Questions need to be asked about this and I suspect that in this case, given the anonymity that the defendants have, and that authorities are scared stiff of ‘fuelling hate’ and ‘raising tensions’, that they will not be met with answers.
I find it curious that the father was acquitted by the jury, but not the mother. Given that he was acquitted both of FGM and of failing to protect a girl from risk of FGM, where was he when all this was going on? Because, it seems to me by definition that if he wasn’t involved in the FGM, then he sure as hell failed to protect the girl from it, whether he was in the next room, or had moved in with another woman a year ago.
Are these not members of a ‘community’ where women are subjugated either directly by their men or by tribal and religious lore? Did such a claim make up part of the case for the defence’s mitigation?
What was the racial, gender and age make-up of the jury? After all, in London – from whence the jury is presumably drawn for the Old Bailey – there’s a perfect cocktail of people who would be inclined to vote soft in the jury room. Views will be coloured by racial, religious, tribal and gender politics and no-one is likely to see plainly what is before them like an old whitey from the provinces.
Why is she not being deported, rather than being accomodated at the tax-payer’s considerable expense? What was she doing here in the first place?
Further questions as I think of them…
Because of her anonymity, BTW, we don’t have a photograph of her, but this was the court artist’s impression of the defendant:
AJ
Al Jahom's Final Word 