Woman's Hour - Domestic Abuse in the Police Force

Episode Date: November 6, 2019

Presenter: Tina Daheley Producer: Kirsty StarkeyAccording to Freedom of Information requests made by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism almost 700 cases of alleged domestic abuse involving police officers and staff were reported in the three years to April 2018. An official “super-complaint” is to be launched and central to that are at least 12 cases where women have made allegations of domestic abuse and sexual violence against an officer, only for the case to be dropped and, on occasion, for the alleged victim to be arrested and intimidated. We’ll hear from Harriet Wistrich lawyer and founding director of the Centre for Women’s Justice who are bringing the complaint and two female Police officers, one serving and one former, who are bringing a claim against Gwent Police. Jann Haworth is the co-creator of The Beatles' iconic Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover. Regarded as one of the leading figures of the British Pop Art movement she was also seen as a pioneer in the face of the 1960’s American feminist movements. Creator of soft sculpture, she is an advocate for the representation of women in the art world and talks to Tina about her current exhibition at Pallant Gallery in Chichester.Amaryllis Fox was just 21 when she was recruited by the CIA. Posing as an art dealer she infiltrated terrorist networks in the Middle East and Asia. She’s written a memoir ‘Life Undercover’ about her career with the CIA and joins Tina to discuss.Interviewed Guest: Harriet Wistrich Interviewed Guest: Jann Haworth Interviewed Guest: Amaryllis Fox

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to Wednesday's edition of the Woman's Hour podcast with me, Tina Dehealy. A very good morning coming up. Jan Howarth, who co-created the iconic Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover, is with us to talk about why she's redesigned it decades on. And Amaryllis Fox, a former CIA spy, is here to tell us all about her undercover life and why she thinks women in particular are suited to this role. If you want to get in touch, please do. We are at BBC Women's Hour on Twitter, or you can email us through the website.

But first, 700 cases of alleged domestic abuse involving police officers and staff were reported over a three-year period leading up to April last year. Now that's come from freedom of information requests made by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Well, our super complaint is being launched against the police, looking into the culture within certain forces that may allow officers to abuse their partners without fear of arrest or prosecution. Harriet Wistrich is a lawyer and co-founder of the Centre for Women's Justice who are bringing the complaint and joins me now. Hi, Harriet. Good morning. First off, what is a super complaint? So a super complaint is a new process which enables designated bodies, those are organisations like the Centre for Women's Justice, to make a complaint about a trend or a pattern in policing.

In particular? Yes, so across the board. So normally complaints against the police are directed at misconduct or issues about individual officers. And this is really looking at a policing matter as a whole, an issue across the board that raises concerns about the way in which policing is dealing with an issue. So it's a new thing. And they could be brought on behalf of the public to, like you say, make complaints about what whoever's perceiving as being harmful behaviour patterns, trends in policing.

Yes, precisely. OK, so you say you have 16 cases where women have made allegations of domestic abuse and sexual violence against an officer only for the case to be dropped and on occasion for the alleged victim to be arrested and intimidated. Can you tell us more about these women? Yes. So what we're doing, we started off with one or two cases and then gradually others emerged. Some of the women have been married to or in relationships with police officers. Others were police officers themselves who form relationships with police officers. Others were police officers themselves

who form relationships with police officers, usually more senior police officers. All were subjected to different levels of domestic abuse, ranging from sexual violence, coercive and controlling behaviour, or sometimes after relationships break up, stalking and harassment. Those are the sorts of different allegations that the cases that we have been looking at involve. It doesn't come as the greatest surprise to me that police officers investigating themselves, or any organisation investigating itself, is problematic.

