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将英国以及中东、北非和亚洲的医学专家、诗人、公民社会组织和致力于GBV的女权主义活动家聚集在一起，开发一种叙事性的故事讲述方法，以应对高发环境中针对女性的基于性别的暴力(GBV)。在GBV发病率高的国家或地区(50%以上的妇女在一生中经历过暴力)，GBV通常被公开接受为妇女日常生活的正常部分，并被国家不采取行动纵容。我们的建议所包括的区域和国家就是这种情况，它们是：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，讲故事被广泛用作回应暴力的一种个人表达手段，利用它们作为古代波斯社会的共同社会文化渊源。我们的合作利用了这段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一种与文化相关的干预措施。我们通过四项主要活动开展这项工作：(1)根据我们团队在医学(精神病学、心理学)和人文科学(人道主义伦理、性别与妇女研究、文学研究、诗歌)方面的不同专长，合作设计一个潜在的讲故事干预措施；(2)为居住在(伊拉克)库尔德斯坦安全屋的妇女量身定制和试行这项干预措施；(3)开发一个在线网络工具，以促进与试点研究有关的合作，并提出未来的项目想法；和(4)根据妇女的叙述创作一本故事集，以便接触到国内和国际广泛的受众，从而促进社会变革。这是一种创建与文化相关的干预措施的创新方法，以解决在高流行率环境中患有GBV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.