Woman's Hour - For Sama, Brexit, Women and Science Fiction

Episode Date: September 14, 2019

The journalist Waad Al Kateab documented her life on camera in war torn Aleppo, Syria. She tells us about her documentary and how she fell in love, married and had a baby daughter during the conflict.We discuss intersectionality in feminist economics with Dr Mary-Ann Stephenson the Director of the UK Women’s Budget Group, Dr Zubaida Haque from the Runnymede Trust and Angela Matthews head of policy at the Business Disability Forum.Adina Claire Acting Co-Chief Executive of Women’s Aid gives her reaction to the cricketer Geoffrey Boycott being knighted despite being convicted by a French court in 1998 for punching his partner.In 1962 Claire Weekes an Australian GP published a book Self Help for Your Nerves in which she said she could cure panic, depression, sorrow, agoraphobia and anxiety. We discuss how her cures would be received today with Judith Hoare the author of ‘The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code’.Marina Litvinenko and the actress who plays her MyAnna Buring, discuss the play A Very Expensive Poison. It follows the story of Alexander Litvinenko, Marina’s husband, who died in 2006 after being poisoned with polonium 210 in London.Listeners give their reaction to how Brexit is affecting relationships with family and close friends with Amber, Ellie, Henry and Gabrielle Rifkind a conflict resolution specialist and psychotherapist.As Margaret Attwood’s sequel to the Handmaid’s Tale – The Testaments is published, we discuss science fiction readers and writers with authors Mary Robinette Kowal and Temi Oh.Presented by Jenni Murray Produced by Rabeka Nurmahomed Edited by Jane Thurlow

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Good afternoon. As Geoffrey Boycott becomes Sir Geoffrey, what does Women's Aid make of a man convicted of domestic violence receiving a knighthood? A film called For Summer, Wad Al-Khatib lived through and recorded the brutal siege of Aleppo. Some of the feeling also which I can't protect my daughter, I can't protect even myself, I can't really plan for tonight or for the next day. It's all, you feel all the time that this life will be finished at any moment. Dr. Claire Weeks was an Australian GP. Why is her biography called The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code?

As Margaret Atwood publishes The Testaments as a follow-up to The Handmaid's Tale, what do we make of the understanding of the term science fiction? There are lots of books that are famous that we now might describe as science fiction, like 1984 is dystopian. I think that Frankenstein is like one of the first science fiction. And whenever I'd suggest this to people, they'd go, oh no, but those are good books. A Very Expensive Poison is a play which traces the death by poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. I'll be talking to Mayanna Boring, who plays his wife Marina, and to Marina herself. And the B word, yes, Brexit.

What did you have to say in a phone-in about the emotional effects of the controversy on you, your friends and your family? 30 years ago, Professor Kimberley Crenshaw invented the word intersectionality to describe how women of different classes and races have different needs when it comes to feminist politics. In the same year, the Women's Budget Group was formed

and they're planning a discussion in London next Wednesday called Intersectionality in Feminist Economics to examine whether economic planning has embraced the idea that women's needs may be different from men's, but also that not all women have the same requirements. Angela Matthews is Head of Policy for the Business Disability Forum. And Dr Mary-Anne Stevenson is Director of the UK Women's Budget Group. Why did she want to highlight this question? Economic policy doesn't just affect women differently from men. It affects different groups of women differently. So, for example, our report on the impact of austerity showed that poorer black and Asian women were hardest hit by spending cuts compared to, for example, white women or richer men. And we also did another

briefing looking at how disabled women had been particularly badly affected by austerity. We wanted to go beyond just that focus on one particular policy area to step back a bit and say how, when we're doing our thinking about how economic policy affects women differently, how can we make sure we think about the diversity of women and the ways in which race and disability and class and gender all intersect? So, Beda, one of the big questions is the question of caring roles, where some are paid, often at low rates, or not paid at all. How do you tackle that huge question? Well, we start from the fact, we start from the argument that there is no such thing as a non-working women.

All women are working. The difference is we're just not paying women who are doing one of the most fundamental roles in the economy, which is caring. And at the moment, caring is an undervalued work. It's an underappreciated work, and it's certainly not paid. And yet, just think, every single one of us is carers at one point in our lives. We're either caring for children or we're being cared for, we're caring for partners or we're caring for our parents. We will care at every single stage of our life and yet that's not appreciated and that's because it tends to be women doing the caring roles. Angela, what are the difficulties for disabled women when it comes to doing unpaid work? Well, we've seen a lot of this for disabled women graduates as well who are getting really fantastic degrees.

