The FEU is pleased to continue its Medical Cultures conference series, organized in collaboration this year with Anaïs Ogrizek, psychiatry resident and former Harriet Hale Woolley scholar, currently working on the theme of perinatal care in prisons. The conference will be released here and on our YouTube channel on January 5th, 2021.
Every year in Europe, 10,000 children are born in prison. It is therefore within the prison that their bond with their mother is formed, the quality of which is fundamental for their short and long-term development. This bond is necessarily conditioned in part by the environment in which it is formed. The conditions both in France and Europe vary greatly from one institution to another. In France, they are formalized by a bill dating back to 1999, which is no longer representative of the changes in the prison environment. It is currently being re-assessed by the prison administration. In this context, a psychological study is underway to determine the impact of this environment on the mother-child dyad to suggest ways of improvement. As part of the Medical Cultures series, the FEU is hosting a conference about this study, including a discussion with members of the prison administration involved in the project.
About the Speakers
Passionate about traveling and meeting new people, Anaïs Ogrizek became interested in psychiatry early on in her career, particularly in transcultural psychiatry. After completing part of her education in London and New York, she decided to pursue her medical studies at Paris 5 Descartes University. During her six years of study there she completed internships in both India and Canada, as well as a one-year Erasmus exchange in Hungary. After completing her general medical curriculum, Anaïs decided to specialize in psychiatry and travelled to French overseas territories to complete her internships. In French Guyana she took part in child psychiatry missions in Native American villages and worked in general psychiatry in Martinique. Following her return to Paris, she achieved a master’s degree in transcultural psychiatry before taking on a PhD research in psychology in November 2018 on the theme of the “mother and child bonding process in prison”. Since then, she has been visiting prisons all around France, with a specific focus on cultural traditions around motherhood.
Caroline Touraut has a doctorate in sociology and is a research fellow at the Direction de l’Administration Pénitentiaire (DAP) and an associate researcher at ISP Cachan. She has carried out several research projects on prisons based on observations and interviews with inmates and staff in various penitentiary establishments. Her thesis, La famille à l’épreuve de la prison (PUF, 2012), focused on the prison experience of prisoners’ families. Continuing her research on prisons, she has recently worked on ageing and loss of autonomy in prison.
Stéphane Cazes is a French writer and director. He is a graduate of the Ecole Supérieure de Réalisation Audiovisuelle. He is known in particular for having written and directed the feature film “Ombline”, released in 2012, which tells the story an incarcerated woman in a nursery. In order to be as close as possible to reality, he has been involved since 2006 with non-profits working in prisons and goes to meet incarcerated women in nurseries. This film plunges the viewer into the prison world and the difficulties encountered by a woman from the beginning of her pregnancy until the separation from her child at 18 months.