By Natasha Carver
Talking about sexual intimacy with your partner – what you like, what you don’t like – can be embarrassing, shameful, awkward and/or frightening even within the best relationships. Talking about sexual intimacy with your partner when you have experienced Female Genital Cutting or Modification (FGMo) can make that conversation 100 times more difficult.
Bristol Research on Female Genital Modifications (BRFGMo) are a group of academics who first came together at the request of community members to explore the impact of FGM-safeguarding on families with lived experience. We found that in the drive to prevent harm on uncut children, health practitioners were routinely causing psychological harm to parents and carers. Women who had been cut were not treated as victims or adult survivors, but as potential perpetrators. They were asked intrusive questions in aggressive ways within coercive situations. Their own health needs were often ignored, downplayed or overlooked in the process.
Working with grass-roots organisation and community partner, Caafi Health, we followed up this research with a study in which we asked nearly sixty FGM-experienced participants living in Bristol what services are available for those with FGMo, what are the barriers to accessing those services, and what services would they most like to see made available. The overwhelming response to this last question from women was the need for sex and relationship counselling.
Women told us they were unable to talk to their sexual partners about what they found difficult, what triggered retraumatisation, what they enjoyed and what they would like more of. They told us that many men, including their own otherwise loving partners, presumed that FGMo meant they were unable to experience sexual pleasure, and therefore made no attempt to find out their triggers or their desires.
How might puppets help?
Both research projects provided evidence that health practitioners often cause harm when intending to provide help. It’s hard to gather the courage to ask for professional help when professionals typically hold negative attitudes about the impact of FGMo on sexual intimacy. It’s even harder for those who have experienced traumatic and stigmatising encounters in health settings. A Brigstow Ideas Exchange enabled BRFGMo and Caafi Health to join forces with a partner organisation that specialises in sexual trauma and counselling, The Bridge, and to include other academics from different disciplines and with creative methods expertise. Together we explored a variety of creative methodologies, including stitching, sandboxing and puppetry, and reflected on how each method might enable or limit conversations about sex, intimacy and FGMo, with the potential for retraumatisation always at the forefront of our minds. From this list, we have selected puppetry for our pilot study. Puppetry is a safe yet powerful tool through which embodied experiences can be investigated and understood in a culturally sensitive way. It allows for the expression of personal experiences and desires without the need to own them as personal, and therefore makes for a more comfortable group research environment, as well as allowing for the articulation and testing of hitherto unspoken thoughts and desires.
What are we doing now?
The pilot study developed from this Ideas Exchange, funded by Research England, will invite 9 men and 9 women from FGM-experienced communities to come together in gender-separated groups to create puppets and co-produce scripts of typical scenarios when such difficult conversations are attempted, and scripts which imagine positive scenarios when desires and fears are successfully shared. We will use this material and the experience of the research process to write a Policy Briefing and produce a short film aimed at Health Practitioners. We will then apply for further funding to develop the scripts into a more substantive piece such as a film, zine or puppet play to challenge widespread misconceptions about sex and intimacy after FGMo.