Well, it is indeed, and particularly in relation to policing, policing of domestic abuse as the more, you know, if somebody, if police officers called out to a particular domestic abuse incident, the woman is in a hysterical state, the police officer, the alleged perpetrator appears calm, and sometimes the police end up arresting the victim. Now, where that person is also a police officer they kind of often are able to use their credibility as a police officer to be even more convincing that they're not the ones it's this woman who's completely mad and is kicking off that that's that's the problem and so that that's one of the patterns that we see um And also we see that within a police culture, and, you know, particularly

within certain police forces, we've seen that the officers who are friends of the officer, if this particular officer who's alleged to be an abuser, is a credible chap and is seen as a good police officer in the work that he's doing. And then suddenly someone comes forward and says, actually, he's been abusive towards me. You know, there's an inclination amongst some of his colleagues to cover up and to believe him rather than the woman who's been making the accusations. Which would embolden that person. Yes. We are going to hear from two women, both were police officers in this case, although one's now left. They are part of your super Yes. of abuse against this particular police officer in Gwent. He was a very experienced police officer who specialised in training probationers. And it appears that what he did was use his position as

a sort of, you know, kind of a, you know, kind of charismatic leading kind of trainer to kind of form relationships with young rookies. And then once they were in the relationship, his behaviour turned abusive. And it seems that he continued to do that. And there were officers who were concerned and even warned, you know, one of the women off getting involved. But at that stage, at the early stage, they were very enamoured with him. And it was only once they were drawn into the relationship. It took many, many years before eventually this officer, he was never actually charged with a criminal offence,

but the pattern of behaviour was such that eventually the professional standards, new professional standards came in and he underwent misconduct proceedings. So he resigned from Gwent Police, didn't he, before the hearing? Well, the hearing went ahead. He didn't attend the hearing. In his absence, yeah. And he was found guilty in his absence. And he appealed, didn't he?

That was unsuccessful. The evidence was very strong. We are calling these two women Sarah and Jodie. They've been voiced by actors, and the interview you're about to hear was recorded by Rory Carson, who is a Wales reporter for Five Live. Here it is. It was relentless. It felt like I was just being stalked and watched. And then, again, he would do something really nice for me, and I would think, oh, he's not that bad.

And he was just switching between this monster. Was there a point when you felt scared? There were lots of occasions when I felt scared. This is a man who had a gun at his house. When I told him I didn't want that gun around me, he then decided to keep it out in the house. When I told him I didn't want that gun around me, he then decided to keep it out in the house. So one night we were actually sat watching TV on separate sofas and he was looking down the sight of the gun, pointing it straight at me. He would also then put it in the bed so when I'd pull

back the covers, the gun would be in there. It was almost as if it was like, just a warning. Like, I've got this. He's held knives to my throat. He used to swish a knife across my face. He would just look me straight in the eye and be doing that as if, as if I could do this to you right now, but I won't today, you know? One night, I ran out of the house and I didn't care where I was going. I just had to go. It was the middle of the night. That's when he tried to stop me leaving, grab me by the arm. I told him to get off or I would call the police. And he said, oh, if the police come, they won't believe you anyway. I'll just tell them you're hysterical.

And that's what he did, and I believed him. Because he kept name-dropping all the senior officers that he was friends with, and that he had joined the police with, and I just thought, well, yeah. Yeah, of course they're going to believe him over me, because that's what he had drilled into my head. I tried to break up with him a few times and he wouldn't let me. And he used to say, I'll tell you when the relationship is over. It was May 2012.

I couldn't take it anymore. I tried changing my mobile number. He was contacting me via email. He was turning up outside my house. Every single day I had something in the post, something different. Poems, CDs that he had made with a description of every song and why that song related to me. I was in the middle of a shift and I went back. My sergeants weren't expecting to see me. So when they said, oh, how are you back? I just broke down. And that's the first time I disclosed to my superior officers, who were fantastic. My sergeant obviously took it really seriously. They took it straight to my inspector.

What did they say to you? If I'm honest, it really got my back up when I first went in there because he said oh have a seat love I hear you're experiencing some relationship problems and I said it's not relationship problems this is totally different to relationship problems when I told him my story to be fair he did seem quite shocked and when we discussed what I wanted done and I said I wanted him to leave me alone let me do my job in peace I wrote a report I believe that went to professional standards I then received an update when my inspector called me back in to report that he'd been given a harassment warning.