These are talented, bright young women, but they have a disability. And so they graduate with a degree, often a first or a 2.1, so really great degrees. And they are going into perhaps voluntary roles because they can't get into paid employment. Why are they finding it so difficult? First of all, there's workplaces being physically and non-physically inaccessible,

but also this idea of what flexible work really means and the diversity of what flexible work needs to be. We think of flexible workers maybe starting a bit later or finishing a bit earlier when actually disabled people and particularly we've seen a lot of disabled women tell us actually I'd like to start a lot earlier have a bigger break during the day and then carry on work later into the evening. And there are still a reduced number of roles who really are flexible to that degree. Marianne, I know that getting women back to the workplace

was supposed to help tackle one of the big problems that we have, child poverty. Why did that not work? So the government's strategy on tackling poverty, and child poverty in particular was focused on paid work. But what we know is that for women in particular, paid work isn't necessarily a route out of poverty. So a very high proportion of children living in poverty are living in a household with a working parent. And for lone parents in particular, it's very difficult to work full-time hours.

They may not want to work full-time hours. They've got other caring responsibilities, which means that paid work alone will never be enough to lift women out of poverty, particularly because of the unpaid care work that Zubeda was talking about. I'd like to talk about ethnic minority women. I mean, Run Amid Trust, we're a race equality think tank, so we look at women and men across all different ethnic groups. Black and ethnic minority women don't just suffer from sexism within the labour market and outside of the labour market. They're also suffering from racism within the labour market and outside of the labour market. On top of that, we know that black and ethnic minority families are much more likely to be poorer. We know that

half of Bangladeshi and Pakistani families, about 40% of black families are all likely to live in poverty. We know that 60% of children in poverty live in working families. So poverty is a huge burden on black and ethnic minority families and particularly restricts black and ethnic minority women, as does the austerity cuts. We know that that has had a significant impacts black and ethnic minority women, as does the austerity cuts. We know that that has had a significant impact on black and ethnic minority women. I know, Angela, you've done a piece of work on equality in the workplace focused on men. Yes. What did you find?

Yes, absolutely. So this was actually a response we did to the Women and Equalities Committee, their recent consultation on men and mental health. And what we found was men were saying, yes, we completely agree. We're still seen as protector, and that's a quote, protector, breadwinner. That's another quote from the men we interviewed. And we are seen like that, and we don't like it. We don't want to be this.

It's a huge pressure, particularly in the workplace. But Angela, who's responsible for changing that kind of culture? Is it business or is it government? We need to look at what needs to be changed and when to stop the things like social care collapsing. The kind of the benefit and the incentive for business to be at the front of changing that is that they can probably do it quicker than the government could in terms of driving change.

But why would they? Why would business be interested in it when they're concerned about making money? So the incentive is to make money. I need happy staff who are interested in working hard, but in a work-life balance as well. And we're seeing in a competitive job market, people can be more choosy about the employers they work for. So we do have this kind of environment where disabled at managerial level are moving between employers because they will go with the employer who values well-being more.

How content do you think business is to make that kind of change in thinking? It's certainly in their interest to have happier employees, but it's more than happier employees. I mean, actually, this isn't fundamentally, it's not just a gender issue. We now have millennial men who are much happier to look after their children. They want to be with their children. They don't want to be at work all day. We have an ageing society.

Some do. I mean, not all. Absolutely. And I think that's part of the problem, that women still take the disproportionate burden of that care. But it is changing, and we've got an ageing society. So even if men didn't like it, they would still have to start caring for their parents, for instance. With those changing dynamics, it does mean that businesses have to sit up and start thinking about flexible working, start thinking about paternity leave and care leave and so on. needs to be a national conversation in society about the assumptions around what is women's work,

what is, you know, what's paid work, what's valuable work, and especially around care. We need to value that a lot more. Marianne, I know there is now a commission on gender equal economy, which began this year, and I know you're not reporting until next year, but what are you hoping it will achieve? A lot of the work that we do at the Women's Budget Group is analysing proposals from government and from opposition parties and saying how they will impact differently on women and men and so on. And what we wanted to do was come up with a set of proposals for how can we actually do things differently. You know, one of the things we often assume is the way the world is just a given. It's like, you know, the air we breathe or gravity. And actually it's not. We've created

this society. We've created this economy. We can do things differently. We can organise ourselves in a different way. Dr. Marianne Stevenson, Dr. Zubeda Haque and Angela Matthews. And we had an email from Carol who said, I'm 60. I've worked two jobs with three children. It's been exhausting. I think women should be paid more for working, not less, as is so often the case. When we work, we still have to do all that other stuff that makes the world go round. Birthdays, Christmas, packed lunches, help on school trips, look after elderly parents. I so agree that the current situation is a social construct. We can change it. Why not assume a four-day week for working as an option

or equivalent hours and also for school? More time to enjoy life. It was announced this week that the former cricketer and cricket commentator Jeffrey Boycott had received a knighthood in Theresa May's resignation honours list. In 1998, he was convicted in a French court of punching his then partner. Well, he appeared on Today on Tuesday morning talking to Martha Carney, who wondered why it had taken so long for him to receive an honour. Well, I suppose one of the reasons that your critics might put forward is the conviction that you had for domestic violence. 25 years ago, love, in a French court, she tried to blackmail me for a million pound. I said, no, because in England, if you pay any money at all we think hang on there

must be something there I said I'm not paying anything I'm not sure I've actually got a million at the time but no and it's a court case in France where you're guilty which is one reason I don't vote to to remain in Europe you're guilty until you proved innocent that's totally the opposite from England and it's very difficult to prove you're innocent in another country, another language. And most people in England don't believe it. I didn't do it. Move on.

