Tomorrow is world end Female Genital Mutilation day and to show how they support this Police Forces across the land are taking time off from painting their fingernails blue to show how they oppose slavery, to send out some tweets. Surrey Police Force has taken an admirable lead in is social media fight to #EndFGM but seems annoyed by the response.
There are estimated to be 100,000 victims of FGM in the UK with 9,000 crimes believed to have been committed last year and, to its credit, Surrey Police is in joint first place among British Police Forces with the number of prosecutions and convictions, that is to say on precisely 0. Quite rightly a number of folks have taken to twitter to point out that virtue signalling is not a substitute for actually doing anything.
The Surrey rozzers have responded by saying that a number of twitterers are guilty of Islamaphobia and will now be dealt with. Great. Bang up a few twitter wags for - as yet unspecified - crimes and meanwhile in a backstreet somewhere young girls continue to suffer dreadful mutilation without Surrey, or any other force, actually doing anything about it. Pay rises all round for the Old Bill's twitter and special investigations units
