Woman's Hour - Covid - Impact on Women's Finances; Bettany Hughes; Berta Cáceres.

Episode Date: June 11, 2020

A picture is slowly emerging of what has happened to women’s personal finances since the Covid 19 pandemic began. The debt advice charity, Step Change, warned that British households are expected to rack up debts worth a combined £6bn because of the health emergency as they fell behind with their bills. And it looks like this will disproportionately impact on women. Jenni talks to Jude Kelly, Founder of the Women of the World Festival who is involved in the Insuring Women’s Futures programme, Zubaida Haque, Interim Director of the Runnymede Trust and a member of the Independent Sage and a commissioner for the Women’s Budget Group and Amy Cashman, CEO of Kantar’s Insights Division.The historian Bettany Hughes tells Jenni about her new series A Greek Odyssey where she retraces the steps of Odysseus from the coast of Turkey where the mythical Trojan War took place to the island of Ithaca in the West of Greece. Sailing through the Greek islands, she makes new archaeological discoveries, visits iconic sites and uncovers the truth around the myths and legends of the ancient world; including iconic women such as Hera, Helen, Calypso and Iphigenia. A Greek Odyssey with Bettany Hughes launches tomorrow, Friday 12 June, at 9pm on Channel 5. Coronavirus has made visible a group of people who were often invisible – volunteers. Thousands of people signed up to help the NHS as a volunteer. Local residents’ groups have got together to help those who can’t get to the shops, or to call people who might be experiencing severe isolation. Before lockdown, Woman’s Hour began interviewing women who volunteered in all sorts of areas – who see a gap, or a problem to be solved, and just get on with it – Troupers. They told their stories to Laura Thomas. Today it’s the turn of Jacqui Shimidzu, who runs the Hill Station Café in South London.Berta Cáceres – a celebrated Honduran environmental activist and indigenous leader – was murdered in 2016. She had dedicated her life to fighting for the land and water rights of indigenous Lenca communities in the west of the country. But after a relentless stream of threats, intimidation and harassment failed to deter her, Berta was brutally killed. Nina Lakhani was the only Western journalist to follow the trial and has herself faced threats and defamation campaigns in her quest to bring Berta’s story to a global audience. She talks to Jenni.Producer: Louise Corley Editor: Karen Dalziel

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to the Woman's Hour podcast for Thursday the 11th of June. Good morning. In 2016, a celebrated Honduran environmental activist and indigenous leader was killed after years of threats and intimidation. To research the murder of Berta Caceres, the journalist Nina Lacani risked her own safety to find out who killed her and why. The next in our series of troopers, women who get things done, is Jackie Shimizu, who runs the Hill Station Cafe in South London. And following the route taken by Odysseus from Troy to his home island of Ithaca, Bethany Hughes and her own Greek Odyssey. Now money, at a time when being paid for work has become uncertain

and jobs are no longer as secure as they might have been, is a worry for most of us during these difficult times. But a picture seems to be emerging that shows women's personal finances are at the greatest risk. The debt advice charity StepChange warns that British households are expected to rack up debts worth a combined £6 billion because of Covid-19 as they fall behind with their bills. And it looks as if this will fall disproportionately on women. Research published this week by the Women's Budget

Group and Fawcett showed that concerns about debt are particularly high among women in black and minority ethnic groups, many of whom said they were struggling to feed their children. How much money do women have and what needs to change if finances are to improve? Well, I'm joined by Zubeda Haque, who's a member of the Independent Sage Group and interim director of the Runnymede Trust, Amy Cashman, chief executive of Kantar's Insights Division, and Jude Kelly, founder of the Women of the World Festival, who's involved in the Ensuring Women's Futures programme. Jude, I remember you saying on the programme last year that money was a feminist issue. What impact on that thinking has the pandemic had? I hope that women will all levels of society are going to be affected because they're much more likely to be doing part-time work they're much more likely

