Historicising the prohibition of vulval cutting in the UK: how race and medicine shaped the criminalization of female genital mutilation.

Abstract

This article is a historical analysis of the law governing vulval cutting in the UK, with a particular focus on the shifting role and perception of the medical profession in this context. It shows how criminalization is not neutral or inevitable, but a strategy that developed through historically contingent negotiations between law and medicine. It charts how racially laden ideas of health, expertise and medical legitimacy informed successive legislative reforms. In doing so, it uncovers the genesis of how racialized understandings of medical authority and mental health were first used to draw fuzzy lines between lawful and unlawful operations, and argues that subsequent concerns of vulval cutting as a widespread problem within migrant communities displaced earlier debates about the contours of the medical exception, cementing its imprecise boundaries. In turn, this article suggests that, during these 40 years of legislative development, the role of doctors has changed considerably, from shaping the limits of the criminal prohibition to being responsibilized for enforcing it.