Dexter Dias KC

What lawyers do – a corrective and a manifesto. By Dexter Dias QC

Dexter Dias QC on the first Female Genital Mutilation prosecutions.

And so it begins. In April we finally witnessed something that activists who have been campaigning against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) for years began to doubt would ever happen: the first defendants in a UK court facing criminal prosecution. The controversy around FGM, the mutilation of the genitals of young women and girls for non-medical reasons, has attained an unprecedented public prominence. There is an ongoing Parliamentary Inquiry. Eminent politicians profess profound concern. National newspapers launch petitions; television stations air documentaries. Yet for all the exposure, two simple stories ram home the brutal reality of FGM.

Dexter Dias QC examines the lessons the UK can learn from US mass incarceration and prison education.

The cull, when it finally came, was brutal. With a single stroke of his pen, Bill Clinton both signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act 1994 and eviscerated US prison education, cutting off the $200 million “Pell Grants” that funded it. Within a year, from there being 350 educational programmes in America’s penal institutions, there were less than a dozen.