By Dr 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. 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.
How the project started
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.
Working with grass-roots organisations and community partner, Caafi Health, part of our research involved a study in which we asked nearly 60 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 re-traumatisation, what they enjoyed. 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.
Why we chose puppets
Our research also found 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.
Through a Brigstow Ideas Exchange project, BRFGMo and Caafi Health were able 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 re-traumatisation always at the forefront of our minds.
From this list, we 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.
The Pilot Study
Funded by Research England Participatory Research Fund, we ran workshops with six men and nine women from FGM-experienced communities in gender-separated groups.
Each participant made their own handheld puppet which they animated to produce short conversational dialogues between dating couples, long-married couples, and in help-seeking scenarios. We asked them first to produce ‘typical’ conversations, and then to imagine how they’d like the conversation to go. The dialogues were rich, sometimes hilarious, sometimes deeply moving. You can watch a film of the process below.
What are we doing now?
This year we were awarded ESRC Impact Accelerator Funding to develop these dialogues into a puppet show which we will tour in England and Wales. Joining our team are community partners, The Puppet Place. With their expertise and in their craft workshop, a new group of contributors will learn how to make and animate larger human arm puppets, and work with script-writers to shape the scripts into a full theatre piece. In autumn 2026 we will tour the show to community festivals and culture days as well as to medical and practitioner training events.
Meanwhile, the participants from our pilot study tell us the workshops gave them confidence to start talking with their sexual partners and with other men and women.
