Juliette Pavy was named Sony World Photographer of the Year 2024 for her series Spiralkampagnen: Forced Contraception and Unintended Sterilisation of Greenlandic Women. Sophie Holloway hears how Pavy discovered the issue and how she supported Inuit women to tell their stories.
It was the summer of 2022 in the Arctic. French photojournalist Juliette Pavy had been working in the region for 10 years, completing a five-year course in bioengineering while working concurrently on press assignments. It was then that she came across a short article in a French newspaper, Ouest France, which would go on to shake Europe’s conscience.
That spring, a team of assiduous Danish journalists, working for the broadcaster DR, had revealed in a podcast series that around 4,500 Inuit women had undergone invasive copper coil implantations without their consent during the 1960s and 1970s (although testimonies have emerged subsequently suggesting these procedures continued well into the 2000s).
The coils left many of the women with severe health complications, including increased susceptibility to uterine infections, internal bleeding and infertility. The scheme had been put in place by the Danish authorities, which governed Greenland at the time, to restrict the native population growth.
Only now, 60 years on, are testimonies and details about the contraceptive procedure surfacing. Greenland and Denmark launched an investigation in 2022, which is expected to conclude in May 2025.
Pavy went on to document the emerging scandal in her photographic series, Spiralkampagnen (meaning ‘coil campaign’), which clinched her the prestigious Sony World Photographer of the Year 2024 prize.
“There was not a lot of information in the article,” she says. “But I was very curious after reading it. I tried to search for more information about it online, but I didn’t find very much.”
Exposing a scandal
The issue is still taboo in Greenland, Pavy explains. Traumatic memories – and an enduring deference to Danish authority among the victims, who lived in a time of colonial rule – mean there has been scarcely any dialogue on this topic within the community over the last six decades, and many of the affected women were initially reluctant to speak with Pavy.
“Some women thought they’d be able to speak with me, but they found it too hard,” she says. “It was very painful for them to recount it. We would have lots of breaks during the interviews. But afterwards, they would thank me and say how important it was for them to talk about it.”
Naja Lyberth, a prominent activist and psychologist from Greenland and a victim of forced contraception was the first to share her experience publicly on Facebook in 2017.
Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, is situated on the East coast of the country and has a population of 19,000. This is the home of Naya Lyberth, one of the first women to share her story of forced sterilisation publicly.
She later went on to speak about the issue internationally and continues to campaign for women’s reproductive rights. She was awarded a place on the BBC’s 100 Women 2022 list, which selects inspiring and pioneering women from across the globe.
“For Naja, it was not her first time [testifying] – but it was still hard,” says Pavy. “There was a lot of emotion.”
Lyberth was Pavy’s first point of contact and one of the photographs in the series is of her looking directly at the camera. It is a striking portrait of resilience, strength and courage.
Naya Lyberth.
“We had many good exchanges on Facebook messenger,” says Pavy, who communicated with Lyberth in English. “And in November 2022, I went to meet her in person. She introduced me to the other victims.” Pavy worked with a fixer to translate the testimonies from Greenlandic to English.
Pavy embedded herself in the community for a month, meeting with the women who had been affected by the scheme and cultivating a relationship with them. She returned again the next year, and also visited Denmark to follow the investigation. One of the challenges of her project was trying to capture the entirety of the story, given its many dimensions and timescale.
“It’s a little bit complicated, because it was something that happened in the past,” says Pavy. “I had a few pictures in mind before I started. I knew I wanted images of the victims, and also of the places it happened.” Pavy’s series includes landscape shots of the city of Nuuk. And conveying a sense of the victims’ vulnerability and innocence was key.
Piecing together testimonies
Old photographs of the victims and of the schools and Greenland’s unique landscape helped Pavy to punctuate the narrative. The youngest known victim of the scheme was 12 years old. “It was important to have pictures of the victims at the age it happened,” says Pavy. “So I acquired some archival images.”
Bula Larsen is another Inuit woman who had a coil implanted inside her while at school. It left her infertile and has profoundly impacted her life. In her interview in April with Helen Pidd on The Guardian podcast, she recounted the ordeal of the procedure.
One of eight children, Larsen had a “very happy childhood”. In her early teens, she and many other Greenlander children moved to the city to continue their education. For a while, life was perfect. She enjoyed playing with the other children and building new friendships.
Then one day, everything changed.
“The leader of the dorm told us girls to go down to the hospital,” she says. “She didn’t tell us why. We had to go to a room one by one. I remember when it was my turn. When I went into the room, they told me take my pants off and lay down on the doctor’s bed.”