to be furloughed if they get furloughed or they lose their jobs or they step down because of huge child care pressures amongst other things their pensions are going to go further down than ever and I'll just give you a frightening statistic. Women from black or ethnic minority groups have a 51% pension gap with an average white man. I mean, the gap isn't just at a pay level now, it's at a pension level much later down the line. And so why it's a feminist issue is because it absolutely relates to the history of the idea that women's finances doesn't matter as much to society, that unpaid labour is acceptable, that low paid labour is acceptable, and that women can go to the back of the queue whenever there's a crisis. And we have to say that's not acceptable. It mustn't happen anymore. Zubeda, the research, as I said, published this week

highlighted the impact on BAME women. How do you reckon we got to this point? Because what COVID-19 has shown more than anything is that racial inequalities have always been there. COVID-19 has brought racial inequalities and socioeconomic inequalities into sharp relief. And that's because, of course, as we've rightly mentioned, that black and ethnic minority women and women in general have always been treated as, if you like, second class citizens. And their work, whether it's direct labour market work or work at home, has not been recognised, has not been valued. And that's been a considerable problem. Now, for black and ethnic minority women, the impact of COVID-19 has been particularly harsh because, as has rightly been mentioned, not only do they not have savings, but they're also disproportionately poor.

We know that one in two black Bangladeshi and Pakistani children are in poverty. We know that black and ethnic minority single households, single women, single parents have been hit disproportionately hard by austerity cuts. And in fact, they were the worst hit by austerity cuts. Amy, I know you've been tracking women's attitudes to their finances since the start of lockdown. What's changed since we spoke about that last summer? So I think what, you know, and it challenges what the other speakers have said, the pandemic has really exacerbated challenges that were already there for women in these areas. So what we see in lockdown is that women are much more concerned with the everyday management of the budget.

And we're seeing that in terms of things like shopping habits. People are trying to, women in particular, looking for better better deals they're thinking about how to save for an emergency men are doing things more like talking to financial advisors looking more at their investment portfolio and thinking more to the long term and and that is absolutely just a continuation of behavior we've seen generally in the class of you which is women are much more focused on the here and now and everyday management of finance and men tend to be better um set up for looking to the longer term and that's again how you see things that you'd mentioned the pensions gap but you how that plays out in the longer term in those sorts of measures but amy we've heard that higher income households are making savings at the moment through the pandemic. What do we know about

how men and women manage their money when they have it? Well, we definitely tend to find that women think much more about others. They think about the family. They think about how they can support, you know, be that children, be that other members of the family men tend to think more individually about money and they tend to think more for the longer term so I think you know to your point about extra money since you know some families are doing better in this situation we have seen for example people starting to do things like overpay their mortgage where they've had extra money or put additional money into savings but obviously that's a very fortunate group within the population and um and you know quite honest

with the experience of the average british person i would say jude women are less likely to seek financial advice how do you begin to change women's difficult relationship with money well you know jenny that we started a project called smart purse recently because we were so concerned that we didn't there wasn't enough independent financial education for women and that we were told as women that you know back way when for some of us well you know it's not really something you need to worry about because you'll have a husband or your father will sort it out for you and that psychological idea that somehow it's not ours it's not ours to be big players and it's not ours to be thinking strategically I think that's been very internalized for lots of us and we have to change that and we have to

change that for our children because we model that behavior that it's not really for us and secondly I think the financial sector has been really poor at talking to women, not about, you know, product. We need to be talking about the stages of women's lives, each stage that will make a difference to how they will be poor or less poor. And thirdly, I think that women have to realize that if they have their hands on money, it isn't necessarily a sort of dirty or bad thing to have money. It depends what you do with your money. And women could make a lot more difference

to the way that investment happens, ethical ideas, the value system they want in society, if they had more levers in their hands with regards to the finances. So that's why I keep saying it's a feminist issue, because it's about if you want the world to be different, both for yourself, your families and your society, you have to find a way of controlling more of the circumstances. And that is about finance amongst other things. It isn't boring women. It's actually a fascinating way of making change happen,

