Around 4,500 new cases of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) were recorded in England over the last year, more than one every two hours, official data shows.
Between April 2017 and March 2018, around 6,200 women and girls who visited a doctor, midwife, or other public health services in England had been exposed to the form of abuse at some point, the National Health Service (NHS) said on Thursday.
Some cases had already been recorded, but 4,495 were being logged for the first time since the government made it compulsory for medical practitioners to report cases of FGM in 2015.
Since then, there have been 28,326 medical attendances of females with FGM and 16,265 newly recorded cases. However, an estimated 137,000 women and girls in England and Wales have been exposed to the practice overall.
In the past 12 months, nearly half (2,755) of the attendance cases were in London, 1,415 were in the north of England, 1,200 in the Midlands and East, and 745 in the south of England.