It replaced the Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act 1985, extending the ban on female genital mutilation to address the practice of taking girls abroad to undergo FGM procedures, and increased the maximum penalty from 5 to 14 years' imprisonment.

Experts said in 2003 that about 74,000 women in the UK had been subjected to the procedure, and that up to 7,000 girls would be at risk of being subjected to it abroad,[3] and on 14 July of that year the proposed new law was introduced by the Labour peer Ruth Rendell as House of Lords Bill 98.

[6] Further provisions were added to the Act by the Serious Crime Act 2015, which: It was noted for many years that no one had been successfully prosecuted under either the 1985 or 2003 Acts,[11] and in December 2013 it was reported that Minister of State for the Home Office Norman Baker had encouraged the Director of Public Prosecutions to reopen or reconsider six cases involving female genital mutilation.

In March 2014, a doctor from the Whittington Hospital near Highgate London was the first person charged with an offence contrary to the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003,[14] he was cleared in February 2015.

[15] In January 2019 a Ugandan woman from London was convicted of mutilating her three-year-old daughter: the first successful prosecution for an offence under the Act.