is my call out. And Zubeda, BAME women are more likely to say they don't have support, they're very worried about their jobs, they're very worried about putting food on the table. Why do things seem to be so much worse for them than for the average woman who's scared of tackling money? Because of racial discrimination. So we've got, I i mean we haven't talked very much about the women who are on the breadline or those women who are just about managing you know you don't make savings if you're on the red line or just about managing and we know that black and ethnic minority women are much more like line i've already shared with you the child poverty statistics, as well as the impact

of poverty. Now, what that means is that while the rest of us, for instance, have stayed at home safely, we know anecdotally that a lot of black and ethnic minority women, particularly those in low paid work, those in social care work, that's disproportionately represented by black women, for instance, they have been having to go out to work, because the government's economic measures, the ones Rishi Sunak rolled out, are not sufficiently covering those women. A lot of those women don't get enough money through universal credit. They are penalised by the two-child limit in child benefits. They're not eligible for the statutory sickness pay and so on. So a lot of those women, including migrant women, including those who have no recourse to public funds, are falling

through the gaps. Now, because black and ethnic minority women are disproportionately poor and not eligible for those, it's particularly hard. But the other issue, of course, that we don't talk about very much is we know, for instance, that poverty is not a uniform, is not uniformly experienced anyway. But the difference between black and ethnic minority women and white British women when it comes to poverty is the issue of racial discrimination. Racial discrimination means that BME women are much more likely to be in poorer conditioned housing,

in overcrowded housing, in insecure housing, as well as experiencing racism in the labour market, which means that they're also likely to be in low paid and insecure work. So all those factors mean that BME women are constantly on the breadline and constantly just about managing. Now, Amy, I suspect for those kind of women, financial services at the moment are not terribly helpful. But I remember last year you said financial services are missing out on £130 billion by not engaging with women. How are banks approaching female customers now to try and encourage them to

take their finances more seriously well i think if i'm honest i wouldn't say they are probably targeting women um directly i think you know as part of the pandemic they've been looking to support um customers who have financial difficulties. But I personally feel that there would be a real appetite there because, you know, some of the data we have as well at Kantar shows just how much the levels of anxiety are much higher amongst women than men. So sort of 40% of women feeling anxious at the moment around the pandemic versus 26% of men. And we've seen that women are much more receptive to bank communications and that kind of that've seen that women are much more receptive to bank communications and that kind of that group that are anxious are much more likely to register and acknowledge that the

communications they're getting from their bank so i think that there is a genuine opportunity there actually and i think you know what's so interesting about this crisis is you know the last financial crisis in 2008 the banks were obviously cast in a very poor light by that experience. And actually here is a completely different type of financial crash and one in which the banks can actually really potentially play a very positive role in terms of supporting people and supporting women. So I think there's a real opportunity there for them actually to really sort of see things from a women's perspective

and try and understand that, you know, we've seen lots of information as well about the fact that women are doing more of the childcare and the homework at the moment on top of the other jobs they may have. So they're feeling quite overloaded, and that can soon a lot of the information we have at Kantar too. So it's what can banks do to understand the different context women are operating in at this point in time

and what services and support might they be looking for that may be different to other customers. Now Jude, there'll be an online Women of the World event at the end of this month. Why will economic equality be one of the global issues you're most concerned about? Yes, so we're doing a 24 hour marathon around the world in response to Covid and Black Lives Matter. It's an urgent point at which women and girls need to talk about their circumstances in many different subjects.

And this issue of money, like how women are perceived in terms of whether they need money or what they can do with less, how unpaid labour is throughout the whole world. These are facts that we need to collect up globally. The UK has some very bad statistics, but so do so many other places for different circumstances. So we're trying to make sure that we travel the whole world talking about economic justice and come back with some findings so that we as girls and women and boys and men who want a different society can say this has got to stop we can't keep on re-entrenching the ideas of of economic injustice and how in every area of injustice reinforces economic injustice so we haven't talked about disabled

women at this point in time but i can tell you that they too under lockdown have been forced to make some really difficult choices and also how much extra they have to pay for care and signing and all sorts of things. So women are finding life under Covid, as Amy said, it reveals the injustices and we have to feel angry about it and positive that we can make change. Jude, Kelly, Amy Cashman, Zubeda Haque, thank you all very much indeed for being with us this morning and of course we would like to hear from you on this. How are your finances as a result of the pandemic? Do send us an email or of course a tweet, we'd love to hear from you. Now if you've been on holiday in the Greek islands you may well imagine the sea there is flat and calm and not at all dangerous.