It's a cross I have to bear, right or wrong, good or bad. I have to live with it, and I do, because I'm clear in my mind, and I think most people in England are, that it's not true. Although the Chief Executive of Women's Aid has said celebrating a man... I don't care a toss about her, love.

It's 25 years ago, so you can take your political nature and do whatever you want with it. Martha Carney and her political nature. Well, Dina Clare is here. She is the acting chief executive of Women's Aid. Just briefly, what is your reaction to the fact that Theresa May has given the cricketer Geoffrey Boycott a knighthood? Well, I was in Number 10 talking to Theresa May the week before she left office.

She reassured me and all of the people around the table that domestic abuse was something she was utterly passionate about. And indeed, it was spoken of, I think, by Harriet Harman as part of her legacy on her last day as Prime Minister. And when you think of her legacy, I congratulated her on that day for such an incredible legacy, something we'd fought for for many years. And it feels that that's just being undermined by celebrating someone who has been convicted of domestic abuse, a violent crime against a woman and we're just dreadfully disappointed. Well, there were hints in that interview with Martha on today

that he certainly would dispute the veracity of the conviction and it occurred in France which he seemed to think was, well, he has views on the European Union as well, we know. But nevertheless, he was, as you say, convicted of a domestic violence offence. And he is now a knight of the realm. And we were talking at the beginning of this programme about how you teach young women about healthy relationships, which I know is another Women's Aid campaign. It just doesn't help, does it?

Not at all. And what sort of message does it send victims and survivors that someone who's been convicted gets celebrated in this way and is put forward as a role model. When you look at the declining number of prosecutions and convictions for domestic abuse, is it any wonder that women don't come forward when people cast aspersions on the veracity of their voices? It sends just completely the wrong message. Are you disappointed in Theresa May? I am disappointed, to be honest. It feels like a misstep. It is a brilliant legacy. She's done so much. I absolutely believe in the passion she has for fighting domestic abuse and in pushing forward the domestic abuse bill. So, yes, I would say we're disappointed in this particular move. Of course, I've fallen into the trap there of blaming a woman when we are talking about a conviction of a man for domestic violence, which is at the very heart of this. Where are we going with the domestic violence bill? Obviously, Parliament has been suspended.

So what happens now? This is, again, all part of Theresa May's prime ministerial legacy, or so we were led to believe. Well, that's right. And she'd pushed it through that first reading, or so we were led to believe. Well, that's right. And she'd pushed it through that first reading, for which we were really grateful. But unfortunately, with the proroguing of Parliament, now the domestic abuse bill's off the table.

We have pushed for Boris Johnson to make a commitment to bring it back. We haven't yet had that commitment, but we sincerely hope that we will achieve that. So at this moment in time, it's a wait and see and see if he has the same level of commitment as Theresa May, which we sincerely hope he has. But in the meantime, what are women that you're talking to every day, is there a sense of limbo? I think so. Certainly across the services in the sector that support women, we were so encouraged by the idea that there would be forward movement through the Domestic Abuse Bill in terms of defining the crime

and supporting services. So there's a real strong sense of being in that limbo, as you describe it, because there's no forward movement right now and we just really want that commitment from Boris Johnson and his government that they will continue to move it forward. Adina Clare, the Acting Chief Executive of Women's Aid, was talking to Jane.

In 1962, an Australian GP, Dr Clare Weeks, published a book, Self-Help for Your Nerves, in which she said she could cure panic, depression, sorrow, agoraphobia and anxiety. The book became a bestseller, and it's still in print, but she was rather poo-pooed by the psychiatric establishment who dismissed her as not being qualified for this kind of work. Well, she was interviewed on Pebble Mill in 1983 and spoke about how a housewife might manage depression. Take a housewife who stands at her window,

and at dusk she's looking out. She has had bouts of depression before and there's just something about the dusk the falling leaves perhaps a distant church bell something that just strikes a note inside her and she feels her heart as she thinks go woof and you know that little clutching hand on the tummy. And she thinks, no, not one of my bouts again. Oh. She becomes immediately apprehensive and afraid because she knows what they're like.

She knows what it's like to go through a bout of depression. And now this is where she does the wrong thing. She starts to rush here and rush there to try and get rid of it. She'll rush to the supermarket and when she's finished she'll think now has it gone? Am I any better? Has it gone? And of course the best way to remember something is to try so hard to forget it. And of course the family will say oh mum get yourself up out of this one you know do something about this one. She's been doing it perhaps for days, trying to get herself out of it,

and the more she tries, the deeper she gets into it. Now, that is a perfect example of how not to manage a bout of depression. Dr Claire Weeks. Now, Judith Hoare is the author of The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code. Now, we heard her say, oh, come on, snap out of it, this is not the way to deal with depression. What did she say was the way to deal with anxiety and depression? Well she was a scientist and she had, as a result, and a doctor, she understood very much, from a scientist's point of view as well as a doctor, the fight or flight reflex, which is

instinctive to all of us. We can't control that. If a stone drops from the sky or something like that or a tiger runs at you, you can't control your response. So what she knew was that when you get into that situation where you have very inappropriate panic responses when there's no tiger or no terrifying situation, that you must just go with that terror.

