Woman's Hour - How to be assertive; Rural domestic abuse; Author Helen FitzGerald

Episode Date: September 3, 2020

In the latest of our How to guides, we discuss the art of being assertive and explore why it can be so difficult for women to stand up for themselves, assert their own needs and make themselves heard. Jenni is joined by journalist and author of the Power of Rude, Rebecca Reid, Journalist, broadcaster and author of The Shift, Sam Baker, and actor, podcaster and writer Kelechi Okafor.Recently we spoke to 16 year old Rhea in Shetland about the stories she had collected about sexual violence in her area. Last year, Judith, who moved to the Scottish Highlands from London, told reporter Kathleen Garragher about the culture of privacy and keeping yourself to yourself. When her husband became abusive she didn’t feel able to ask for help. The author Helen FitzGerald on her latest domestic noir thriller – Ash Mountain – set in a small Australian town threatened by bush fires and the impact of historic sex crimes. Helen trained as a social worker in the probation service and her novel The Cry about the disappearance of a baby following a flight to Australia was adapted for BBC TV in 2018. How much of her life has been influenced by her own childhood experiences growing up in Australia? Presenter: Jenni Murray Producer: Henrietta Harrison

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. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to the Woman's Hour podcast for Thursday the 3rd of September. Good morning. Helen Fitzgerald is best known for writing the television series The Cry. Her novel Ash Mountain is described as a domestic noir thriller set in a small Australian town threatened by bushfire. How much of her work is influenced by her experience as a child growing up in a similar community?

A culture of privacy and keeping yourself to yourself for a woman who's being abused by her husband. How difficult is it to ask for help in a remote rural area? And the serial, episode four of Annika Stranded. Now throughout the summer we've had a series of how-to guides ranging from how to change your career to how to end a relationship well and today it's how to be assertive. How do you get what you want and what you think is right for you without leaving a trail of annoyance and hurt feelings behind you? I'm joined by Sam Baker, the former editor of Cosmopolitan and Red and the author of The Shift, Kelechi Okafor, who's an actor, director and

podcaster, and the journalist Rebecca Reid, who's written The Power of Rude. Rebecca, what do you mean by The Power of Rude? So The Power of Rude is really about doing things that you might internally fear are going to be perceived as rude, even though very often they're not objectively rude, and doing it because it's what you need or what you want, and it can be as small as telling the hairdresser that actually they've taken three inches off more than you wanted. Or as big as pushing a doctor when they ignore the symptoms that you're presenting when you see them.

What happened to put this idea of rudeness into your head? So I was on a television debate on Good Morning Britain about 18 months ago. And I was on with a male comedian who was quite robust. And he wouldn't stop talking. And the question he would ask me, and he really, really wouldn't stop talking. And I sort of leant forward and I shushed him like you do to a child. Put my finger in front of my lips and I went, shh. And it was very, very briefly a sort of national news story.

One newspaper dubbed me Rebecca Rood. And I was really upset about it because I have nice manners. I always say please and thank you. I write a lovely thank you letter. But then I sort of reflected on it and I thought, well, actually, better when I stopped worrying about being perceived as rude, assumed I would be perceived as rude, and then did what felt right rather than what felt polite. Now, I know you kept a diary noting every time you did or didn't do something because you didn't want to be rude. What kind of things went into the diary? So there were small things, like I'd be in a class at the gym and somebody would stand in front of me and then I'd move and then move again. I wouldn't be able to see myself. And rather than just saying, oh, excuse me, do you mind?

I'd really like to be able to see what I'm doing. I would move eight times and then stew furiously for the rest of the day. Or, you know, I'd be on the tube and I wouldn't be sure if somebody was putting their hand on my leg because it was crowded or because they wanted to put their hand on my leg and obviously that's an incredibly uncomfortable situation but again I would rather at that point I would let somebody keep their hand on my thigh for 25 minutes rather than potentially offending them and what would you do now now I would say your hands on my thigh and I wouldn't say why I would just say it is and then they would move it and the problem would be over very very quickly. Sam how much of what Rebecca's saying is ringing bells for you? Oh I've been sitting here laughing and smiling at everything Rebecca said because literally until I

