mutilation protection order and also for an order to prevent the woman from entering the UK.

But Mr Justice Holman, sitting in London, said the question of whether the woman could enter the country was a matter for the secretary of state, not the court.

The woman, who was not named in court, is understood to be Kharday Zorokong, who was part of a Sierra Leonean delegation that included the minister for gender, Dr Sylvia Blyden, to the 73rd session of the UN committee on the rights of the child in Geneva last week. Zorokong performs FGM, but is opposed to operations on children under 18. Campaigners feared that she would come to the UK as part of Blyden’s delegation after the meeting in Geneva.

Zimran Samuel, appearing for the police, said officers had been asked by acampaigner in her 40s, who was also an FGM survivor, to take action to ban the cutter.

Samuel did not name the cutter but said she had a “high-profile status” as the head of a council of cutters in her community. Because of her status, people in the UK would want to use her services, even although it is illegal here, he said.

Later, Samuel said that he was concerned that there was a “loophole” in the law set up to protect women and girls against FGM. While FGM orders, introduced in the serious crime bill, allowed the protection of named individuals, it did not allow protection in this case. He told the judge that a request to the home secretary to be stop Zorokong from entering the UK was “in motion”.

The judge said he found FGM “abhorrent and a terrible scourge on women”, but “the right thing is to try to get the secretary of state not to let this woman in”.

After the judge declined to make any orders, the Metropolitan police said in a statement: “The MPS is now considering what other options are available to prevent the entry into the UK of a person who may wish to carry out FGM.”

DS Wendy Morgan, from the MPS sexual offences, exploitation and child abuse command, said: “FGM is illegal and constitutes child abuse. A lot of work has been done to raise awareness over the last few years of this horrific practice, highlighting the short- and long-term health risks and the absence of any religious teaching that supports it. However, we are not complacent and more still needs to be done.

“The Met spends time highlighting the support available to those who may be at risk. When victims come to us with concerns over the risks they face, no matter what stage they are at in their life, the Met takes take these concerns very seriously.

“Police have a responsibility to act to protect vulnerable people and prevent people, especially the vulnerable, from becoming victims of crime. The Met will always to seek to follow the law to carry out this responsibility.”

Before the Ebola outbreak forced a temporarily ban on the practice, it was estimated that 88% of Sierra Leonean girls were cut, the seventh highest rate of the 28 countries in which FGM is practised.

While FGM is not illegal in Sierra Leone, ministers have proposed outlawing the practice among under-18s. But many anti-FGM campaigners in the country say this will have little impact, as it is traditionally the parents who make the decision of a daughter, irrespective of age.

Nimko Ali, an anti-FGM campaigner and founder of Daughters of Eve, said she welcomed the judge’s comment and was hopeful that Rudd would take action. She said that cutters in Sierra Leone had a powerful role and political clout in the country.

Ali said: “I’m hopeful that this will be successful. The symbolic nature of the judge saying: ‘I haven’t got the power but you should explore other areas’ is very welcome. The sense of impunity with which this woman (Zorokong) can sit on the UN and say that FGM is an act of consent. If she were to visit the UK it would be a propaganda mission.”

Anti-FGM campaigners from Sierra Leone have condemned Zorokong’s appearance before the UN. At the meeting, Blyden spoke about protecting under-18s from FGM but insisted that an adult women should be allowed to “do what she wants to her body”, ignoring the pressure upon women to undergo mutilation.

Yasmin Jusu-Sheriff, part of the Not In My Name coalition with Equality Now, said it was inappropriate that Zorokong was present at the UN last week.

The first ever recorded figures for FGM, reported in July, showed that between April 2015 and March 2016 there were 5,702 new cases in England. Most of the women and girls were born in Africa and underwent the procedure there, but at least 18 were subjected to FGM in the UK.

Police urge home secretary to ban FGM practitioner from entering UK

A day in the life of ... a senior web site nurse practitioner

Andy Brittin has been a web site nurse practitioner for more than 15 many years and thinks the future choices for his work are countless. Photograph: Andy Brittin

On operate nights I get up all around five.30pm, have a shower and anything to eat and then head out to whichever web site I am rostered to perform in. I typically cycle in, as I can not bear the tube in the mornings when I am on my way home to bed. As soon as I arrive, I quickly look over my emails for anything at all critical which could be relevant to the night ahead just before we consider over from the day group. As the senior practitioner, I oversee all of the trust internet sites overnight, so I may well also chat with my colleagues functioning in our other hospitals and guarantee they are Okay.

After this, it is time for the first of numerous visits to the emergency department to examine in with the nurse in charge, using this opportunity to place any individuals who require to be admitted to inpatient beds. At eight.30pm we join our health-related colleagues for the hospital at night handover to hear about the patients admitted that day and go over any person on the wards who may well give us result in for concern. We also get a handover from the outgoing outreach teams, who tell us about any patients they want us to review overnight. The beginning of the shift is when we make sure our wards are safely and adequately staffed, which can often involve asking employees to go and work in a diverse location for the evening if we’ve got an sudden shortfall somewhere. This is by no means a popular request and has to be handled sensitively, nevertheless it is crucial to make sure our patients are stored in a secure setting.

Following handover, we verify on any sufferers who have been flagged to us, and choose up any urgent jobs. We’re quite great at putting IV cannulas, so typically we get asked to see “tough” sufferers whom other men and women have experimented with and failed to cannulate throughout the evening there’s a particular fulfillment in acquiring the line in very first time so that the patient can finally get their remedy.

At 10pm I chair a conference get in touch with which entails all of the internet site nurse practitioner teams functioning across the a variety of trust web sites. We discuss our activity, highlight any concerns or challenges and make our programs for the evening. Then it really is time for our 1st hospital round, selecting up the clinical work as we go along – reviewing individuals, ordering tests, inserting IV lines, performing catheterisations, to name just a number of. About half of the staff are independent prescribers, which permits us to pace up patients’ access to medicines at night, and we all have acute care abilities. In in between job-primarily based operate, the pager does not stop – much more bed requests, clinical or managerial queries from the wards, plus crash calls for cardiac arrests or other health care emergencies. At times we get a lull in exercise in the little hrs, but other nights we’re kept on the go for the complete shift. In reality, something could happen – we have had to use our key incident strategy at night more than after.

My background is HIV/isolation nursing, but I’ve been a web site nurse practitioner for more than 15 years now, with no ideas to depart. When I consider how different the job is now in contrast with when I commenced out, the long term choices are limitless. I would never ever have thought we would finish up as nurse prescribers and innovative practitioners, yet here we are, and with the move to a safe, productive 24/7 model of care in the NHS I am hunting at ways we can roll our night-time clinical part out into anything that operates in the course of the day as effectively. I believe the biggest challenge is encouraging all our employees to think about the ward setting at evening – just simply because we’re awake, it does not indicate the individuals must be.

Soon after a last hospital round I catch up on admin and paperwork ahead of handing more than to the daytime management and nursing teams. Then it is time to cycle property and get to bed. The journey home is usually ample time for me to reflect on the evening and clear my head, so I am normally asleep as quickly as my head hits the pillow. Operating predominantly at night does not suit every person, but for me the mix of a clinical and operational role is just perfect, whatever the time of day.

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A day in the life of ... a senior web site nurse practitioner