You can't fight it because the instinct is to fight it. The instinct is to run away. It's called fight or flight. But there are occasions for people with high anxiety where there is really no threat and they're a bit overwhelmed by that fear that they've got because it was fear she knew that was driving it. She has a series of words which she said you should follow, kind of mantra.

What are those words? Yes, just simple six words designed to calm the nervous system, to deregulate it, as it were. They were face, accept, float, and let time pass, all of which are fairly self-explanatory. Possibly float was the most difficult concept. People today might try and say it was equivalent to mindfulness.

It's just a bit of release, just yield entirely is what she said to the feelings. You must let those feelings run their course for if you don't, you perpetuate the vicious circle. It's by fighting the fear, which is so instinctive in people,

that perpetuates the fear. What she would say is, you have had first fear, and then you add second fear to first, and you're in a vicious circle before you know it. So you must yield to it. Now, she was absolutely convinced that she had the cure, that cure was possible. What evidence did she have that it was possible? Look, the evidence was in the huge, grateful hordes of individuals, first in her practice in medicine, where she would explain to them very simply the way in which the nervous system worked. She wasn't a great believer in delving into the past. I mean, people had problems, and yes, they should be addressed. But what they were worried about was the all-consuming feelings of fear that they had now and that had to be addressed.

But she learned from being a doctor that she was offering something special to people. They got better. Once their situation was explained to them, once the simple medical, the way the nervous system functions and the way to calm it down, as it were, is explained to them. They have a small toolkit where they can take charge and that those black areas become less terrifying. Then when she published the book, it was a bestseller. The first book sold, I think, about 600 copies were printed and they sold within three hours. Why was the psychiatric establishment so opposed to her

and just poo-pooed her ideas? I think she was an outsider. It was like a silo. If you weren't a trained psychiatrist and they'd studied Freudian psychology, she might have been a scientist and a GP, had a scholarly background, but she was not a psychiatrist. She was an outsider. She had a zoological background.

Well, not only that. She had a doctorate of science. So she'd reached the very top. She'd got a Rockefeller scholarship to London to study evolutionary evolution in lizards. She was working at the absolute top of the tree and had an international reputation in that field. And then became a doctor. But that wasn't good enough. She wasn't a psychiatrist.

And also, here she is writing books called Self-Help. Well, they thought that was just nothing more than grandma's advice. And they didn't see that beyond the simplicity of this book lay a depth of understanding of evolution, of the body, and of the mind, and of the interconnection of all of that. She understood that so clearly, but she was also perhaps being just an older woman standing up there in front of those audiences probably didn't help much in those days either, but she was really an outsider who wrote self-help. To what extent was she one of the first self-help book writers? Look, I can't be definitive about that, but I'm pretty sure looking back on it,

she was around the time of Dale Carnegie's book, How to Make Friends and Influence People. So she was, you'd have to say, one of the very early people. And she did say she had two choices. With a scholarly background, she could have written a scholarly research paper. But she said she could see the need was so great that she should go directly to the people. And she wrote a little manual for people who needed help right now not an appointment with a couch in a week's time but something that would help them in that desperate state people can get into. The understanding of mental illness and the words used to describe it are very different

now from what they would have been in the early 60s. Where is she different and where is she the same as what we might hear now? Well, I think she identified fear was at the centre of her analysis. If I can go back a bit in time, fear, I think a lot of scholars and medical people at the early part of the 20th century in World War I realised how important fear was in deranging people's sense of their own comfort and themselves. But you had Freud and psychoanalysis and early childhood experiences and sex, so that sort of went off onto the mind area. I think she brought it back to the body.

She brought back how important it is, those terrible feelings that fear brings. It's not just a feeling in your head you're frightened. It's a whole body feeling. Your heart races, you worry you can't breathe. People get all sorts of terrible dissonant symphonies of physical responses. I think people now understand how that body-mind connection is so important now

in a way that got derailed through the 20th century when everyone focused on the mind. Judith Hoare and her book is called The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code. Gillian sent an email and said, I'm now 75 and thank goodness and possibly thanks to Dr Weeks, I'm in a reasonably good state of mental health but for most of my 20s and 30s I had severe anxiety, followed by depression. I came across her book, Self-Help for Your Nerves, at that time. I still refer to it again at times.

