Minority Ethnic Issues are issues which primarily, though not exclusively, affect minority ethnic women, such as forced marriage, female genital mutilation, human trafficking, and no recourse to public funds. Under the Scottish Government's gendered analysis these issues are considered as violence against women.
- It is difficult to quantify the scale of the problem of Female Genital Mutilation in Scotland. A study in 2007 for England and Wales estimated that nearly 66,000 women aged between 15 and 49 living in the UK had undergone FGM and over 20,000 girls were at risk.
- Although we recognise that the known cases of forced marriage i.e. brought to the attention of the Forced Marriages Unit will be much smaller than the actual number of incidents, 40 cases from Scotland were notified to FMU during the period January to October 2008.