Woman who handed over British girl, 3, for FGM in Kenya got seven years
A woman found guilty of extraditing a three-year-old British girl for female genital mutilation (FGM) during a trip to Kenya has been jailed for seven years.
Amina Noor, 40, was convicted last year of assisting a Kenyan woman to carry out the procedure abroad in 2006. The conviction was the first for assisting such harm under the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003.
Judge Bryan, who sentenced Noor to seven years at the Old Bailey on Friday, described the crime as “truly heinous and abhorrent”.
FGM involves the partial or total removal of the external female genitalia and is considered a violation of the rights of women and girls. In 2012 the The UN has passed a resolution to ban FGM, but it is still practiced in about 30 countries.
In 2006, Noor, then 22, traveled from Harrow in north-west London to Kenya with the toddler, who was taken to a private home and circumcised.
The crime came to light years later when the girl was 16 and confided in her English teacher at school. On Friday, the judge said he hoped her “courage” would encourage others to come forward to report incidents. The victim, who is now 21, cannot be identified for legal reasons.
The only other successful prosecution under the 2003 law came in 2019, when a Ugandan woman from Walthamstow, east London, was jailed for 11 years for cutting off a three-year-old girl.
The court heard that when spoken to, the defendant said she thought the procedure was just an injection and that the girl was “happy and able to run around and play” afterwards. But when the girl was examined in 2019, it was found that her clitoris had been removed.
According to an initial account, Noor described going with another woman to a “clinic,” where the girl was called into a room for a procedure. The defendant said she was invited but declined because she was “scared and worried.” Afterward, the girl cried all night and complained of pain, the report said.
Jurors were told the suspect was born in Somalia and moved to Kenya at the age of eight during Somalia’s civil war. She was 16 when she came to Britain and later gained British citizenship.
Giving evidence at her trial, Noor said she was threatened with being “cursed” and “ostracized” within her community if she did not participate in the FGM. In a later police interview, Noor cautiously denied that anyone had threatened her before the girl was injured.