“It almost kills you. From my experience, I almost died and I was out of it for about two days,” Jay K-Frederick tells The Huffington Post UK.
At the age of 15, she was taken from the UK to her home country, Sierra Leone, where she underwent Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).
“At the time I didn’t know what I was going back home for. I thought I was going on a family trip,” she says.
However, Frederick has fought hard to prevent the ordeal from defining her life.
She has founded an online network called ‘Sisters Keeping It Moving’, SKIM, and uses it as a platform to empower others who have also been subjected to sexual violence.
New data shows there were thousands of cases reported in England last year - the equivalent of 16 cases every day.
Between April 2015 and March 2016, there were 5,702 new cases, including 43 girls who were born in the UK.
Frederick also works as an ambassador for the Orchid project, a charity aiming to end the practice FGM.