Female genital mutilation: Still bleeding "I NEARLY bled to death," says Bogaletch Gebre, a women's rights campaigner who suffered female genital mutilation (FGM) at the age of 12. Her organisation, Kembatti Mentti Gezzima, is credited with reducing the practice in Ethiopia, her home country. She does not tell people to stop, she says. She just explains that the procedure - which ranges from a symbolic nick, to the removal of all or part of a girl's clitoris, to infibulation (sewing up the labia) - is not in the Bible, nor the Koran; nor do culture or law require it. Such "community conversations," based on African traditions and involving young and old, men and women, may help explain the startling discrepancy, highlighted in a new report by UNICEF, between the number of Ethiopian women who have undergone FGM, and those who think it should continue (see chart). More than 125m girls and women alive today have been subjected to FGM of some kind in the 29 Middle Eastern and African countries where it is most common; 30m are at risk over the next decade. The practice has declined in more than half the countries UNICEF looked at, but most dramatically where it was already rarer. In the Central African Republic the share of women in the 15-49 age group who had been mutilated dropped from 43% in 1995 to 24% in 2010. In a few countries new data suggest the practice is all but eliminated. In the countries where it is most common, however, such as Egypt and Sudan, the prevalence has hardly changed. In Kenya it varies by ethnicity: FGM is now rare among the Kalenjin and Kikuyu tribes, and has almost disappeared among the Meru. Yet more than 95% of ethnic Somali and Kisii girls are still being cut. Support for FGM, among both sexes but especially younger people, seems to be falling, even in countries where the practice is almost universal. Experience elsewhere suggests that this may herald an actual decline in coming years. In the meantime, many, especially in the West, say the perpetrators should be dealt with more harshly. In Britain, where the practice is illegal whether carried out at home or abroad, some immigrants, notably from Egypt, Gambia, Kenya, Sierra Leone and Somalia, still take their daughters away to be cut during the summer holidays. John Cameron of the NSPCC, a children's charity, says a helpline it set up three weeks ago has received 63 calls, mostly from neighbours worried about girls at risk. It has referred 25 cases to the police. They are investigating, but no prosecutions have yet resulted. The British authorities are "chicken" and too worried about being politically correct, says Linda Weil-Curiel, a Parisian lawyer. She has been defending victims of FGM since 1982, when a girl of Malian origin died after the procedure, sparking national outrage. More than 100 parents have been prosecuted, many have received jail sentences of up to two years. Two practitioners were given longer sentences. One of them, Hawa Gréou, who served five years, subsequently joined forces with her one-time adversary, Ms Weil-Curiel, to write a book on the thousands of girls mutilated in France each year. She says she will never harm a girl again.