LONDON — According to a new British law, any teacher, doctor, nurse or social care professional who comes across a case of a girl who has undergone genital mutilation has the duty to report it to the police.

This law, which took effect on Oct. 31 and applies to any victim under the age of 18, can result in sanctions and job termination if a case is not reported. It is just the latest legislation passed in Europe to deal with the issue of female genital mutilation (FGM), a phenomenon that until recently was thought to be limited to faraway countries.

But as can be seen by the below interactive map, FGM is surprisingly widespread in Europe as well, amid migrant communities from Somalia, Eritrea, Nigeria, Senegal, Gambia, Egypt.

Actually, Europe has its own, fortunately brief, history of "the cut." The first case of clitoridectomy was reported in 1825 by the medical journal The Lancet: In Berlin, the surgeon Karl Ferdinand von Gräfe believed it could be the perfect cure for the excessive masturbating of a 15-year-old girl. For decades, cutting female genitals was thought to heal hysteria and certain sexual deviations, even in France and England. Then scientific societies imposed a ban on the procedure, which soon fell into oblivion and seemed to have been eliminated once and for all in Europe.

Today, following decades of migratory waves, the problem has resurfaced with a different aspect, forcing European countries to confront a societal wound as complex to fight as it is to understand.

The first challenge is measuring the scope of the problem. The only official statistic about FGM in Europe is a registered increase in women asking for asylum who come from countries where FGM is practiced: from 18,110 in 2008 to more than 25,000 in 2013. According to the UN Refugee Agency, this is due to a rise in the number of women asylum seekers from Eritrea, Guinea, Egypt and Mali, where FGM prevalence is over 89%. On the map you can see how many women were granted asylum from 2008 to 2011: from 2,225 in Britain to 75 in Italy. The reasons for fleeing from their countries varied, but in 2011 more than 2,000 girls and women were escaping precisely the threat of being forced to undergo circumcision.