You kind of wonder why it might have taken Odysseus 10 years to get back to his wife on Ithaca as he returned from the Trojan War. Well, the historian Bethany Hughes decided to make her own Greek odyssey in a series for Channel 5. Following the route taken by Odysseus and found his journey might not have been as calm as we might have thought. Bethany, how surprised were you to find the sea was often really dangerous there? Yeah, well it was a surprise that we'd sort of engineered for ourselves because we wanted to make the journey across winter because you hear in the story of Odysseus and the Odyssey that he has all kinds of challenges that he meets monsters and storms and is shipwrecked so we thought it would just be making it too easy for ourselves as we went during the summer that was interesting because we really were caught up in waves nine meters high in sea storms that were two notches off a hurricane and

and even an earthquake in fact so we sort of began to understand why it might have taken Odysseus 10 years rather than the kind of 30 or so days actually if he just had an easy sail that could have taken him from Troy back to home and Ithaca. Now, it only took you six months. Could it have been that Odysseus stayed with several women on his journey back to the patient Penelope, including the goddess Calypso, with whom he spent seven years? Yes, he does spend seven years with Calypso and we're told that they made love every night

and this was one of the reasons that he didn't want to leave her and travel home. It's a really fascinating story that actually, I mean, it's one of the reasons we love the Odyssey. We love these myths because they give us truths both about ourselves and about history. And in the story of Calypso, who's this beautiful nymph who tempts him in, a goddess who treats him, it's as if he's arrived in a Greek heaven and she offers him immortality but actually Odysseus makes this choice. He knows that it's better to live and to live with challenges and threats and trauma rather than to almost give in and live in this kind of Elysian way with Calypso. It does take him seven years to make that decision, I have to say, Jenny,

but eventually he manages to tear himself away and make it back to his beloved home and to his beloved wife, Penelope. Now, you did go to 13 different Greek islands, including Samos, and the temple there is claimed by the Greeks to be the largest in the world. Let's just hear a little bit of you there. This has to be one of the most romantic places in Greece, and it's got a pretty romantic story attached. It was said that this was the birthplace of the goddess Hera, and it's also where she married the king of the gods, Zeus, making her the kind of first lady of the Greek pantheon.

In the Adventures of Odysseus, it was Hera who helped the Greeks win the Trojan War. As soon as you arrive, you get a real sense of the status of Hera in this place, because it's approached by this beautiful, sacred way, which is a road that led from the ancient town right to the temple. This site was actually so rich that most of it has been nicked down the centuries, so there are hardly any stones left here.

But you just have to try to imagine this place in its heyday. It would have been a brilliant, buzzing, heady, cosmopolitan place. Now, you mention her relationship with Zeus, which you point out in the programme. It was a somewhat fiery relationship. Why was it important to tell the story of her fiery relationship with Zeus and the story of her son? Well, I think because when Hera is described typically in the story of the myth, she's described as a jealous wife, which we thought was frankly outrageous because, you know,

you're dealing with 3,000 years of misogyny here. Because Hera is only annoyed because Zeus keeps on slipping off from Mount Olympus and going having affairs with nymphs and assorted mortals. So actually her rage and anger is perfectly righteous. And there's one myth. It's one of those things, you know, it's why these stories matter because they're actually helping us to kind of understand how we should behave. They're kind of moral tales as well as tales of fantasy and history. And they tell us that Ahira was so furious that she manages to kind of channel her rage and to give birth by herself

to this explosive son Hephaestus who is the god of blacksmithry and forges and volcanoes and so he is an eruptive creature. There's a really interesting story about Hephaestus that he was said to have been born lame or became lame and we actually think it's one of those moments where myth and history graze because ancient blacksmiths used to use arsenic a lot in their blacksmithry, and Arcanisosis can make you lame. So it's a little hint in the story of the god Hephaestus of what was actually going on on the ground in the ancient Greek world. How significant is the discovery of the fragments of a 2,500-year-old ship there, which is dedicated to Hera?

