How we’re tackling FGM in the UK
Shrouded in secrecy and notoriously difficult for professionals to identify, female genital mutilation (FGM) affects thousands of young women and girls in the UK every year.
Sometimes referred to as female circumcision or simply ‘cutting’, it can have serious health and emotional consequences. FGM is considered a form of child abuse and classed as a serious crime in the UK.
Since 2015, it’s been mandatory for doctors, hospitals and mental health trusts to record any new cases of FGM identified in their patients.
And yet, with 123,000 women and girls estimated to be affected by FGM in England and Wales, and a further 60,000 girls under 18 at risk, it’s showing no signs of going anywhere soon.
We want to change that. That’s why we’ve teamed up with the Local Government Association (LGA) to create the National FGM Centre, funded by the Department for Education.
We caught up with Catherine Mannu, the National FGM Centre’s Knowledge Hub and Digital Officer, to learn more about how we’re using tech to help end FGM in the UK.
Why is FGM still such a critical issue?
Largely because it’s a form of hidden harm, so it’s difficult to identify unless a woman or girl discloses that they’ve undergone the practice. FGM usually happens behind closed doors in close community circles, and those involved rarely talk about it.
There’s anecdotal evidence that the girls — many under the age of ten — are flown out of the country during school holidays to undergo the procedure in secret. They’re often told not to talk about what happened as it would be considered taboo, and they may be scared to speak out because they want to protect their family — as many children do.
Because of this secrecy, levels of understanding around the practice and who is most at risk remain low.
How can we tackle the problem?
At the National FGM centre, we’re constantly looking for new ways to empower families, social workers and other professionals to protect vulnerable girls with confidence.
Frontline professionals are the ones that build personal relationships with the girls and their families, which means they’ve got the power, responsibility and opportunity to create change.
Making sure they have access to the right level of information and support is critical, especially with something as sensitive as FGM. To find the best ways to tackle the issue, we first needed to make sure we really understood the challenges facing social workers working with families where FGM had been identified as a concern.
What did that process look like?
Through working with and training social workers, teachers, police and health staff, we learned that many of them felt they didn’t know how to assess the risk of FGM, especially when it came to what questions to ask and how to ask them.
“There is a fear to refer, a fear to challenge and an overall fear to deal with FGM. We also heard, that even when staff have been trained, they do not know how to translate training into action and are nervous about sharing information.” London Assembly, Tackling FGM in London
Understandably, this had a huge impact on both their professional confidence and their ability to protect vulnerable girls in their communities. The team came together to explore what we could do to help.
How could a digital approach help?
Knowing that the first barrier preventing us from helping girls at risk of FGM was the secrecy and lack of information around it, we wanted to create a readily accessible online assessment tool that social workers could access from anywhere to help them assess cases where FGM had been flagged as a concern.
But we didn’t just want to help them spot the risks — we also wanted to give them easy access to support and guidance around what they should do after the assessment in each individual circumstance and vitally, which parental protective factors needed to be supported to help keep the girl safe.
We knew from our work in local authorities that many social workers used their smartphones or tablets on the go, so we wanted the tool to work seamlessly with the technology they already had.
What happened next?
We developed a two-part assessment tool that included guidance on how to work on cases (including preparing for the visit, setting the scene and activities to use with the family), and an online FGM assessment that would help analyse the information the social worker gathered during their time with the family.
Then, we gathered 10 social workers from various local authorities with differing prevalence of FGM to pilot the tool, and brought in York Consulting to evaluate how useful the tool was and suggest any recommendations for improvements.
“The questions provided are the most useful, they help me prepare. When things can be really busy, it’s a ‘go to’ place that I can pick up and print off and I feel confident with it.”
Social Worker in pilot
We met with the social workers throughout the pilot to discuss how they found using the tool. Overall the feedback was positive, but the main recommendations focussed on the usability of the online assessment, which at this point was an excel sheet.
With the help of a £10,000 investment from the Barnardo’s Innovation Fund, we were able to move onto our next iteration, developing a web-app version of the online assessment tool and implementing the recommendations from the evaluation.
How does the FGM assessment tool work?
When a social worker visits a family to explore a potential risk of FGM, they can use the FGM Assessment Tool to help prepare them for the assessment. Once they’ve visited the family and gathered the relevant information, they can then start completing the online assessment.
The online FGM assessment takes this information and generates a simple, personalised report that highlights any risks, areas of safety that could be improved, any safeguarding concerns that should be explored and any actions that should be taken.
For example, if a girl under 18 reports that they’ve been cut, the tool will immediately alert the social worker to report the information to the police as required by law.
They can then save and print the summary, with their answers to the questions and recommended actions.
Any data entered remains anonymous and won’t get stored anywhere, so the privacy and security of both the child and the social worker are protected at all times.
Together with their existing experience, we’re hoping the additional guidance can give social workers the extra support they might need to help them navigate these challenging conversations with confidence.
“I’m not a specialist in FGM, though I read about it. To go in and do a risk assessment without this, I wouldn’t have known what to ask. It helped a lot to push the conversation in the right direction to find out what I need.”
Social Worker
How widely available is the tool?
The tool is available online for free for anyone to access, however, our key audience is social workers.
There’s also CPD-accredited training on how to use and implement it in local authorities, which has already been delivered across local authorities in England and Wales. Alongside the training, the tool has also been demonstrated to partners in Sweden, Belgium and to our colleagues in the FBI/Homeland Security in the USA. While training isn’t compulsory, the evaluators recommend it to anyone thinking about using the tool in their work.
What kind of feedback have you had so far?
Overwhelmingly positive!
Since its launch in February 2018, the tool, including guidance, has been viewed over 4,500 times, with the online FGM assessment being accessed over 1,300 times — including by individuals outside the UK.
It’s been embedded in several existing FGM pathways and guidance within local authorities, and feedback from training and our launch events has shown that 100% of users would recommend the tool.
And that’s not all — social workers have reported increased confidence in their ability to identify, assess and address the risk of FGM in their communities. This, for us, is what success looks like.
Dr Leyla Hussein and Hibo Wardere, two prominent FGM survivors and activists, have also given the tool their personal recommendation.
While we can’t say for sure yet how many girls have been protected since the tool has been active, and many families would be unwilling to admit their intention to carry out the practice, based on what we’ve heard we’re confident it’s already making a huge difference.
Who else is using the tool?
Although we developed the tool for use in England in response to our model for social care, we’ve already had feedback about it being used by other bodies, such as the police and solicitors, in helping judges explain the risk of FGM in a legal decision.
What’s next?
Social work professionals have been using the assessment tool since 2017, and it’s in what we consider a ‘beta’ phase. This means we’ll keep looking at it, listening to feedback and making improvements as we go.
In the meantime, the tool has been shortlisted for The Early Intervention Award from Children and Young People Now, and for Best Use of Technology in Learning by the Training Journal Awards
We’re also really excited to have prototypes for many other similar applications in train. I guess you could think of the code for this tool as a sort of skeleton; once we know the structure is right, we can bring it to life in a new skin, helping to tackle other issues and making a difference to the lives of even more vulnerable children and young people.
Catherine Mannu is a Knowledge Hub and Digital Officer at the National FGM Centre, a partnership between Barnardo’s and the Local Government Association funded by the Department for Education.
To learn more about FGM and the Centre’s work, visit their website. To find out more about the work we’re doing in the Barnardo’s digital team, subscribe to blog.barnar.do on Medium, and follow #futurebarnardos on Twitter.