True, the high doses of Valium and anti-depression drugs did help, as did my caring GP. But Dr Weeks was an added bonus. I will always be grateful to her. I would love to have had the privilege of meeting this truly able and compassionate doctor. Still to come in today's programme for summer, the documentary film of the siege of Aleppo as the bombs fall, children die, and Wad Al-Khatib marries, has a baby, and records the impact of the war for posterity. Your views on Brexit and its emotional impact on you, your family and friends, and as Margaret Atwood publishes The Testaments, we discuss women and science fiction. In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a young Russian detective who'd moved to the UK with his wife and son and become a British citizen,

died after he'd been poisoned with polonium-210 in a hotel in central London. His story is told in a play which opened last week at the Old Vic Theatre. It's called A Very Expensive Poison and traces his history and that of his wife Marina in Moscow and then as they settle here. It also follows Marina's efforts to get a public inquiry into her husband's death. The conclusion of that was that the Russian FSB Secret Service had most probably authorised the killing with the approval of Vladimir Putin.

Well, I spoke to Mariana Boring, who plays Marina, and to Marina herself. How happy was she to have her tragic story made into a play? It's absolutely amazing to have my story on the stage. But I saw, and I saw this play already three times. I think it's amazing. First of all, it's my life story and my love story. It's done so well.

Thank you to Mayanna and Tom. Tom, who plays your husband, of course. Tom, who plays my husband. But, of course, all this story of what happened in London in 2006 brought in a certain way and so interesting, and it's attracted different people from different levels and different ages. And when I saw these people in theatre, when they discussed about this, I realised it was all right to bring the

story to stage. It's a tough story, Mariana. How did you prepare to play Marina, knowing she may well be sitting in the audience watching you do it? Well, very early on, it was very clear to all of us and definitely to me that what we were not doing was a documentary. Lucy had done an extraordinary... Lucy Prebble, the playwright. Lucy Prebble, absolutely, who is extraordinary. And she had also done an extraordinary amount of research. And what she had captured was the sort of madness of the event and the times, but also the emotional truth of it.

And with that in mind, it gave me a freedom to let go of this idea that I was going to do a sort of staged physical replica of you, Marina. And instead, I just needed to follow Lucy's work and Lucy's words and find the emotional truth in all of the beats that she had written. It's all there on the page. And by doing that, we would achieve what we all wanted to achieve, which was to get this story out there, to remind people of it or to educate people about it again, and also to help people to feel this emotional madness.

Marina, it is at times incredibly moving. I mean, we open with that awful, famous picture of your husband lying in bed in hospital. And the impact it all had on you. And then at times, there's almost pantomime in the comedy where the audience goes from feeling they want to be in tears to just howling with laughter at some of the amusing things. How do you cope with the fact that it swings from tragedy to comedy? How it was done, it's amazing because it's so entertaining. It's so unusual. It's the music. It's the dancing.

I have no idea how it might be made so perfectly. And, of course, when I received the question, who's going to play you? I have no, again, idea who it might be. But when I saw Mariana first time, from very beginning, I realized it's exactly me, even without seeing her on the stage. There you are. She approves of you, so that's all right.

Marina, there's a mention in the play of Anna Politkovskaya, who I interviewed on Woman's Hour. She was a journalist who opposed Putin. She was shot a month, I think, before your husband died. And I wondered how much her death inspired you to fight for justice. Anna Politkovskaya was an amazing woman, and she was an important person in the life of my husband. I could call them friends, and I saw her a few times. And her death for Sasha was devastating.

And he pointed Putin as a person who killed Anna Politkovskaya. He said it in a frontline club. And I believed if Sasha would be alive, he'd be able to investigate this case. He would try to find who behind this crime. And remember, Anya, as a very determined person and doing incredible stuff, helping people in Chechnya, even when she was in danger and was asking to move from Russia, she said, I can't. Okay, I can't write my articles being in Europe or in America. But how about these people? And it's every time thinking about people and what

you can do to help people. It was important for me too. How difficult though was it for you to get the public inquiry? There's an extract of Theresa May in the play when she was Home Secretary. What was it she actually said to you when you were trying to get your public inquiry? First of all, of course, it was not easy because it took a quite long time. But then I was not thinking about this, is it difficult or not, because I didn't know how long it will take. I just knew we need to achieve result. If it's not possible to do on this direction, we will take another one. If we need to go to inquest, it's one thing, or we're going to public inquiry.

And every time when I had some kind of distraction, I couldn't believe why. I don't do nothing wrong. I do this for this country. I do this for Russia. And, of course, when they received this rejection of public inquiry from Home Secretary, who was Theresa May at this time, I couldn't understand why. And everything that was saying why, I didn't feel it's true. She said it was not in the public interest, I think. And even it would be cost a lot of money. It was just a question, why? it's just so important to all of us to understand why these two countries

as Russia and United Kingdom can't be together. The play, as I think I've suggested in my questioning, is openly critical of the Russian assassins, the probable approval of President Putin. And I wondered for both of you, how much does being involved in this make you fear for your own safety? Well, I mean, from my point of view, it was very clear that compared to so many people like you, like Sasha, like Ben Emerson, like so many people involved in this case, like Anna, the fear that I experience is nothing in comparison to these incredibly brave individuals who are out there on the front line fighting all the time. But the fact that as soon as I read this,

it was a story I wanted to be a part of, it felt important, and I feel it's more dangerous to be afraid of telling these sorts of stories. I think that's, for me, where the danger lies. Marina, what about you? I absolutely agree. I would say even silence is not protection anymore. You have to say the truth and you need to say this aloud.

