And Britain`s “lamentable” record of protection will deter those “brave enough” to come forward to report and address the violent acts, the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee (HASC) warns. 

The Committee says that the ongoing failure to bring a successful prosecution for FGM is a “national scandal that is continuing to result in the preventable mutilation of thousands of girls”. 

The HASC report Female genital mutilation: abuse unchecked says the paucity of good data on this crime in the UK makes it difficult to assess the scale of the problem. 

But a City University study estimated that there were approximately 137,000 women and girls subjected to FGM who were permanently resident in England and Wales in 2011. 

The HASC is “alarmed” by reports that some clinicians are ignoring the duty on frontline healthcare professionals, social care workers and teachers to record data on FGM incidence and repeats its call for Government to introduce stronger sanctions for failing to meet the mandatory reporting responsibility. 

Other recommendations made by the committee include that Government departments should link up more to form a cohesive and united approach to addressing the issue, and that the Home Office`s FGM Unit should form better links with Border Force operations and police forces to provide intelligence and guidance on high-risk countries and intercept families when they try and take a girl out of the UK to cut her abroad. 

The FGM Unit should be made a joint enterprise between the Home Office, the Department of Health and the Department for Education, with the remit, powers and budget to become the sole source of Government policy for safeguarding girls at risk and meeting the Government`s ambition to eradicate FGM “within a generation”. 

The HASC warns that FGM is not a religious or cultural rite of passage that deserves protection but “an horrific crime which when inflicted on a girl is violent child abuse”. 

The report goes on: “FGM involves young girls’ genitalia being cut with scissors, a razor, a knife or even glass, usually with no anaesthetic or antiseptic. 

“Everyone involved in protecting children needs to be aware of, and prevent, this specific form of abuse.” 

The MPs criticised a lack of reliable and in-depth information on the issue, warning it is difficult to fully ascertain the extent and prevalence of the abuse without solid statistics. 

Overall, the HASC is calling for a more sophisticated, data-driven approach to eradication that would see the Government engage directly with affected and at-risk women and girls. 

The Government must conduct research to ascertain attitudes towards FGM, the motivations for continuing to inflict the procedure, and to measure awareness of the law prohibiting it among practicing communities, MPs are urging. 

While heartened by the Government’s willingness to confront the abuse, unless sufficient resources are provided to groups who work and campaign within the communities where FGM is practised, efforts to prevent it “will be in vain”, MPs feared. 

The committee review was instigated after a petition campaign was launched calling on the Government to do more to address FGM. 

Petition organiser Leyla Hussein said that while she welcomed the committee’s commitment to stopping the “hidden crime” of FGM, more still needed to be done. 

She said: “I’m glad they’ve called it a national scandal, becau