Perils of a cause célèbre

A FEW YEARS AGO, I WAS HAVING A conversation with a friend who was organising a discussion on feminism. She said she wanted to talk about how the overreach of the law into women’s lives was misguided — we needed less legislation around offensive words and more protection around real harms such as rape, assault and female genital mutilation (FGM). I remember asking her what more legislation was needed around FGM? She didn’t know. It was simply one of a list of “real things” that was supposedly happening to women and girls, and needed to be stamped out by the law.

Anti-FGM campaigns are a among many feminists — an easy win, especially if you’re critical of other feminist campaigns. I often hear people say, “Yes, making misogyny a hate crime is ridiculous, what we should really be doing is cracking down on FGM.” It even has its own UN-sponsored day — the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation. Nimko Ali and other campaigners have used their own compelling personal testimony to push for government support for stricter legal measures (in Ali’s case, becoming quite close to Boris Johnson and his fiancé Carrie Symonds, as well as being named the new UK Home Office independent advisor for tackling violence against women and girls). The question is, does all this amount to a better life