Well, I mean mean this is amazing so it really reminds us that the Greek myths absolutely do not belong to the West that these are stories where influence from Africa and Asia are as important and we know that that ancient world was stitched together around the Mediterranean by traders by ra raiders sometimes. But we find on this particular beautiful sanctuary of Hera in Samos, offerings from Armenia, from Babylon, from Egypt. So it was a completely interconnected world. And that's what we were trying to do in this series, was to try to find the new archaeology and the evidence that kind of gave us a fuller idea of history as it actually was rather than as it's been delivered down to us by 2,000 years worth of western orientated

historians. You go to the site of a Bronze Age sacrifice which is reminiscent of the story of Iphigenia. What did you actually find there? Well, this was really very chilling, very sobering. So I think we have this slightly Pavlovian response when we think of ancient Greece, as you said, right at the beginning of our conversation, of being at these beautiful blue seas and wonderful, stunning landscapes and a kind of golden age. But this was a place that was brutal as well as brilliant.

And in the myth stories, so in the Iliad in particular, and in the tragedians when they write these extraordinary Greek tragedies, we hear about human sacrifice and we hear about the sacrifice of young women. So Iphigenia, exactly as you say, is the classic example. So we're told that this daughter of Agamemnon, the great Greek general, was sacrificed by her own father so that the Greek warriors could get fair winds to sail to Troy and eventually to be victorious in the Trojan War. It's a terrible story, very hard to countenance, but when we were on Crete we went to a mansion which had suffered terrible earthquake damage. You can

actually see the splits in the floor from the earthquake and the people at the time, we're talking about 3200 or 3300 years ago, reacted by making sacrifice of animals but also there is the decapitated skull of a young woman. And the skull has actually been pulled open as if it's imitating the earth being pulled open by the earthquake. So we're certain that this is a young woman, possibly a young princess, who was sacrificed in order to try to keep the power of the gods and nature on side. So, you know, this was, we must kind of imagine this world as having horror within it. And isn't it fascinating that it's a young woman who then turns up in myths,

in the story of Ophigenia, in the story of Polyxena, also from the Trojan War, that it's a young woman who is chosen both as the most sacred creature and as the ultimate offering, but as the victim of human sacrifice. Bettany Hughes, it's a fascinating programme. I've only seen the first episode. I know there's a series. Thank you very much indeed for being with us this morning. And I will just mention that Bettany's Greek Odyssey is on Channel 5 tomorrow at 9 o'clock.

Thank you very much for being with us this morning. Now, still to come in today's programme, the murder of Berta Caceres. Who killed the celebrated Honduran environmental activist and why? The journalist Nina Lakhani risked her own safety to tell the story. And the serial, the fourth episode of the seventh test. Now, throughout the crisis of the pandemic, we've been talking to women who often get no attention at all because, as volunteers, they tend to be invisible.

Well, now, these troopers, women who see a need and get things done, have been a crucial support system in communities across the country. Today, Laura Thomas talks to Jackie Shimitsu, who runs the Hill Station Cafe in South London. I've lived in South London all my life. I was only born in Charlton, so I haven't gone far. But I've lived in this particular area for about 12 years. This space that's become the Hill Station project was a dead space and some members of the community thought they could do something with it. So they consulted with the local community as to what people would like to see here

and a cafe was quite a popular choice. I'd run a little mobile cafe in the park, which I used to pull out every day, and the tender came out for this, so I attended for it. And me and a business partner called Stephen Carrick-Davies, we ran it for two years before Stephen went on to find a paid job, because for those first two years we didn't get paid. We ran it, Stephen Stephen moved on I decided to

carry on and that's that's how I'm still here I put all my savings into it you put your savings into it yeah I put my savings into it I haven't got those back out I'm hoping to at one point um but there's some things that are worth more than money you know the amount of stuff that we've done here we've raised lots of money for other charities we've created employment for people that you know never had jobs before we've got two people that we've employed with autism it's a real focal point of the community that gives me a lot of satisfaction so yeah sometimes you you know it is only money sometimes you just can't put a value on what you do, I suppose.