Didn't hear anything from that. What does that harassment order state? So basically that would state that you're not going to contact the victim directly or indirectly so that includes via third parties. And the consequence of breaking that is? Well they should be arrested. Should he not have been suspended while an investigation of this severity was conducted? Absolutely. He wasn't suspended until years later when the other allegation came out. He was left to do his job, whereas I had to give up my role on the riot team

because he was a trainer. I was terrified of the man. I was going to do everything I could not to be anywhere near him again. And after you went through this process, which must have been very difficult, at any point then did an inspector or anyone contact you to explain what they found in this investigation? No, no. And should you have? Yes. I mean, especially with victims. You're supposed to keep them updated all the time. You especially update a victim

if you've come to a conclusion or the end of an investigation. It's really key. But I heard nothing. When did it stop? He sort of disappeared. And now putting the pieces back together, that coincides with him meeting the second victim.

Your relationship begins, and it starts off quite well, quite normal. When did things start to change? Only a couple of weeks in. What happened? A lot of things. If I wanted to get out of the house because I was scared of him, he would pin me down to the point of, I'd have bruises on my hands. On the occasion I tried to leave the house, I was just

going to get a taxi home. I'd had enough that night. I needed to go. He literally grabbed hold of me, threw me across his bed, pinned me down, had hold of my face and was just holding my head down on the bed to the point where I was screaming at him, get off, get off, get off. He wouldn't budge and I hate spitting,

but I had to spit in his face to get me off him. And that kind of made him even angrier. But I was just like, I can't deal with this anymore. As I managed to loosen myself up, I jumped up and we were face to face. I thought, I've got to go. I've got to get my stuff and go. He grabbed hold of me again and threw me across the bed.

I landed on the floor and I thought, do I play dead? I don't know what to do. And in the end, I didn't. He came rushing over to me because I think he thought I'd lost consciousness because I just laid there thinking about, what do I do? How do I get out alive? I managed to grab hold of him, throw him kind of behind me and run,

literally just ran out of the house. He then constantly phoned me. If I didn't go back, he was going to commit suicide. You know how close I live to the river. I'm jumping in. I can't do this without you. All this manipulative behaviour that I'd heard so much before and I was stuck. I was stuck. I couldn't get a taxi home because I was crying. I went back and tried to sleep on the sofa.

Halfway through the night he came and physically picked me up and took me to his bed. And I just didn't have the power, the energy to fight. That must have been terrifying. It was. We had finished in the September of 2014. That's just under two years. So then you get to a point where you say that this can't happen to anyone else. So then who do you speak to?

I speak to my sergeant and my inspector. What happened then? He was suspended on this occasion, but they didn't interview him for a year. And that was on a voluntary basis. This investigation went on for four years. Is that a normal amount of time for an investigation like this? It is, and he was on full pay the entire time. And what effect did all of this have on your day-to-day life?

We just had to look after ourselves. It was the support of friends and family that got me through. And if, for example, a woman or a friend came to you and told you some of the stuff that you've just told me, as a police officer, what would your response be? The first thing you need to do before any thought of prosecution is safeguard the victim. So whether that be remove her physically from where she is, take her to somewhere safe. And then we're looking down the lines of the criminal prosecution.

So we would be looking to arrest the perpetrator. And at any point, did you think that your rights were safeguarded, as you put it? No, we were both victimised and bullied. We were both walked past in the corridors of the police station. I was called liar. My colleagues, again, inverted commas. If he'd been dealt with properly when she put a complaint in and dealt with like a normal member of the public,

