Heather Bellamy spoke with Ann-Marie Wilson from 28 Too Many about the recent Summit and the impact of FGM on young girls

Ann-Marie: That's an interesting question. FGM probably happens to one girl in the world every 10 seconds somewhere. There have been 90 million girls cut in Africa and 140-odd million around the world, so that's live people who are living with the implications of FGM: they're the statistics. In terms of violence, certainly different societies have different norms - and actually violence against women is quite prevalent in the UK. But certainly some societies in Africa will have more of a biblical perspective, though not necessarily accurate - to spare the rod and spoil the child. It's sometimes a mistruth that children should be beaten or belted and many wives don't have the voice to stand up to their husbands in either Muslim or Christian society in some of Africa. Often women don't have the choice to allocate how often they have sexual relations or how often they have children.

Heather: So what is 28 Too Many doing to stop these sort of things happening?

Ann-Marie: 28 Too Many was founded after I went to work in West Darfur as a volunteer aid worker with Medair, a Christian relief charity. I met a little girl who'd had FGM at five years old and was raped at ten and the whole of her village was killed: her parents, her family, everybody, burned and deserted. She was left for dead, but pregnant at ten and had her baby at 11. I met that little girl and thought, "This is just too shocking: we need to do something." I think there's an opportunity for us to work to change these cultural norms; in fact we decided that there was a gap in the marketplace, in the FGM sector and nobody was doing actual grassroots research for exactly what's going on on the ground, what the prevalence rate is, what's the rationale - because it's different in different places, even in different ethnic groups within a country, and unless you've got a baseline survey, a benchmarking of what's going on, you can't see whether any initiatives are actually changing things. So that's the first intervention we do. Having done that we disseminate it across the country and share it with people; we then go and talk to people and say, "What would you like to do?" and we're just planning some initiatives now. After I'd visited East Africa I think I met about 350 people from 85 organisations in February to say, "What would you like next?" and we're just beginning to think about how to do that - but it will involve working with networks of people and helping to capacity-build the FGM sector to make sure their initiatives are even stronger.

Heather: I mentioned the Girl Summit earlier, so who came to that? What organisations were represented?

Ann-Marie: That was quite an exciting event. We had two summits in two months, after the Ending Sexual Violence in Conflict Summit in June, so this was an exciting one. This was smaller, it was 650 people from all around the world, and we had government ministers, heads of states, heads of faith movements, people like UNICEF and the United Nations joint programme on FGM would have been present, and NGOs would have been present as well.

Heather: And what happened there?

Ann-Marie: There were some plenary sessions, one from David Cameron and the closing one from Nick Clegg; and then there were seven seminars in the morning and seven in the afternoon sharing best practice. The idea was let's share best practice around the world to make sure everyone can get the same knowledge and be enthusiastic and able to take good ideas back and do even more. We had a young researcher of ours who went for the Girl Summit, the youth summit of the Girl Summit, on Saturday to share as an under-21-year-old what we want for the next generation, so that was an exciting day. And then there was the Girl Effect Day in Brick Lane on Sunday and then various meetings on research and communications and then the day itself, so for us it was five days of work, but we also were excited to be involved.

I have been collecting a pledge signed by faith leaders over the last few weeks and have got near on 350 of those, including one this morning came in from the Archbishop of York so that's quite exciting. These are faith leaders saying: "There is no place in any of our holy books for FGM: it isn't required by us, so why is it happening?" So I sat on a panel with two people from Muslim backgrounds, a professor from Egypt and a women's Muslim association worker from Birmingham; a pastor who we work with in Uganda; and myself and we shared about the role of faith in ending FGM and that gave a lot of hope I think for the future.

Heather: And one of the things the summit wanted to address as well was child marriage. How big a problem is that?

Ann-Marie: That is also a vast problem. It has a different sector it caters for - but there is a correlation with child marriage and FGM. In many of the countries I work in and 28 Too Many works in, the FGM is a requirement for marriage and as soon as a girl has been cut she will be married. We were trying to differentiate in the summit between forced marriage, child marriage and early marriage, which are all generally for a minor, often under the age of 18. This is illegal in some countries, but not in all and it is forced marriage; arranged marriage might be a family takes on organisation of a young person's marriage, but the two people do consent to marriage and that's normally over-18.

Heather: Is there much will to change from the nations and communities that practise these things? I mean are the community or national leaders dialoguing about changing these practices?

Ann-Marie: It was quite interesting that we had heads of state of Bangladesh and India and many other countries across Europe pledging funds and many communities from the south, African leaders coming to share from Ethiopia and Kenya. I think there is, but different countries are at different levels of advancement. In Kenya the president appointed last year the head of an FGM-abandonment board and that's an exciting initiative and they do seem to be making progress now and they are arresting people who are committing FGM and they're getting prison sentences, so that's taken quite seriously now. In Ethiopia the government takes harmful traditional practices very seriously, but they like to take responsibility for working against harmful traditional practices in their own country, rather than getting international NGOs coming in telling them what to do.

Heather: So finally, if anyone's concerned about these issues, whether for themselves or someone they know, who should they contact?

Ann-Marie: That's a good question. On our website we always have the good contact numbers - but the NSPCC ChildLine number has a dedicated anti-FGM phone number, which is available; the other thing is they can call Crimestoppers, or the police, all of those will help. Also each local authority in the UK will have a child protection board that will take this seriously: social services and other protection agencies have a duty to take this seriously. I think that's something coming directly out of the summit, that any girl in the UK, whether British citizen or not, in the next term of legislation will be protected, so there is getting more protection for girls.

Summer is a risk time for girls to be taken home back to their motherland, often in Africa or Asia, for both these two things: child marriage or FGM. If people feel they're at risk and it's against their will, border controls can help to protect the rights of people. I know there's a story sometimes now where girls who are being taken out against their will to get married, if they put a spoon in their luggage, that scans, then they can be taken off and protected. There was a young girl taken into care when she came back with an older woman this year from Sierra Leone and it's likely that there was something found in the woman's luggage and it was found to be that the girl either had been cut or had been taken out of the country for that reason. I think that case is still going through court so all the details aren't known, but the border controls are getting better this year at protecting girls and British people.

On our website there's lots of information and there's ways people can get involved. All our work is done by volunteers, so if anyone wants to get involved, to give, go, or pray, we've got all sorts of roles people can get involved with. The address is www.28toomany.org.