I'm just going to pause one minute. Hi, Peter. Hi. I just wanted to check. You have counselled your party, haven't you? Yeah. Because they didn't know your name, but I presumed it was you. But, yeah, for obvious reasons.

Oh, yeah. Oh oh was it your birthday oh happy birthday if you have a space people can find you and um and a space is so important and it's hard to come by in London these days and that's what happens things bubble up from the community people approach me to put on stuff because they know where to find us sort of thing so the space is like it's about possibility yeah it's about possibility and kind of this kind of magic that happens with this I mean just yesterday we were talking to someone one of the customers who turned out to be a comedian and then we just happened to be having a conversation with him and we're talking about him putting a comedy night on here things like that just naturally happen how important is it to understand like the context of your own childhood when we're looking at all this work

that you do i grew up in care but i used to go home to my dad's weekend so I think my dad felt very guilty about us living in care in the week we hated it but in those days he would have had to give up work and go on the dole and he just wasn't that sort of a man so at the weekends we could do what we wanted and we had so much freedom and so much fun and my dad used to have everyone in the house he would feed all the kids in the street he'd often stare out the window and and say to me that kid looks like it's hungry like go and ask that boy if he wants a banana and I'd be saying no dad you go ask him if he wants a banana I'm not bloody going to go and ask him that but he was always looking out for because he came from that

background as well like a very poor background from Bermondsey he was always looking out for other people so I suppose I get it from from two things one from his empathy and me growing up watching him and how he sort of behaved towards people and also because my mum wasn't around so I suppose you knew what it was like to feel like the underdog before I moved here I was living on an estate in Blackheath and me and my neighbours used to put on lots of you know litter picking days, sports days, take the kids up to the Palladium, see a show. I always was involved in stuff like that in the community and then when I came here one of the projects that I started was four mums got together. None of us knew each other, but our children did.

Our children were all about 12 to 14 years old at the time, all boys, and they skated. And they were getting a lot of hassle from the local neighbours because they were skating in the roads and people were worried about their safety and the police were threatening them with ASBOs. And so my son kept saying oh you've got to speak to toby's mum you know they want to get a skate park in the park and so that we've got somewhere we can go without being hassled so four mums got together and we raised with the boys we raised like about 200 grand to to build the skate park 200 grand yeah i mean we raised it through funding bodies not just through donations

but it was a quite a long hard road because there was a bit of pushback from the community they didn't really want it here didn't really they thought there was going to be loads of youth in the park and that was going to cause problems and stuff but it's been here 10 years and it's a great asset and I love it when I go down to the tube station I might see kids getting off the tube with their skateboards and I know they're going to the to the tube station I might see kids getting off the tube with their skateboards and I know they're going to the skate park. I think sometimes coming from a background where you're wondering where your next money's coming from

to be able to put on your electric or put on food or spend on food, you haven't got the time or the trust. I think the trust is a massive issue. So I always try to do things and a lot of the time my the trust I think the trust is is a massive issue so I always tried to do things and a lot of time my peers were very you know well what do you want to do that for you're not going to earn any money we haven't got time to do that there was always this suspicion that either it wouldn't work or it wasn't worth doing because there was no money in it and that comes from being under enormous amount of pressure when

