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在英国和中东，北非和亚洲各地从事性别暴力工作，以制定一种讲述故事的方法，以应对高患病率环境中对妇女的性别暴力（GBV）。基于性别的暴力发生率高（超过50%的妇女在一生中遭受暴力）的国家或地区往往是基于性别的暴力被公开接受为妇女日常生活的正常组成部分，并因国家不采取行动而得到宽恕的国家或地区。在我们的建议中包括的区域和国家，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，情况就是如此。在这些情况下，讲故事被广泛用作应对暴力的个人表达手段，借鉴了他们作为古代波斯社会的共同社会文化渊源。我们的合作借鉴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）根据我们团队来自医学科学的各种专业知识，（精神病学，心理学）和人文学科（2）针对居住在库尔德斯坦（伊拉克）安全住所的妇女，制定并试行干预措施;（3）开发一个在线网络工具，以促进与试点研究有关的合作，并建立未来的项目构想;以及（4）根据妇女的叙述编写一个故事集，以达到广泛的国内和国际受众，从而实现社会变革。这是一种创新的方法，旨在创建一种与文化相关的干预措施，以解决在高流行率环境中经历性别暴力的妇女的心理健康需求，并将理想地挑战接受妇女生活中的暴力行为作为更广泛的社会变革项目的一部分的话语。

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.