he'd have been arrested and prosecuted based on that email that is in black and white. a deall y cyflwyniad gyda'i gynulleidfa, byddai wedi cael ei ddysgu a'i gyflawni ar y ffurf yma yn blynyddoedd a chymryd. Byddai'n dal i gael ei gael. Ac yn realistig, byddai wedi gwneud amser y tu hwnt i'r barau i ddifrifo'r adroddiad ymarferol, a byddai wedi arwain i mi i fod yn ei ddyn nesaf. Byddai wedi cael ei ddysgu a'i gyflawni y tu hwnt i'r barau a ddim wedi bod yn swyddog polis yn cael ei wneud yn y sefyllfa o ran ymddygiad yn hyfforddi unrhyw dynion sydd wedi ymuno â'r gwasanaeth polis. prosecuted behind bars and not have been a police officer allowed to be in that position of responsibility,

training young women who had just joined the police force. Rory Carson there, Wales reporter for Five Live, talking to two women we're calling Sarah and Jodie, who are voiced by actors. Gwent police say, we expect all our officers and staff to act in accordance with the code of ethics and the standards of professional behaviour at all times. It's right that anyone who doesn't adhere to these standards is held accountable and the appropriate action is taken. Harriet, is it essentially, is this to do

with systemic problems about how the process of reporting police officers for abuse and this, if I can call it, a boys club that protects officers? Yes, I mean, that's essentially what we're looking at in this super complaint which we're currently compiling. So we haven't submitted it yet and we haven't drawn all the conclusions from the evidence that we're looking at. But some of the key problems, so we've heard from these two women who were themselves police officers and a number of the women we're looking at. But some of the key problems, so we've heard from these two women

who were themselves police officers and a number of the women we're hearing from were also police officers, but we also hear from quite a number of women who weren't police officers who had relationships with police officers. And one of the huge issues for them and some of the stories,

the woman has never complained to the police because she's fearful that she won't be taken seriously. And he's used his position to say, no one will believe you. I'm a police officer. Those that have, have experienced, you know, sometimes they've gone to somebody and said, look, he's behaving like this. And they said, well, you know, don't worry. I'll have a word with him, but nothing changes. Or, you know, they're not investigated.

They don't feel confident. In one of the cases, which I've dealt with over some time, the woman reported it, but she was too fearful to take the allegations forward, but wanted the evidence recorded. That evidence, a number of years later just disappeared but because of the way that she had been dealt with by the police and and afterwards he also uh got his his uh his mates to harass her and her boyfriend like stopping a subsequent boyfriend when he was driving and so on um so so there was a sort of a wider kind of harassment campaign after after she split up with him but she then went on to suffer a further uh rape by a date rape by somebody else and she was too fearful to report it so it has longer term consequences to end on a positive though the fact we are talking about it now and the fact that the victim's commissioner has written to the home secretary

about it we heard this yesterday it sounds like it's being taken seriously now. This is something that has to be looked at and it's an issue that has arisen before. We hope that the super complaint will look at and make recommendations for changes so that reporting can be done with confidence and so officers can be held properly to account. Harriet, thank you very much.

And you can hear the full version of that interview with Sarah and Jodie on 5 Live today at 12.15. Still to come, Amaryllis Fox, the former CIA agent, reveals what her undercover life was really like in a new memoir. But first, we are heading to Utah to speak to Jan Howarth, co-creator of the Beatles' iconic Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover and one of the leading figures in the British pop art movement. Good morning. Good morning.

Or is it morning actually there? What time is it? Yes, it's very early morning, three o'clock. Oh, thank you. Have you been to bed yet at all? I took a little quick sleep and a lot of tea. The combination seems to have kept me sane. Well, thank you for staying up to speak to us. Jan, as I just mentioned, co-creator of the iconic album cover. And now you and your daughter, Liberty Blake, who's also an artist, have

recreated a new version of it. Why? Well, the original cover had only 12 women on it. The basic idea was that the Beatles were to choose their heroes to make up a crowd. And the Beatles chose no women. Peter and I put the women that are there on the cover, or selected them. And that began to bother me year after year, as I looked at the cover, thinking maybe one had to do a reassessment of where we stood at the present time with that kind of omission. And so I began a project in Salt Lake City to create something called SLC Pepper, which was a riff on the original cover that set out to put 50% women on the cover. And then later, the idea of another sort of look at the idea of the Sgt. Pepper cover, I put together the notion about having an all women mural. And Liberty and I then went ahead

and tried to make that a reality. And several panels of this are in your exhibition, which is on at the Pallant Gallery in Chichester. One interview I read suggested you have taken more satisfaction from questioning the original sleeve than you ever got from making the original artwork. Is that true? Absolutely true. The original artwork was a piece of graphic design and was an interesting project at the time.