Larsen was then instructed to put her legs into large metal stirrups. “I was very afraid,” she says. The doctor picked up some metal tools and inserted the intrauterine device (IUD) into her womb – an IUD that was intended for a fully-grown woman, not an adolescent.
One of Pavy’s images shows a radiograph of the coil inside one of the victim’s wombs.
“I wanted to convey the scientific side of the story,” she says. “So, I met with a gynaecologist and she showed me a radiograph of the spiral [coil]. It’s very important, because the coil was too big for the young women, and even if it was removed, they would get infections and have to have hysterectomies because [the coil] wasn’t adapted to their body.”
Radiograph of a coil which was used during Greenland’s ‘coil campaign’ between 1966 and 1975. The coils were way too big and unfit for the adolescent women’s bodies, with the youngest being only 12 years old. In addition to the pain, the coils have caused severe infections.
Larsen was 17 when she contracted a serious uterine infection because of the IUD. Doctors ended up removing it but quickly insisted on replacing it. Larsen had no say in the matter. She says the “assault” on her body massively affected her self-esteem and confidence.
When Larsen later got married and tried for a baby, she found she was infertile, a common complication of these IUDs, which were frequently unsophisticated and far too large for the teenage body.
It is estimated that 4,500 Inuit women and girls were subjected to the scheme between 1966 and 1975 – about half of the female population of fertile age. “If you look at the demographic during this time, it affected the whole community,” says Pavy. “The population halved. There is a gap in the graphs.”
During this period, the birth rate (the number of live births in Greenland per 1,000 people) fell from 39.41 to 17.22.
Injustice perpetuated by the law, schools and colonial mindsets
In 1970, a law was passed forbidding doctors to speak with underage girls about contraception without the permission of their parents. But the same year, the minimum age of consent was lowered to 15, and the implantation of IUDs was re-continued.
While the contraceptive scheme is thought to have ended in 1975, Celine Klint, one of the Danish journalists who uncovered the story, says there have been reports of women discovering these IUDS beyond the scope of the investigation, which spans from 1960 to 1991.
In 2022, the BBC spoke with women who had found these coils as late as 2018, inserted during abortions, uterine surgery or after giving birth. In total, fifteen reports have been made to the National Medical Examiner’s Office since 1991. It remains unclear whether these were isolated instances of malpractice or a continuation of the scheme which began in the 1960s. Some activists, like Nivi Olsen, a member of Greenland’s liberal party, have called for the investigation to take into account these more recent discoveries.
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The procedure frequently took place at school, as in Larsen’s case. Separated from family and with no means of contacting home, the girls had few people to turn to discuss what had happened. Larsen recalls the night after the implantation, which was one of pain, tears and an unshakeable feeling of isolation.
Despite the community being close-knit, there has been a general silence around the issue until only recently. Greenlanders were expected to respect the Danish authorities, Pavy explains.
“It’s a tough time for Greenland,” she says. “It’s hard for people to talk because they have this colonisation mentality.”
A conversation she had with one of the victims reflects this entrenched sense of inferiority and obligation.
“A woman told me that her mother told her never to say no to a Danish man, to say okay when he asks you something,” Pavy says. “It took a lot for people to speak about it, even among sisters and friends. It was simply too taboo and traumatic.”
A Danish colony at the time, Greenland was incorporated into the kingdom of Denmark in 1953. The country had one of the highest birth rates in the world, averaging around eight children per family, which the Danish government, responsible for providing a welfare state and schools, found to be cause for concern.
National documents unearthed by Danish journalists in 2022 reveal the contraceptive scheme was a government-approved policy implemented in collaboration with medical staff to curb the native population growth with the aim of alleviating pressure on public finances.
Read more: Austerity and Prosperity
“Before, people thought this sterilisation was being done by just one doctor,” says Pavy. “But since 2022 – and the release of the podcast – it became clear it was Danish policy.”
It was important for Pavy to capture the story of the perpetrator as much as the victim, and during her project, she visited the Danish parliament and took photographs of national documents to convey a sense of Denmark’s responsibility for the tragedy. She also took photographs of the gynaecologists involved.
In March 2024, 143 Inuit women sued the Danish government, demanding a collective compensation of around £4.9 million. But for women like Lyberth and Larsen, the IUDs have scarred their lives forever.
Pavy is optimistic about the future of the community, however. She says more and more women are opening up about their experiences and forging connections with other victims.
“When I was over there, I saw three of the victims speak with one another and compare their medical files,” she says. “It was interesting for them to have these conversations about the past, and to have that place and time to talk.”
She adds: “I think because of the emerging media coverage and the investigation, the women know they are not alone and it is getting easier.”
All photography by Juliette Pavy.
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