London's Metropolitan Police on Wednesday launched a campaign that aims to eradicate female genital cutting in the United Kingdom by highlighting the practice as a crime, the AP/ABC News reports. Detective Chief Superintendent Alastair Jeffrey said the police is offering a $40,000 reward for information that leads to the country's first prosecution for the practice (Doran, AP/ABC News, 7/11).

Female genital cutting -- sometimes referred to as female circumcision or female genital mutilation -- is a practice in which there is a partial or full removal of the labia, clitoris or both. About 6,000 girls undergo the practice daily worldwide, and the World Health Organization estimates that 100 million to 140 million women worldwide have undergone the practice. At least 90% of women who undergo genital cutting live in developing countries -- such as Djibouti, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sudan -- while almost no women undergo the practice in Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, according to UNICEF (Kaiser Daily Women's Health Policy Report, 7/2).

A 2003 U.K. law bans conducting the procedure in the country or abroad, punishable by up to 14 years in prison, but there have been no prosecutions under the measure, Jeffrey said (AP/ABC News, 7/11). The reward will be given to anyone who provides information that leads to a successful prosecution under either the 2003 Female Genital Mutilation Act or the 1985 Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act, which also bans the procedure, London's Guardian reports.

According to U.K. Department of Health figures expected to be released this fall, an estimated 66,000 girls and women in England and Wales have undergone genital cutting. The estimate was extrapolated from a 2001 census by the Foundation for Women's Health, Research and Development, a group campaigning against the procedure, according to the Guardian. Maureen Salmon of the foundation said the total likely is an underestimate because of an influx of refugees to the United Kingdom from countries with civil wars, including Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sudan (Pidd, Guardian, 7/11).

"The timing of this campaign is for one good reason: so we can get in before the summer holidays, a time when young girls are taken abroad and subjected to genital mutilation," Jeffrey said (AP/ABC News, 7/11). "This is child abuse," Jeffrey said, adding that the campaign "is not an attack on anyone's culture, it is an attack on anyone who commits this horrendous abuse of children" (BBC News, 7/11).