And I can't say I don't like this question about safeties. I think you have to live your life. You need to live your life with your friends, with your family, and just not to be afraid. did as I viewed For Summer, a documentary made by Wad El-Khatib during her years living in her home city of Aleppo from 2011 to 2016 as the bombs fell incessantly on the civilian population. The tears came when one limp little boy was brought into Wired's husband's hospital, followed by his two stunned brothers. The little one had died. Then there was the woman brought in unconscious and nine months pregnant, whose limp grey baby was delivered by caesarean section,

and the staff struggled to bring him to life. Well, the film is now on general release and will be shown next month on Channel 4. What prompted Wired to begin filming? I was just a student at Alipay University when the revolution started. And we've seen in our own eyes how the media in Syria before,

it was all controlled by the regime and you can't really publish any single word if they didn't sign it off. And we've seen like a huge amount of protest in the street and on the formal channels they were saying that like there's nothing in Syria happening. And later on they were trying to say that these people are terrorists and they were speaking about us, about my daughter, about children, and these people can't be terrorists. I felt the only way to document this and save this for the history, for ourselves, for the world outside, just to film this all. What was it like? I mean, it's unimaginable to think of living under that constant bombardment.

I can't really describe this as much as I can tell people to see the film to feel the same experience exactly. But it's just like the main feeling all the time that I'm alive now for the last minute of our life. And you just feel how sometimes you are helpless to help others when you feel that I can't really do anything for them. Some of the feeling also which I can't protect my daughter, I can't protect even myself, I can't really plan for tonight or for the next day. It's all, you feel all the time that this life will be finished at any moment. You met the man who would become your husband, Hamza, a doctor.

And again, I just wondered what on earth was it like for you filming in his hospital with injured people coming in all the time, blood everywhere. It's horrific to watch. And you were there. We were living in that hospital. Even before we and Hamza got married, we lived in the hospital. And most of the staff was living there. So the hospital was for us part of it as a home and part of it as a job. And just being there filming this, it was just a huge responsibility of documenting all these faces and all these injuries,

even if I know that I will not use it for any media purpose. But I know that this is all our crimes evidence and we need to save all this for the future, for like a hope that the accountability will happen one day. But, you know know you keep thinking what were people thinking of her when she was filming and then there's one scene where a woman

hears her young son has been killed and comes to collect him and she shrieks at you to go on filming she says carry on filming me Why do you think she did that? I know that part of the people in Aleppo were saying that this camera is their way to survive. We have all that idea, and that's why I kept filming. We've thought that people outside the world, the Western countries, when they have seen all these crimes happening in Syria, and it's all for about civilians. And it's all because of the freedom, because of the dignity, because of the shared principles that we all should have agreed on. We felt that the world in 2011, 13, and 16, and unfortunately, now, 19, the world will not let that happen to civilians in this time of

the world and it was just like it's still happening unfortunately and this is the main message of the film there are scenes where you show your friends and your colleagues surviving there's only one word for it and they're dealing with diminishing food supplies, the delight of one of your friends over the discovery of a persimmon fruit, which she is longing to taste. How easy was it to find delight when day-to-day life was so dangerous? We were struggling to create that hope and that delight. It's just really to stay alive. You need people like Salem and Afra, the other family in the film. You need like really face like Sama when you are so exhausted and so disappointed to look at her and gives you all the hope.

There's part of the film when people are playing chess in the street and children like swimming in a hole happened because of a barrel bump. All these things, you can just look at this and have a strength and facing all the horror that was happening. How dangerous was it for you and your husband to send out news reports? I mean, your films to Channel 4

and he gave reports too. This is the only way which we felt that we can tell the people outside what's happening. Against the propaganda that the Russian and the Assad regime was trying to do about saying that all these people are terrorists, there's no civilians in these areas, and we've seen all these children. You can see in the film how many children and families are in the city. Just one part of what we felt that this is our responsibility to do, and we felt that this could change something in what happened.

Why finally did you have to leave? We were forced to flee out of the city. All the 3,000 people who lived in Aleppo were forced to flee by agreement between the Russian and the Turkish government to let the Assad regime control the city. And this was the only way for us to be survived. When I was watching the film, I saw you had your daughter,

then you now have another daughter, you're settled in the UK. But looking back on the putting together of the film, as you've had to watch all that footage again, what do you suppose makes your work filming a siege and bombardment different from what a man might have done? The first thing and the first decision I've taken and I promised myself to do

when I decided that this film will happen was to be very honest, very honest to myself, very honest to other people and speak out about all my fears and all the bad feeling that I had. Even if I had to say something out, but I felt that this is big responsibility. I'm not telling the people just my story as a mother. I'm telling them the motherhood story in Aleppo, and I need people really to understand what war means. I directed the film with another director called Edward Watts, and I want to thank him for his great work with me in this. And we both felt that there was a very part of this about the female perspective of war and of motherhood and of filmmaking. And that was all during the time when I was filming the story in Aleppo for five years. I was talking to Wad Al-Khatib. On Monday, we asked you about the impact of the Brexit debate on you, your families and friendships.