it comes to money but I think what my dad showed me was that no matter how little money you had because my dad didn't have much money he just always gave it he shared it with those who had less than him. Jackie Shimidzu and during lockdown the Hill Station Cafe has been the centre of a COVID-19 mutual group called Feed the Hill. It's the centre from which a network of 400 volunteers now serve 200 free food boxes a week to people in the community who need them. Berta Caceres was a highly regarded environmental activist and indigenous leader in Honduras. In 2015, she was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for her work campaigning against a dam which would have interfered with the land and water rights of communities

in the west of the country. She was not deterred by threats and intimidation, but in 2016 she was murdered. Nina Lakhani was the only Western journalist to follow the trial of those suspected of killing her. Her book is called Who Killed Berta Caceres? Nina, Berta was the most celebrated conservationist in the Americas. What was her background? So she was, you know, she was a grassroots leader.

She was, she came from a family of progressives, of activists on her mother's side. And she grew up in the dirty wars of the 70s and 80s when the US and Russia were fighting their proxy cold wars in Central America. So she really, from a very young age, learned how local struggles had a regional and global context. And she also, just as a very young child, would accompany her mother on foot. Her mother was a midwife to rural outposts and to communities, indigenous communities, which have been completely abandoned by the state, to help women deliver babies safely. And I think that experience of seeing just, you know, these communities where there were no basic services, no water, no lights, no electricity, no roads, no schools, no health services,

you know, really made a huge impact on her. And so then after sort of participating in the El Salvadoran civil war, she lived on the west side of Honduras, which is very near the Salvador border. She came back and her and her then partner, they co-founded a grassroots organization which always was very much about the um the struggle and the battle to put indigenous rights land rights um and that very much included the right to use natural resources on their territory in a sustainable way i know nina you you met her because you interviewed her. What was she like? She was incredibly compelling. You know, she was serious, but, you know, kind.

She you know, she when I met her, she was on the run. She'd been there with an arrest warrant out for her on trumped up charges related to this dam that you mentioned. So she was staying somewhere different every night. And, you know, she was, you know, she was very clear that she wanted, that there were these threats against her and her community. Her kids had been forced to go out of the country for safety reasons. And she was taking lots of safety measures. But that when, you know, she said this to me at the end of the interview, when they want to kill me, they will kill me. You know, that her life was a threat.

Her name, she'd been told, had appeared on a military hit list. And, you know that her life was a threat her name had um she'd been told it appeared on a military hit list um and you know but she wanted to live she wanted to live she wanted to fight there was so much more she wanted to do what's it like being a woman in Honduras especially a powerful and influential one um I mean it's a deeply deeply misogynist society, you know, so just being a woman is difficult. Walking down the street is difficult. You know, there's harassment and lewd comments all of impunity and so because it's such a deeply misogynist and conservative society you know um the role that there is the space for women in political and public life is really not there and so to be a you know outspoken smart tenacious um um female leader and not just a woman but she was an indigenous woman you know and outspoken, smart, tenacious female leader. And not just a woman, but she was an indigenous woman, you know.

And I think in a country which has deep racism problems as well, was incredibly challenging. How did they get to her, to kill her, Nina? They hired a hit squad. You know, the people that pulled the trigger that, you know, were a hired hit squad, a group of young, poor men who killed for money. And so it was really as simple as that. You know, Honduras is one of the most dangerous countries in the world outside of war zone. And and and you can kill you can hire somebody to kill, kill somebody really quite cheaply, you know. But it's really important to know that her standing, her position,

her influence globally and within the country means that that could not have taken place, that murder could not have taken place without the either implicit or, you know, at least without the implicit knowledge or complicity of people in power. Now, how much did you put yourself at risk in trying to document her life, the search for the perpetrators, and follow the story?

