Leyla Hussein is a psychotherapist specializing in supporting survivors of sexual abuse. She is an international lecturer on female genital mutilation (FGM) and gender rights. She is recognized as one of the key experts on this issue globally and her work has been presented at Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, Leeds, Exeter, Coventry University, the International School of Geneva and many Ivy league faculties in the US including Columbia, Harvard and U Penn, as well as Georgetown and George Washington.
She is a leading and award winning international campaigner against female genital mutilation(FGM) and her passion is to empower women and girls. Leyla founded The Dahlia Project, the UK’s first specialist therapeutic service for FGM survivors and co-founded the anti-FGM charity Daughters of Eve. She created the ground-breaking Face of Defiance project, which is a series of photographic portraits and interviews with FGM survivors. She is currently a senior consultant and Global ambassador for The Girl Generation Movement, which is working to end FGM globally. The documentary she presented, “ The Cruel Cut,” was nominated for a BAFTA. Leyla was named Cosmopolitan Campaigner of the Year 2010 and was included in the BBC 100 Women List in 2013, the Woman’s Hour Power List 2014 and the Debretts 500 as one of the UK’s most influential people. As a writer, Leyla has been published in national and international media and she regularly appears in print and on television as an expert commentator; her articles have been published in The Guardian, Cosmopolitan, The Huffington Post, Newsweek, Mumsnet, Stylist magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Department of International Development website.