Do you see eye to eye with other people in your family? Have you fallen out with close friends? Well, Jane was joined by Gabrielle Rifkind, who's a psychotherapist and specialist in conflict resolution. She's had two decades' experience of working in the Middle East. First, they heard from Amber. I'd always been very close to my dad growing up, and then following a family bereavement in 2016, we fell out.

We came very distant but with the sort of onset of the referendum and the interest in politics at that time it actually gave us a sort of if you like neutral topic on which we could converse and sort of act normally together. What do you mean exactly because you both agree? We both ended up voting the same way in the referendum. I've always been very interested in politics and so has my dad. When it all sort of kicked off, we were able to kind of find this safe ground to, you know, have you seen what's happening in the news, etc., without sort of bringing in anything deep and underlying. Amber, thank you very much.

Ellie is able to join us now. You're Dutch. You've lived in Britain for many years. Yes, more than half a century. And tell me your thinking about Brexit. I find it most worrying. It's very difficult. It makes us very insecure. It makes you question the friendships you have. It makes you realise that even after more than 50 years in a country, some people regard you as the other and not just as their neighbours, their friends, their carers, their colleagues. It's very upsetting. You say that some of your friends have started to treat you differently. Have you lost friends, would you say, through this? But actually, I've also made very good and strong new friendships. That's a positive, especially when you're feeling a room at a family event, and there is, let's say,

your brother-in-law or your sister-in-law, and they have exactly a polar opposite opinion to your own, what is your duty as a decent family member in that circumstance? It's interesting you use the word duty. But I think what happens is the atmosphere is quite hostile already. So people think, well, I'll keep off this subject. It's too difficult. It's only going to cause conflict and argument. And actually, I think if one can pause and think, how do you actually engage with people who think differently?

And how do you inquire? How do you find out? Why do they think differently to you? What are the things they really care about? And you mentioned the word identity before. I think one of the reasons we don't do it because we see it as tied up with our identity. And if we loosen it in any way or we don't stand firmly, maybe we won't even know what we think. But actually, it's possible to inquire, to learn something and even manage that you don't even have to agree with the other person, but you can manage the difference. And we're not very good at this. We've got a 19 year

old, Henry. I just thought I'd call in because I am a Brexit supporter. And I recently had to go on a week's holiday, which I did enjoy with my girlfriend and her family who are all quite serious remainers. Okay, so how did things go socially? Well I just think it's really important that people don't go around burning bridges in an endless debate which you can't resolve. It just seems like a terrible way to lose some friends or relatives. I think people really need to grow up. It won't be the end of the world. I'm sure there'll be stresses and arguments which could go of of course, you can argue both ways. But why would you, you know, needlessly cause arguments and ruin friendships? Did your girlfriend's family try to change your mind or did you try to change theirs?

The discussion came up a few times, but I bit my tongue and yeah, okay, it can be a bit frustrating at times. Sometimes I wish they'd have done the same and we could have stayed clear of politics. Henry, Ellie, Amber and Gabrielle Rifkin were talking to Jane. The Testaments, Margaret Atwood's sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, was released this week and has been described by her as speculative fiction, but others of her most famous works are defined as science fiction. Sci-fi is often stereotyped as a male genre, even though one of its first practitioners was Mary Shelley.

She wrote Frankenstein and obviously was a woman. But when it comes to recognition in science fiction, male authors have received twice the number of Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke awards. But how much are things changing? Six of the Hugos in the past eight years were awarded to women. Temi O is the British author of Do You Dream of Terror 2? and Mary Robinette Carwell is the author of Calculating Stars. To what extent does prejudice hold women back from reading and enjoying science fiction? My experience going to conventions is that it is pretty evenly split on who the actual readers are. However, I think that a lot of people think of science fiction as being for children, or something that is just a very specific category of fiction. Certainly in the way it is marketed, it is marketed and targeted towards men,

even though you find that the readers themselves are not strictly men. Tell me, did anyone try to stop you from writing science fiction? I definitely came across a lot of people who would say, oh, I've never read science fiction. And I feel like, especially throughout history, there are lots of books that are famous that we now might describe as science fiction. Like 1984 is dystopian. I think that Frankenstein is like one of the first science fiction. And whenever I'd suggest this to people, they'd go, oh no, but those are good books. So no, they don't count.

Do they really say that? People have said that to me, definitely. Mary Robinette, that happens in the States as well, does it? That is a constant thing. Ursula Le Guin talks about this, that the moment something is viewed as literature, it's taken out of science fiction and shelved someplace else.

