The Guardian's campaign has put female genital mutilation firmly on the political agenda, with Michael Gove, Ban Ki-Moon and Malala Yousafzai throwing their weight behind it. I am heartened that the physical autonomy of young African and Asian girls is being taken seriously, and I hope that concrete assistance will be given to those at risk: the physical, psychological and social harm of FGM fails women, and whatever justifications kept it alive for millennia, have no weight against the idea that a child's body is perfect and healthy the way it is made.

However, the sudden, intense focus on a practice that very few people follow in Britain – and the lack of clarity on who is doing it, where and why – has allowed negative stereotypes to run amok.

I was raised in Britain within a Somali family and, within my understanding, the vast majority of Somali families who settle here abandon FGM. The strong societal pressures in east Africa do not apply here, and there isn't a framework of experienced and easily accessible "cutters".

The widely quoted figure of 24,000 British girls being "at risk" would have us believe that 88% of British Somali girls are in danger. In fact, this figure originally derives from World Health Organisation and Unicef estimates, some dating back to the 1990s, from "sources of variable quality", about the prevalence of the practice in various African countries. These figures have then been extrapolated, some assuming there is the same potential prevalence among under-16 girls from those countries now living in the UK. In other words, these are crude estimates based on unreliable data – and several years out of date. There's no doubt there are cases of FGM in this country – and even one is too many – but in our horror over the practice we must resist the urge to potentially exaggerate its scale. The numbers of specific allegations are far lower than the headlines suggest and, even though the police have been alerted, there has not yet been enough evidence to gain a single conviction.

Teenage girls at an after-school club in Hargeisa, Somaliland, a breakaway region of Somalia. 'Prejudices regarding Somalis, Islam and 'backward African tribal customs' are conflated to create an image of a dark, brutal, incorrigible mass.' Photograph: Jason Straziuso/AP

This is important because the tough talk about clamping down on FGM has led to a slightly hysterical attitude among health workers. One elderly Somali woman I know entered hospital with a heart complaint but found herself being quizzed about a procedure on her genitals 60 years earlier; in another horror story a woman in labour was treated as a circus exhibit when midwives discovered she had been infibulated, the attention suddenly on the spectacle between her legs rather than on her urgent needs. This obviously isn't helpful, and I hope that as the conversation widens and deepens it will become less likely.

The comments left on the Guardian website after previous FGM articles seem to justify a lot of the doubts that Somalis, despite wanting to end FGM, have about how the campaign can portray them. "Uncut girls are disowned, cast out and raped and abused" – they are not. "It is all about cruel evil psychopaths who love causing pain" – it isn't. "Are they insane or just low intelligence?" Why not both?

Prejudices regarding Somalis, Islam and "backward African tribal customs" (a phrase that regularly pops up) are conflated to create an image of a dark, brutal, incorrigible mass who, to use Kipling's phrase, are "half devil, half child" and therefore cannot be trusted to even raise their own children decently. There is plenty of resentment towards immigrants in this country, some of it centuries old, some of it a product of recent changes, and the solutions given to stop FGM – hang them, cut their hands off, take their children away, deport them – seem to betray a wider antipathy rather than an honest concern for affected children.

The proposed stop and perhaps search of "at-risk" families re-entering British airports during school holidays, reported last month, also makes me uncomfortable. Again, does this in effect mean that all east and west African travellers will be under suspicion?

I am trying to imagine how I would feel if I were returning home with my children after a long, arduous journey and forced to answer questions that insinuated I had done something I found abhorrent to them. How would I convince the UK Border Agency that this wasn't the case? Would they interrogate my children? Would they demand that I strip them? It is already hard enough travelling as black and Muslim and dealing with official suspicion; I am regularly pulled over for extra security checks and have to explain what business I have going where I'm going. It is a humiliating experience and one that too many children have to witness already.

Now Michael Gove, the education secretary, will be writing to schools asking them to help protect girls. Again, this help needs to be offered very sensitively. Will teachers single out African and Asian girls, either on their own or – worse – in front of their classmates? Even a general talk to the whole class could lead to eyes turning to the brown girls.

It seems much more sensible to use GPs and community groups as the point of contact; a relationship needs to be built before any links are made to those children who are genuinely at risk rather than just falling into broad ethnic groupings. For this campaign to actually contribute something to the fight against FGM rather than just spilling more ink on a subject that has provoked much pearl-clutching horror over the years, we need to integrate east African or west African children – or whoever is at risk of FGM – into the existing child protection framework. If we are to take FGM seriously we need to make sure those same children are protected from violence, homelessness, hunger and all other abuses.

A recurring obstacle is how ignorant mainstream society is of the lives of recent migrants. We have to speak to them and, most of all, listen to them rather than talking about them in the most fearful and contemptuous tones. We need accurate and up-to-date figures on the real scale of the problem.

I hope this campaign doesn't go the same way as Kony 2012 and become consumed by its own flash-in-the-pan moral panic, with all the grandstanding and backslapping that entails, which doesn't achieve anything. What I want to see is children with migrant backgrounds – in fact all children – being so deeply valued in this society that there is a plethora of support for whatever problems they face.