According to the European Parliament, 500,000 women in Europe had undergone FGM . In France up to 30,000 women were thought to have experienced it as of 1995. According to Colette Gallard, a family-planning counsellor, when FGM was first encountered in France, the reaction was that Westerners ought not to intervene. It took the deaths of two girls in 1982, one of them three months old, for that attitude to change. In 1991 a French court ruled that the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees offered protection to FGM victims; the decision followed an asylum application from Aminata Diop, who fled an FGM procedure in Mali.Jana Meredyth Talton, "Asylum for Genital-Mutilation Fugitives: Building a Precedent", Ms., January/February 1992, 17. The practice is outlawed by several provisions of France's penal code that address bodily harm causing permanent mutilation or torture."Current situation of female genital mutilation in France" , European Institute for Gender Equality, European Union.Megan Rowling "France reduces genital cutting with prevention, prosecutions – lawyer" , Thomson Reuters Foundation, 27 September 2012. The first civil suit was in 1982, and the first criminal prosecution in 1993. In 1999 a woman was given an eight-year sentence for having performed FGM on 48 girls.David Gollaher, Circumcision: A History of the World's Most Controversial Surgery, New York: Basic Books, 2000, 189. By 2014 over 100 parents and two practitioners had been prosecuted in over 40 criminal cases.
According to the European Parliament, 500,000 women in Europe had undergone FGM . In France up to 30,000 women were thought to have experienced it as of 1995. According to Colette Gallard, a family-planning counsellor, when FGM was first encountered in France, the reaction was that Westerners ought not to intervene. It took the deaths of two girls in 1982, one of them three months old, for that attitude to change. In 1991 a French court ruled that the Convention Relati,ng to the Status of Refugees offered protection to FGM victims; the decision followed an asylum application from Aminata Diop, who fled an FGM procedure in Mali.Jana Meredyth Talton, "Asylum for Genital-Mutilation Fugitives: Building a Precedent" Ms., January/February 1992, 17. The practice is outlawed by several provisions of France's penal code that address bodily harm causing permanent mutilation or torture."Current situation of female genital mutilation in France" , European Institute for Gender Equality, European Union.Megan Rowling "France reduces genital cutting with prevention, prosecutions – lawyer" , Thomson Reuters Foundation, 27 September 2012. The first civil suit was in 1982, and the first criminal prosecution in 1993. In 1999 a woman was given an eight-year sentence for having performed FGM on 48 girls.David Gollaher, Circumcision: A History of the World's Most Controversial Surgery, New York: Basic Books, 2000, 189. By 2014 over 100 parents and two practitioners had been prosecuted in over 40 criminal cases.