A new community outreach programme to help women and their partners who are managing the consequences of Female Genital Cutting or Circumcision (FGC) is set to launch following a successful pilot.
Researchers from Bristol’s School for Policy Studies, the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (University of London), in collaboration with community health organisations and local arts charity, Puppet Place, have co-produced a new community engagement programme. The team will tour community venues and visit NHS practitioners to raise awareness of the impact of FGC on marital relationships.
Dr Natasha Carver, Senior Lecturer in the School for Policy Studies and project lead, said: “This tour will raise awareness of the impact of FGC on marital relationships, prompting and promoting those with lived experience of FGC to talk about it with their partners.
“It also provides an opportunity for NHS practitioners to understand the difficulties of seeking medical help or even talking about FGC for those with lived experience and will challenge commonly held stereotypes and myths about FGC and intimacy.”
The roadshow builds on earlier research led by academics from the School for Policy Studies, and Caafi Health, a local grass-roots community health organisation which sought to better understand the healthcare experiences of people living in the UK with FGC.
As part of this earlier study, the team interviewed over 50 Bristolians with heritage in 10 different nationality groups with lived experience of FGC. Their research found that current policies designed to prevent future incidences of the practice led to the needs of people already living with FGC to be overlooked, creating distrust in the NHS among affected communities.
In particular, women included in the study reported that many health professionals held negative stereotypes about the impact of FGC on intimacy, which made it difficult for them to ask for support. They also said that many men felt that women with FGC were ‘damaged’, leading to a pattern of married men abandoning women with FGC and women who were looking for partners being rejected outright if they admitted to having FGC. They said that talking about female desire was difficult if not impossible.
Huda Hajinur from Caafi Health, reflecting on the research, said: “We need healthcare services to be more trauma-informed and not profile people.”
The project team collaborated with sexual trauma counselling experts from The Bridge SARC, part of University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust, to design and deliver the community engagement project responding to findings from the earlier study. The pilot project used puppetry to role-play scripts depicting typical scenarios when difficult conversations are attempted, which imagine positive scenarios where desires and fears are successfully shared.
Please visit the project website page here for more information.
Further information
Female genital cutting (FGC), also known as FGM, is a procedure in which female genitals are cut or changed in some way. In the UK, 37,615 individual women and girls have been identified as having experienced FGC. FGC has been associated with long-term physical, sexual, reproductive and psychological complications.