Exploring Narrative Storytelling as Mental Health Support for Women Experiencing Gender-based Violence in High Prevalence Settings

我们的合作伙伴关系汇集了医学专家、诗人、民间社会组织和女权主义活动家，他们在英国以及整个中东、北非和亚洲致力于性别暴力问题，以制定一种叙事方法，解决高患病率环境中针对妇女的性别暴力（GBV）。性别暴力高发的国家或地区（超过50%的妇女在其一生中经历过暴力）往往是性别暴力被公众接受为妇女日常生活的正常组成部分并被国家不作为所容忍的国家或地区。我们的建议所包括的区域和国家就是这种情况，即：阿富汗、克什米尔（印度）、突尼斯、库尔德斯坦（伊拉克）和土耳其。在这些背景下，讲故事被广泛用作应对暴力的个人表达手段，借鉴了它们作为古代波斯社会的共同社会文化起源。我们的合作利用了这一共同的历史和讲故事的文化重要性，为遭受性别暴力的妇女制定了与文化相关的干预措施。我们通过四个主要活动来做到这一点：(1)基于我们团队来自医学（精神病学，心理学）和人文科学（人道主义伦理学，性别和妇女研究，文学研究，诗歌）的不同专业知识，合作设计一个潜在的讲故事干预；(2)针对居住在库尔德斯坦（伊拉克）安全屋的妇女进行调整和试点干预；(3)开发一个在线网络工具，以促进与试点研究相关的合作，并建立未来项目的想法；(4)根据妇女的叙述创作故事集，以吸引广泛的国内和国际观众，以影响社会变革。这是一种创新的方法，旨在创造一种与文化相关的干预措施，以解决在高流行环境中遭受性别暴力的妇女的心理健康需求，并将理想地挑战将妇女生活中的暴力视为更广泛的社会变革项目的一部分的说法。

Our partnership brings together medical experts, poets, civil society organisations, and feminist activists working on GBV in the UK and across the Middle East, North Africa and Asia to develop a narrative storytelling approach to gender-based violence (GBV) against women in high prevalence settings. Setting that have a high prevalence of GBV (where over 50% of women experience violence in their lifetime) are often countries or regions where GBV is publicly accepted as a normal part of women's everyday lives and condoned by state inaction. This is the case in the regions and countries included in our proposal, namely: Afghanistan, Kashmir (India), Tunisia, Kurdistan (Iraq), and Turkey. Storytelling is widely used as a means of personal expression in response to violence in these contexts, drawing on their shared socio-cultural origins as ancient Persian societies. Our collaboration draws on this shared history and the cultural importance of storytelling to develop a culturally-relevant intervention for women experiencing gender-based violence. We do this through four main activities: (1) collaboratively designing a potential storytelling intervention based on our team's diverse expertise from the medical sciences (psychiatry, psychology) and the humanities (humanitarian ethics, gender and women's studies, literature studies, poetry); (2) tailoring and piloting the intervention with women residing in safe houses in Kurdistan (Iraq); (3) developing an online networking tool to foster collaborations related to the pilot study and build future project ideas; and (4) creating a collection of stories based on women's accounts to reach a broad national and international audience to effect social change. This is an innovative approach to creating a culturally-relevant intervention to address the mental health needs of women experiencing GBV in high prevalence settings and will ideally challenge discourses that accept violence in the lives of women as part of a broader project of social change.