I mean, it was, you know, it was difficult. It's been difficult, you know. I think, you know, when I started investigating her murder for The Guardian, you know um one of you know the couple of stories i did early on um were about her name appearing on the hit list were about what i did another one about how um the military units in um suspected to be involved had received training um and for and support from the u.s and those led to US and those stories led to a campaign of intimidation and an attempt to discredit me by senior political officials and I never

after that went back into Honduras by air. I always took really quite odd routes over land through Central America to get there. And, you know, took a lot of care not to report or publish stories while I was in the country. But when I then got there for the trial, obviously that was much more difficult. And, you know, there were these communiques released declaring me a persona non grata, claiming that I had links to violent insurgency, organized crime, terrorism, all of which we believe were linked to military intelligence at the time. And I do think it's important to know in a country like Honduras, the military, the politics, the politicians over

security forces are operating really with the interests of the economic elites at heart. Seven people were found guilty at the trial who were they um those seven people they were you know in part the hit squad that i mentioned and others were the middlemen you know so there were two people who were linked to the dam company um an environment and communities manager a former former security chief who had been involved in monitoring her. They had set up paid informants in the community where the dam had been sanctioned to be constructed to follow her, you know, to feed them information. And also, you know, a key person who was convicted was an active special forces major who had known that ex-security chief from his army days.

And this army major at the time was under investigation for drug trafficking and kidnap. We don't believe that he knew Bertha in any way, but he was also convicted. How much does Bertha's family feel justice has been served? I mean, I think they and I, you know, and all those that have observed and followed this case closely, believe that justice has been only partially served. Nobody who paid for, ordered, enabled and benefited from Bertha's assassination has been brought to justice. What about the dam? What's happened to the dam?

The dam continues to loom over the community. While some of the international funders pulled out after the murder, the licence for the dam has not been revoked and that dam was licensed among hundreds of other environmentally destructive mega projects by a post-coup government that continues to rule honduras so that and many many others you know they remain a threat in these communities and so that you know that her family bethes family and colleagues have constantly been calling for that concession to be revoked and it hasn't been. I was talking to Nina Lakhani, the environmental justice reporter for The Guardian in the United States, on her book about the murder of Berta Caceres. We had a lot of emails and tweets in response to the discussion about the impact of COVID-19 on women's finances.

Anne Yvonne said in an email, I'm a self-employed illustrator and I'm one of the many who have had no financial aid at all from the government. I queried HMRC as to their decision and was told it was because I didn't earn enough last year. So, because it's become very difficult indeed to make any kind of living as an illustrator today, which means living hand to mouth while earning far less than the minimum wage, the government don't think I'm worth any kind of support, unlike my better paid brothers and sisters. Elisa said, of course, women aren't thinking about the long term. After I've paid the bills, the groceries and most household expenses,

there's very little left to manage as an investment. On the other hand, my partner makes four times as much as I do and hence pays the rent. In relative terms, this is about the same amount that I spend on the above. However, in absolute terms, he ends up with much more left over to invest. I would love to have money to invest. I'm putting away my £200 a month into my first-time buyer's ISA, but I simply don't have enough to make any significant investment. Perfect perfectly aware of how I could be managing my money if I were a rich woman, to paraphrase the song.

And this doesn't even begin to touch on the additional challenges faced by BAME women or women responsible for children. Jory said there are many, many ethnic minorities in Britain. Slavs, Azeris, Armenians, Turks, Arabs, Jews, Kurds, Zulus, Malays, to mention but a few. They're not all poor. And are they really more affected by COVID-19 than white British people? Anne said the item on money had me screaming at the programme on the radio this morning. In the early 60s, in an abusive and controlling poor marriage, the lifeline of family allowance, the only money that was mine by right, saved my sanity.

This is gone. Maybe we should acknowledge that some mothers at least need that freedom back. And then on Twitter, HV Woodley said, I'm finding some of this so patronising to women. And Shida D says, If women tend to take the responsibility of household finances and men the more strategic financial management issues, that is a fact and a choice that women make.

Also applies to who takes the lead in child care. Up to them to change it. Well thank you for all your contributions to this morning's programme. Do join Jane tomorrow when she'll be discussing the best way to talk to children about attending a protest. There'll be advice for parents and, of course, the concerns about safety. She'll also talk to Candice Braithwaite about what it's like to be a black British mother and why she's called her book I Am Not Your Baby Mother.

That's Jane tomorrow morning, just after 10. From me for today, bye-bye. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula

that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now.