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

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.

Women experiencing gender based violence (GBV) in high prevalence settings are the targeted beneficiaries of this partnership project. In order to bring about benefits for this population we will bring together partners from six high prevalence contexts: Afghanistan, Kashmir (India), Tunisia, Kurdistan (Iraq), rural South Africa and Turkey. All of our partners have some experience working on gender based violence with highly vulnerably populations in their respective contexts, but have approaches this from different perspectives (e.g. ethics, storytelling, poetry, feminism and mental health). Through our multidisciplinary partnership we will design and pilot a narrative storytelling intervention for women experiencing violence. In the short term this will impact the women who are directly involved as participants in the pilot studies in Kurdistan, Iraq by involving them in an intervention aimed at supporting their mental health (both intervention and control groups will participate in a mental health intervention). Participants will also have the opportunity to be involved in creating a collection of stories, which we will publish as a book and disseminate online to an international audience through UCL Press. This book project will impact those involved in its creation through improving recognition for the issues they face, giving them voice in a global space, and ideally bringing about broader impacts that reduce the social acceptability of violence in high prevalence contexts.