It's become something else in hindsight. But I think the new work involves collaboration of a different sort. And it's collaboration with a community of people who are largely non-artists. And so in putting something like that together, you're going out of your normal sphere and asking people to help you to create something and trying to find a way of doing that that actually pays homage to the people that you're depicting. And that's when we developed this process, Liberty and I, of using the stencil graffiti process, creating portraits through stencil work, using photographs and so forth, that supports a non-artist in actually creating a recognisable

portrait of someone. Working with family, I know this from personal experience, can be a nightmare. How do you find that? It's just such a pleasure. I mean, our family is very much involved in the arts, all our kids are, and, you know, my stepdaughters too. And we just, it's part of our life and we seem to get along very well. it's uh it really seems to be more of um you know that the goal is that kind of interchange and uh I guess we just fall into it rather naturally I'm glad to hear it um you've said the conversation got very heated around the 50th anniversary of the album cover can you tell me why well Well, I don't think, I mean, I didn't feel heated. I think that various people obviously were contacted to tell the story of their contributions to the cover. And many people, you know, had stories that were in conflict one with another or, you know, a sense of, you know, just disagreeable moments as well as agreeable ones.

And I think when you do a hindsight view, it's very easy to have the memory shift or to remember things that you did differently. And I think you have to be very sort of fierce with yourself to actually keep to the line of what you actually did. And so I think in some cases, you know, there were emails that I got that questioned my role. And I'm very clear about what I did. I think my memory is sort of nicely pickled because I've been on the outside of it. So I retain what I did. Janet, it's 100 pioneering women spanning 2000 years. How did you decide which women to include? Who's on there? How did you decide? Well, I didn't really decide what we did. I was a creative director at a museum called the Leonardo.

At the time, some of these ideas began to find their feet. And what we did is we put out a sheet and a description of the project that we wanted to do and ask people if they would contribute names of people that we called catalysts for change in the arts, sciences, and social activism. And gradually, this list built up to hundreds of names. And then, you know, when we began the idea of the workshops, we approached the mayor's office and the YWCA and various places. And some people wanted to look at the list to pick someone or to and individuals coming to us in workshops saying, no, no, no, we want to do, we're nurses, we want to do people in medicine and here are some names. That allowed us to move outside our normal kind of artistic zones or creative zones into territories that we didn't know and kept the selection broad. But as far as we would go with the selection, more and more and more names turned up. It wasn't that women were missing from history. It's just we didn't know it. And we were unaware of our history,

which is a terrible thing to come to realise. Well, Jan, thank you so much for staying up to speak to us. You didn't exhibit for nearly 20 years so this is well worth seeing. It's on at the Pallant Gallery in Chichester for how long Jan? It's on till February 23rd. Okay, all right, make sure you check it out. Thank you very much Jan. It's my pleasure, thank you. Now Amaryllis fox was just 21 years old when she was recruited by the cia posing as an art dealer she infiltrated terrorist networks in the middle east and asia well now she's written a memoir life undercover about her career and joins me now hello hi just where i could i can't even remember what i was doing when i was 21 years old but the idea of you being recruited by the CIA, you're 21 a pub in central Oxford. And they'd heard that I'd done some work in Southeast Asia in my gap year and said, you know,

we hear you've been running around foreign regimes. Do you want to do it for us? And at the time, I really believed in being a journalist, in writing for all the people, not just policymakers, and said, no, thanks, and thought that would sort of be the end of it. And I've never brushed up against the world of intelligence again. But after 9-11, I started focusing more on predicting terror and understanding terror activity in my academic work. And when I did a master's in the US, and that was when the CIA reached out and asked me about my work and whether I was interested in being in the field doing clandestine service work. What attracted you to the role? Why did you say yes?

