France Cracks Down on Abuse of Women With Bold Ads Targeting Muslim Migrant Communities

France has launched an advertising campaign to combat the surge in female genital mutilation, as statistics show that 1 in 10 girls living in districts with large Muslim communities are being coerced into this cruel practice.

The three-monthslong campaign, which coincides with the school holiday season when parents are most likely to take their daughters abroad for the procedure, will conclude on Sept. 2.

Hoardings on bus shelters are warning parents: “Female genital mutilation should never be part of the journey.” The advertisement features an image of a young girl whose genitals have been mutilated.

The charity “Excision, parlons-en!” (Let’s Talk About Female Genital Mutilation!) is offering an awareness kit as it partners with the French government. According to statistics provided by the nongovernmental organization, 180,000 girls risk being “cut” each year in Europe.

Female Genital Mutilation Plagues Muslim-Dominated Areas in France

The prefecture of Seine-Saint-Denis in the Paris region, which has an estimated Muslim population of 800,000 people out of 1.8 million inhabitants (44.4% of the population), has the highest rate of female genital mutilation, with 1 in 10 women at risk of being victims of the procedure, in 2026.

A study conducted at the André-Grégoire Hospital in Montreuil, a suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis, found that nearly 12% of women giving birth were affected by female genital mutilation. 

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According to Excision, parlons-en!, 500,000 women have already been forced to undergo the procedure across Europe. France has the highest number of victims (60,000), with Belgium (13,000) coming second.  

In 2019, France had 139,312 adult women and 10,688 underage girls who had undergone female genital mutilation, according to the Interministerial Mission for the Protection of Women against Violence and the Fight against Human Trafficking. 

France outlawed female genital mutilation in 1983, with a sentence of 10 years in prison, or up to 20 years for cutting a girl under the age of 15. Parents who oversaw female genital mutilation are treated as “accomplices” to the crime. The law also applies to parents who send French-born children abroad to be cut.

By 2024, France had granted refugee status to 20,000 girls under the age of 18 to protect them from the risk of being genitally cut in their country of origin. 

Flagging off the campaign in July, the Prefect of Seine-Saint-Denis said it was “raising awareness about Female Genital Mutilation before the summer holidays.” The prefect noted that “FGM is an unacceptable violation of the integrity and fundamental rights of the women and girls who are victims of it. It must be denounced and condemned internationally, as well as in France.”

Islamic Justification for Female Genital Mutilation

“The Quran says nothing on this issue, but Yusuf al-Qaradawi, considered one of the greatest spiritual leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, long treated ‘female circumcision’ as a matter of religious jurisprudence,” Dr Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, a global authority on the movement, told the Daily Signal.

“This issue intersects with a normative universe that radical Islam has significantly developed in France: that of controlling women’s bodies and sexuality,” Bergeaud-Blackler, author of “The Brotherhood and its Networks: The Investigation,” explained.

“While Islamic religious authorities in France hardly endorse this practice, they fail to confront the problem, which affects a growing number of young girls, particularly from Sub-Saharan Africa,” the anthropologist added. Female genital mutilation is more commonly justified through the Sunnah of Mohammed; that is, conversations that the founder of Islam had during his travels.

“Any insistence that FGM has nothing to do with Islam is simply unserious. Granted the practice predates Islam, is not directly commanded in the Qur’an and most Muslims thankfully don’t practice it,” Nuriyah Khan, a leading British women’s rights activist, told the Daily Signal.

Khan, a fellow of the Ideological Defense Institute, noted that “the classical Shafi‘i school of Sunni jurisprudence classifies female circumcision as obligatory, while the Dawoodi Bohras, a Musta‘li Isma‘ili Shia community centered in India, have long practiced ‘khafz,’ the community’s term for female genital cutting as a religious rite.”

“That does not mean Islamic jurisprudence is its only cause. Culture, family pressure and the desire to control female sexuality all play a part,” she observed. “However, Islam is part of that conversation whether campaigners like it or not. We will never tackle FGM honestly if every discussion begins by denying the belief system used to justify it.”

British Medical Journal Attacks Campaigns to Outlaw Female Genital Mutilation

In 2019, the French government launched the “National Plan for the Eradication of Female Genital Mutilation,” which includes “15 measures aimed at strengthening the detection of the risks of excision, training professionals and raising public awareness of this harmful practice.”

The government sanctioned 5 million euros from 2020 to 2022 and 2.5 million euros in 2023 to develop comprehensive care units for victims of female genital mutilation. 

In 2023, the Minister for Gender Equality convened the monitoring committee for the National Action Plan to Eradicate Female Genital Mutilation, announcing it would fight female genital mutilation through a “sexual and reproductive rights roadmap with €250 million in funding over five years.”

Government plans to crack down on female genital mutilation have suffered a setback, however, with the September 2025 issue of the British Journal of Medical Ethics warning that campaigns and policies against female genital mutilation are likely to cause more harm, “despite their grounding in human rights and health advocacy.”

“This discourse, driven by a heavily racialized and ethnocentric framework, has led to unintended but serious consequences: the erosion of trust in healthcare settings, the silencing of dissenting or nuanced community voices, racial profiling and disproportionate legal surveillance of migrant families,” the peer-reviewed article in the prestigious medical journal warned.

The journal also warned against a “troubling double standard that legitimizes comparable genital surgeries in Western contexts while condemning similar procedures in others,” failing to mention that female genital mutilation in the context of Muslim communities is almost always coerced, unlike cosmetic genital surgery, which is undertaken to create a “designer vagina.”

The 25 co-authors, made up of academics from the University of Cambridge, the University of Bristol, the University of Brighton, and Sussex Medical School, noted that anti-female genital mutilation laws, such as protection orders by family courts leading to confiscation of passports, “construct parents as potential perpetrators” and “disrupts trust within families and causes harm to entire communities.”

“This is an abhorrent act and we should call it what it is: mutilation,” lawmaker Claire Coutinho stressed. “It is beyond belief that members of the medical profession would want to smooth out the harsh realities that face young girls undergoing this awful practice in the name of ‘diversity.’”

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