Dressed in her school uniform, the eight-year-old girl talked about her love of sketching, how her little sister made her laugh, and how she liked her kind mother for packing her lunch every day.

After an hour of enthusiastically describing to a police officer and a welfare worker some of her favourite things, like her gold jewellery box, fairy books and sleepovers with friends, the girl began to answer questions about the meaning of "khatna".

"I heard that ... it's something that some young girls have and that it's like a type of cutting to the private part?" the welfare worker asked, in the recorded interview played to a NSW Supreme Court jury on Tuesday.

"Yep, it is," the girl, who can only be identified as C1, replied.

"How do you know?"

"Because it's happened to me."

The girl said "khatna" happened to her as she lay on a bed at a house in Wollongong, surrounded by female relatives.

"It hurt," C1 said.

She said the unknown woman who did it to her told her to think of a place she liked, so she imagined she was a princess in a garden.

When the police officer asked her why it happened, C1 replied: "It's a part of our culture and it has happened to every girl."

Her mother, who can only be identified as A2, is accused of organising the mutilation of the clitoris of C1 and her younger sister C2 between 2009 and 2012.

A retired midwife, who cannot be identified, is accused of carrying out the procedure.

The jury has been told the women were part of the Dawoodi Bohra community, a Shia sect of the Islamic faith.

Both women have pleaded not guilty to a charge of genital mutilation, and the alternative charge of assault occasioning actual bodily harm.

Shabbir Mohammedbhai Vaziri, a high-ranking member of the Dawoodi Bohra community, has pleaded not guilty to being an accessory after the fact.

Earlier, defence barrister Stuart Bouveng, who is representing the retired nurse, said each girls' genitals were simply touched with a pair of forceps during separate ceremonies.

"There is no dispute that [she] was asked by the mother of the two girls ... to perform a symbolic ceremony on the two girls," Mr Bouveng told the jury.

"The only real issue is to determine beyond reasonable doubt whether or not each of the girls had their clitorises mutilated by [the retired nurse], or whether or not there was any actual bodily harm inflicted on each of the girls in these ceremonies."

Robert Sutherland, SC, for A2 and Mr Vaziri said the Crown case could only amount to a possibility or suspicion that something illegal happened at the ceremonies.

The trial continues before Justice Peter Johnson.