"In a hugely significant, and possibly life-saving step, the NSPCC has launched a helpline for those at risk of, or worried that someone else might be at risk of, undergoing female genital mutilation (FGM) in the UK.

This is a procedure carried out for religious and social reasons in many countries (primarily Africa and the Middle East) and immigrant communities across Europe, during which parts of a girl’s genitalia are brutally cut out and the remaining opening stitched together (often in a makeshift procedure with no anaesthetic, professional tools or proper hygiene), so that her future husband can be sure he is marrying a virgin. In truth, FGM ensures the girl experiences no sexual pleasure, as the clitoris is often damaged, while side effects include infection, blood loss and organ failure. What happens when the girl starts her period or undergoes childbirth is probably better left unsaid.

Details of the referrals the NSPCC has made to the police emerged at a meeting of ministers, police, health workers, lawyers and others to discuss an initiative launched by chief prosecutor Keir Starmer a year ago to tackle Britain’s failure to prosecute a single ‘cutter’, as practitioners are known, in the 28 years that FGM has been illegal – yet still carried out – in this country.

I have been aware of this appalling practice for almost as long as it has been outlawed. For most of her career as a gynaecologist, my mum worked in south-east London, in areas heavily populated with women who had immigrated with their families from the various parts of the world where it was – and still is – practised. She witnessed the horrific physical and emotional results time and time again.

Back then, it was called ‘female circumcision’ because it was regarded as the distaff equivalent of the removal of the male foreskin. But I wonder if it also provided, subconsciously, a protective mental veil for those who were involved in its execution or consequences, because they are too awful to contemplate – although this is nothing, of course, to the pain of the procedure itself.

The first overt sign of progress, and recognition of the suffering incurred by those forced – generally girls at the age of seven or eight – to undergo it, came when this name was supplanted by the one we use now, which far better conveys what actually happens.

Lucy Mangan: "Will we finally end the horror of FGM?"