I definitely agree with that. Yeah, Melga Atwood in Bookshop, would she be in contemporary fiction? That's the thing. I feel like maybe we could use that as an example of this phenomenon, which is that she's an amazing writer and she writes really beautifully imagined worlds, but people don't describe it as science fiction. And she's sort of reticent to describe it as science fiction as well. Because she doesn't want the label. What does that tell you? I mean, yeah, I think it speaks for itself.

Mary Robinette, the lead protagonist in Calculating Stars is a woman. And that's probably one of the reasons why I'm enjoying it so much. But I know some people have said to you, oh, how do you make your books appeal to men when you've got a female protagonist? Oh, yes. I have gotten that literal question on a panel. And the answer that I give them is that I don't worry about that

because there's another half of the population that I'm interested in writing to and for. So I don't think that men are ever asked, how do you make your books appealing to women? It is something that women are asked to do all the time to cater to the male gaze. Temi, did anyone talk to you about female characters, male characters? Not in particular, but I definitely had that in mind when I was writing it because I was working in a science fiction and fantasy bookstore during my gap year and I'd read quite a lot of books about space that I really loved and I was saying to the manager this was sort of

six seven years ago do you have any books that are set in space but have like a female point of view character and now there are so many that I could list like with like Mary Robinette Cowall and Becky Chambers and Emma Newman but at the time he and his colleagues were sort of scratching their heads really unsure of any books they could think of. Isn't that depressing? I mean well it depresses me. Ursula Le Guin has been mentioned. Mary Robinette I want some some cast iron recommendations from you, please. Well, so some of the people that Temi has already mentioned, but I would also suggest Anne Leckie, Nadia Khorafor, N.K. Jemisin. And a lot of it depends on what a person wants to read,

like what draws a person to a book. So if someone is looking for something that a lot of science fiction allows an author to do is to kind of tip the natural world to its side so that you can see the interconnecting tissue. And that's something that Emma in her books does to wonderful, wonderful effect. Go on, Timmy. Yeah, I definitely agree. There are sort of some books that focus a lot on the technology and how the technology comes about. But then Emma Newman's books focus on how the technology affects what it's like to be human and the human condition and the inner lives of the characters. And they're really beautifully drawn. So women do they do it differently, we need to I'm trying to find

out exactly what women do that a male author wouldn't or couldn't. What would either of you say about that? Yeah, I remember reading Madeline? What would either of you say about that, Tim? Yeah, I remember reading Madeline Millard, and she was talking about The Song of Achilles, and she was saying that the Iliad is an epic. It sort of spans these huge battles and these big characters, and each of the characters embodies a certain character trait. And she was saying that her version of the story is lyric.

It's intimate, and it's about these two people and it's about a relationship. And I've definitely noticed science fiction going more in that direction and it could be related. I've seen a lot of female authors who that's sort of their particular interest. I wouldn't generalise. I've been reading up about you, Mary Robinette.

Your working life is genuinely mind-boggling because you are a very successful puppeteer. Yes. Is it true that you've worked on LazyTown? Yes, I did. I spent a year and a half working on LazyTown. My first novel I actually wrote in the green room at LazyTown. For me, puppetry and science fiction are very much the two sides of the same coin, that we're looking at the theater of the possible. And for both of us, we get shunted over into this little ghetto. One of the things about puppetry is that it's got this rich, thriving adult puppetry community. But if you say adult puppetry, people get this image in their head that is

a little, you know, they think I'm talking about a completely different type of puppetry. But the thing that's instructive about it is that there is a – in order to make people understand, there's a default that puppetry is for children. And so I have to put a modifier to it. And with science fiction, I find that it's much the same way that a lot of people read juveniles, juvenile science fiction, and then as adults, when they reach for science fiction, again, they reach for the stuff that they read as kids, which doesn't work for them, because they're adults. And so we often have to use modifiers, or other trappings to get people to read it, which is why I'm a little bit sympathetic to the fact that Margaret Atwood calls what she writes speculative fiction.

Mary Robinette Carwell and Temi O. And Nigel sent an email saying, I write sci-fi or speculative fiction. Two brilliant current and British women writers are Scarlett Thomas, who's written End of Mr. Why, and Justina Brooks, who wrote the Quantum Gravity series. Women writers tended to civilise the genre, for example, concentrate as much on character as on plot, and so paved the way for more nuanced and interesting work.

Love your programme, although sometimes a little distracting when I'm trying to write. And Lisa says, I cannot believe you haven't mentioned Nebula award-winning author Octavia Butler. Her work is a great way into science fiction with women at the centre, in particular African-American women. Octavia Butler is a glorious, intelligent, exciting creator of believable worlds, some of which are like ours, almost. Maybe start with her short works collection, Bloodchild, and other stories. Now, thank you for all your contributions to the programme. As you know, we love to hear from you.

Now, as division over Brexit in Parliament continues and a general election is expected soon, the Liberal Democrat Party's President, Baroness Sal Brinton, joins us from the Lib Dem Party Conference on Monday. What opportunities does the current chaos offer the party and what is their message to women? Join Jane, Monday, two minutes past ten from me for today. Enjoy the rest of the weekend. 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.