Well, the idea I think I'd always had of the agency from kind of pop culture was that it was very paramilitary and forceful and masculine curious and very humble. And he said, you know, I see this work that you're doing around understanding the causes of terrorism. Do you think you got all the inputs? And I remember sitting there and saying, you know, maybe all or some of the inputs that I could get at the university library, but that doesn't come close to someone sitting across the table and saying, you know, here's why I actually believe that it's valid or important to get up tomorrow morning and commit an attack that could kill civilians. You know, that's at its core what I want to understand. And he said, so do we. And that was really what began it for me was that shared curiosity around the humanity and the emotional drivers of this kind of violence, because I just don't think you can stop it unless you understand those very human causes. How difficult was it for you to hide your life from your family and friends? What did they think you were doing? It's really lonely. You know, it's that I think that's one of the really hard parts of this particular kind of service. You have to have a cover that makes sense that

puts you in, in the parts of the world you need to be in, that keeps you safe. And more importantly, the sources that you're, you're building and talking to safe. So there's a reason for it. But, you know, it's hard enough to know who you are in your 20s anyway, I think. And to know who you are without being able to share these kind of core truths with your family and your friends and even the people you work with because the information is all very siloed. That part of it is very difficult, and it makes life now really sweet. I really appreciate all of the quiet moments now. Yeah, you must have to be a really good liar.

Yeah, you know, funnily enough, I was sort of always known as a really rubbish liar when I was a kid. You know, I just remember so many times people being like, you're really terrible. I think the deceptions, you know, what I realized over the course of a career is the deceptions are there as this kind of protective shell casing to safeguard you being in the room over months and years with a source that you're developing. But inside of that conversation, it's the opposite of deception. It's actually this incredibly raw authenticity that you have to find with someone who basically has as far away a worldview from yours as possible and is a part of a group that is devoted to the destruction of your country. And to find some really authentic shared humanity with somebody that you've always considered your adversary, your enemy, is in a way the most honest, strangely soulful work that you can do, actually. So even though it's sort of shrouded in deception for security reasons,

the work of coaxing somebody from taking lives to preventing attacks is actually very, very authentic and raw. And this is the bit that sounds like it's out of a film. You go undercover as an art dealer, and you were then dealing with terrorist networks in the Middle East and Asia. Can you explain exactly what you were doing? So I was focused for most of my career on a particular subset of the counterterrorism mission. CTC is the Counterterrorism Centre. CTC WMD, which is what I worked on, focuses on keeping WMD precursors out of the hands of non-state actors. So basically terror groups, other non-state actors like Shinrikyo, which is the kind of death cult that put sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system. So any non-state actor, not Tehran, not Pyongyang, but keeping WMD out of the hands of groups.

Just how dangerous was it? And did you think about the danger to your own life while you were doing it? How dangerous was it is, you know, is sort of how long is a piece of string a little bit. I mean, the operating environments are very difficult and you're working with people who are either arms dealers or violent extremists for a living. But on the other hand, the training is very good and the support is global and extraordinary. So I think while I was doing it, I wasn't or didn't sort of allow myself to be terribly aware of the danger until I had my daughter. You know, and that was I had my daughter while undercover overseas and it was a very focusing thing you know you you suddenly have this um kind of fragment of your heart that's beating outside of your body and realize that all of the kind of abstract thinking you've been doing about making the world a safer place is suddenly very concrete you know

and so are the threats your am i right in saying your husband at the time was also in the CIA? Did that make life easier for you? Yes and no. I mean, relationships are really difficult in this kind of work because, you know, the advice that we always get is communicate. And that is really difficult at the best of times and very, very difficult when, you know, there's surveillance to consider and there's, you know, the kind of compartmenting of information that means that, you know, even with your closest colleagues and family, and in this case, they were one in the same. Those things can't really be shared. But I do think that sort of being a wife and being a kind of service to which they're uniquely well suited. Why do you think that women are particularly suited to the role?

