The Portugal Health Ministry has confirmed 292 documented cases of female genital mutilation among women and girls living in the country during 2025, marking a 15% rise over the prior year and the highest tally in a decade. The data, released by the DGS in late 2025, covers the full calendar year. Yet health authorities frame the increase as evidence of better screening capacity rather than a surge in the practice itself—and crucially, not a single procedure was performed on Portuguese soil.
Why This Matters
• Detection, not prevalence: The Direção-Geral da Saúde (DGS) attributes the jump to heightened awareness among clinicians, not an uptick in new mutilations.
• Age vulnerability: Seven out of ten victims were mutilated before age 9, with the average procedure occurring at 7.7 years old.
• Health burden: More than half—53.1%—present with physical or psychological complications, complicating obstetric, urological, and sexual health care.
• Geographic spread: While Lisbon and Vale do Tejo still account for the majority, cases are now appearing with growing frequency in the North, Centre, and Algarve, signalling both diaspora movement and improved identification beyond the capital.
Who Is Affected and How Detection Works
Nearly all documented cases involve women and girls who underwent the procedure abroad, often in their countries of origin, before arriving in Portugal. The largest at-risk community stems from Guinea-Bissau, which in 2010 accounted for nearly 20,000 residents—the single most represented nationality from FGM-practising regions. Other African nations stretching from Senegal to Somalia, plus smaller pockets from Asia, also contribute to the caseload.
Most identifications occur during prenatal visits, childbirth, or postnatal check-ups, when obstetricians and midwives spot scarring or anatomical changes consistent with mutilation. This "clinical gate" has proved the most effective surveillance point: women who might never self-report are flagged during routine maternal care. The risk persists for Portuguese-born daughters of migrant families, however, who may be taken overseas during school holidays for the procedure—a scenario the government has sought to pre-empt through border alerts and targeted outreach.
What This Means for Residents
For healthcare professionals, the data underscores a duty to screen and document. The DGS has mandated use of a national registry since prior policy cycles, and clinicians who encounter suspected or confirmed FGM are legally obligated to report to the Public Prosecutor's Office if a minor is at risk. Beyond the clinic, teachers, social workers, and police share the same reporting threshold.
For affected women, the complications ripple across domains: obstetric tears and hemorrhage, chronic urogenital infections, painful intercourse, and post-traumatic stress are routine sequelae. Reconstructive surgery, counselling, and tailored maternity protocols are available through the National Health Service, though uptake depends on awareness and trust—variables that community mediators work to improve.
For the general public, especially employers, landlords, and educators in high-density migrant zones, the numbers serve as a reminder that FGM is not a distant issue but one woven into the fabric of multicultural neighbourhoods. Lisbon, Porto, and now secondary cities host families navigating trauma that predates their arrival yet demands active Portuguese institutional response.
Legal Framework and Penalties
FGM has been a standalone criminal offence since 2015 under Article 144-A of the Penal Code, carrying sentences of two to ten years imprisonment. Even preparatory acts—booking travel, arranging practitioners—trigger up to three years. The statute invokes extraterritorial jurisdiction, meaning a Portuguese resident who facilitates mutilation abroad can face prosecution at home, provided the victim or suspect holds sufficient ties to the country. Crucially, consent is irrelevant: even if a family or the girl herself agrees, the act remains criminal.
Portugal has ratified the Council of Europe Istanbul Convention on violence against women, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, all of which classify FGM as a human-rights violation. Asylum law also permits women fleeing imminent mutilation to claim protection, embedding FGM within the broader refugee framework.
Government and Civil-Society Response
In February 2025, the Comissão para a Cidadania e Igualdade de Género (CIG) relaunched a postgraduate diploma in FGM prevention and care, training physicians, nurses, social workers, and border-control officers in clinical identification, trauma-informed interviewing, and legal obligations. The program feeds into Práticas Saudáveis—Fim à Mutilação Genital Feminina, a flagship initiative that since 2018 has deployed specialist teams across ten health-centre clusters in Lisbon and Vale do Tejo. In 2025 the scheme expanded northward to Porto metropolitan hospitals, reflecting the geographic diversification of cases.
January brought a fresh €80,000 government grant line for NGOs tackling harmful traditional practices. Recipients include the Associação para o Planeamento da Família, which runs a youth-activist network using social media and peer workshops to shift attitudes within at-risk communities, and the Casa Árabe Portuguesa, which works with religious leaders to reframe FGM as incompatible with faith and human dignity.
At Portugal's borders, the Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras (SEF) maintains a risk-alert protocol: if intelligence or a tip suggests a child may be taken abroad for mutilation, frontier officers can delay departure, notify prosecutors, and activate child-protection commissions. Airport campaigns—posters, multilingual leaflets, direct engagement—run year-round, intensifying before summer holidays when travel to West Africa peaks.
The National Strategy for Equality and Non-Discrimination 2018–2030, coordinated by CIG, embeds anti-FGM work within broader gender-equity goals, ensuring political continuity across election cycles and budget allocations tied to measurable outputs: training hours, community sessions, prosecutions initiated.
How Portugal Compares to the Rest of Europe
Across the European Union, an estimated 500,000 women live with the consequences of FGM, and 180,000 girls face immediate risk. Most member states have criminalised the practice, yet enforcement and prevention models vary. Portugal distinguishes itself by being the only EU country to author a dedicated, second-generation national action plan focused exclusively on FGM in the early 2010s, a specificity that contrasts with nations that fold the issue into omnibus violence-against-women frameworks.
The border-alert mechanism operated by SEF also stands out: while other countries rely on passive intelligence sharing, Portugal proactively screens passenger manifests and interviews families flagged by health or school authorities. In practice, this means a paediatrician in Faro who treats a seven-year-old from Guinea-Bissau and learns the family is booking August flights can trigger a legal hold, subject to judicial review, that prevents the child leaving until risk is assessed.
Like Portugal, countries including France, Belgium, and Sweden apply extraterritorial prosecution, treat FGM as grounds for asylum, and mandate professional reporting. Yet Portugal's integrated community-outreach model—embedding cultural mediators within primary-care teams, co-designing campaigns with diaspora associations, enlisting imams and priests—has drawn study visits from neighbouring states seeking replicable blueprints.
What Comes Next
The DGS has announced plans to publish quarterly registry updates beginning in late 2026, replacing the previous annual cadence, to accelerate policy adjustment. A pilot school-based screening protocol for adolescent girls, modelled on dental and vision checks, is under ethical review; if approved, it would represent the first systematic, non-clinical detection layer in Europe.
Bilateral health-cooperation agreements with Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, and Cape Verde aim to harmonise messaging, train practitioners in both Portugal and origin countries, and create "safe-passage" networks for families that renounce the practice. Early data from Bissau suggest that when community leaders publicly pledge abandonment and health workers offer alternative rites-of-passage ceremonies, prevalence can drop measurably within a generation.
For residents and professionals in Portugal, the imperative is straightforward: vigilance without stigma. The 292 cases documented in 2025 represent women and girls who have shown courage—or encountered systems alert enough—to bring hidden harm into the light. Each registration is simultaneously a wound revealed and a doorway to care. Whether that number rises or falls in 2026 will depend less on the practice itself than on the willingness of clinicians, teachers, neighbours, and policymakers to see, report, and act.