I think there are sort of feminine approaches to problem solving that we really see being critical to the human intelligence officer, you know, things like intuition, relationship building, you know, emotional intelligence, multitasking. These are all things that are so important to clandestine service officers, to national security in general. And we know that women are disproportionately affected by conflict around the world and that when women are at the negotiating table during peace negotiations, that the peace that results lasts longer and is more stable for every woman that is at the table. So it really is, I mean, it's an exciting time because we're also seeing women in these leadership roles. You know, now that in the US, the CIA is headed by a woman,

but also the women of all the are the leaders of all the directorates beneath her are also women for the first time in history. So there is really a sea change underway. It's been reported, as you must know, that the book was published without approval by the CIA. When you decided to write a memoir, did you consider that you were maybe putting your former colleagues' lives at risk by sharing? And I also believe that some officers have questioned some of the accounts saying that they don't ring true. How much of it is true? So it's a really long review process. And it definitely did go through it. And that the product of that is really important. I mean, the reasoning behind it, as frustrating as it can be at times, is exactly that, to ensure that identifying details aren't included. And in order to do that, there are changes that are asked of you, there are omissions that are asked of you.

And here, before I put pen to paper, I had a very good sense of what particular things had to be left out, which scenes there are a couple of operational scenes where there were two or three that had to be compositized into one in order to mask certain details. And I felt pretty comfortable with that as long as it was, you know, it's noted on the first page that those changes have been made. So the reader knows, but I felt comfortable about it because it's such a personal story. You know, there's, it's a coming of age memoir rather than a kind of, here's how the bin Laden raid went down, right? Or whatever the thing is, where the point is kind of a tradecraft tell all. That wasn't what I was asked to do for 10 years and the very personal lessons that came out of it from kind of wanting to wipe the adversary off the map as a young person newly at war with no experience of how to do it to getting to a place of realizing that that just doesn't work, you know, and that we need a more holistic view of this conflict and to really deeply listen to our adversaries. That was Amaryllis Fox. This message

came in. It's anonymous. And it's from someone who says, my ex subjected me to years of psychological and physical abuse. I made complaints to his superior officers and was told to be a sensible girl and start behaving like a supportive police wife. They continued to ignore me, told him about my complaints for which I received further abuse and only took action when he became verbally abusive towards neighbours and his colleagues. I left him with my three children and live on very little income as he refused to pay any maintenance. It was a very difficult time, but I have no regrets and we've moved on. This one, also from someone who wants to remain anonymous. I was in a brief relationship with a man I worked with who is now a police officer. During and after the relationship, I was sexually harassed by him.

I considered contacting the police when I heard that he joined, but thought that they would not believe me and I'd be painted as the rejected ex-girlfriend. It worries me that he's in the position that he's in, particularly as he will be in contact with vulnerable women. And a message about Amaryllis Fox, the former CIA spy from Hannah, an absolutely extraordinary woman. This was such a privilege.

Her life story is quite incredible. Thank you for those. In tomorrow's programme, we are going to be focusing on your questions about vaccination. Have you ever hesitated? And if so, why? What made you unsure? Let us know by emailing us at womanshour at bbc.co.uk.

We'll see if we can get you some answers. Thank you for listening. Russell Cain here, and I'm here to tell you about Evil Genius, the BBC Radio 4 podcast, where we take icons from history and then decimate them by slinging mud. Think you know everything about Einstein? You don't. He was a woman hater. You probably think you know about Amy Winehouse, that she was a victim.

She had a pretty dark side side and we're not shy about exploring it. Evil genius. We take people from history and a panel of three fellow jesters have to vote at the end of the show. No ifs, no buts, no grey areas, evil or genius. Plus hilarious banter as well. So head

to BBC Sounds now and hit subscribe. 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.