was 50 I did that I did all of those things all of the time, right down to, you know, if someone would say, what meal do you want tonight? Do you want Indian or Chinese? I would say, oh, whatever you like, instead of actually, I really want Indian. So, you know, and that was really menopause. And that's one of the reasons that I wrote The Shift, because until I went through menopause, I was a total pushover, total pushover. Why did the menopause make the difference? Oh, how long have you got? I mean, I went through menopause quite early, so about 45, 46, and it really struck me that there was very little information out there. And I wanted to talk about, you know, how bad it was, but also how good it was. So I wrote, you know, I wrote the book that would tell other women that story. What about you, Kelechi? Are you naturally assertive or have you had to learn how to do it um i've definitely had to learn how to become more assertive as someone who um you know

was a victim of um child abuse sexual abuse when i was a child i i wasn't i didn't really speak up for myself um i kind of went inwards and kind of closed myself up from the world as a way of like protecting myself but actually what i realized is you know, that silence wasn't protecting me. In fact, it just meant that everything was kind of like ruminating on the inside. And there was a lot of anger there as well. So that's the current project I'm working on in terms of a book.

And the reason I started my podcast, Say Your Mind, because there has to be a space for women, specifically black women in my instance, to express their anger, to express the anger, to express the ways in which society hasn't served them, you know, hasn't protected them. So, yeah, it took me a while. It took me maybe until I was about 21, really, to get to that point

where I thought to myself, actually, it feels so horrible to exist inside me and in that moment there was the well who is the me who is existing inside of this body that me deserves like a chance to speak up and to speak out and to live as like joyfully and as loudly as possible do you remember how you actually began to do it the first stage I think was just having that moment on the bus realising that oh this feels horrendous and then looking at what steps I could take so I got started to go to therapy which isn't something that a Nigerian girl necessarily does we don't really speak about mental health and the impact you know know, within the community generally, but that's changing a lot. So I had to take that step for myself. And the first therapist,

I thought wasn't very good, we didn't really connect. But then after that, I was blessed to have therapists who really understood me. Initially, I was doing that through the NHS, you know, so I'm thankful for that. And I started learning vocabulary, vocabulary for the ways in which I've been violated in a number of instances. And from having the vocabulary, I then found the power to speak up for myself, and to also encourage other people to speak out. So when people say to me now, oh, my God, you're so confident, you're so assertive. That was something I had to discover within myself um it it was you know there were numerous stages it's not just some kind of epiphany and it happens

and then the life is better it's an arduous task but one that I've chosen to take on because I want the world to be better for me and to be better for other women. Sam in the shift, you call oestrogen the biddable or nurturing hormone. And I wonder, are you suggesting that women are somehow genetically programmed to be biddable? Or is it their conditioning? Well, I'm not suggesting that. Science calls it the biddability hormone but I actually I believe it's conditioning I mean as a very small girl I quickly learned to take the temperature in a room you know to behave in a way that would not make the temperature drop so you know I think and I watched that happen to me all through my life. And it was all the things that Rebecca was saying were just so resonant. And now I look back at myself having having learned to get comfortable with saying uncomfortable things, small things, you know, like I'd rather have a curry or no, it's not convenient for me.

If if you change that plan. Now, I look back at myself over the years and I think, oh, my God, not only was it uncomfortable to be inside me, but it must have been so annoying to be around me. It's so much easier if you just say, please don't do that. Or I would rather do this. You know, if you think about how confusing it is for people to be around people who aren't direct. Rebecca, what do you reckon is at the root of it?

Nature or nurture, the way we're conditioned? I think it's very, very much nurture. And I think, so I was a nanny for many years, so I spent a lot of time sort of seeing how people raise their children effectively. One thing that I really noticed is how differently we treat little girls and little boys and i know that's probably not a shock to anybody um but the the difference in how often little girls are told say please say thank you sit up straight you can't get down from the table um and also how often they're told to hug or kiss

relatives whether they want to or not all of these small things whereas little boys are kind of in oh they're so energetic that letting them run around boys will be boys and I think probably we do do better with that now than we did I'm a child of the 90s I think probably now parents are less likely to do those things but it's still there there still is that sense that girls have got to put other people's comfort above their own. Kaji, what about you? What was your nurturing like in terms of not being assertive? I think that when I kind of analyse Nigerian culture, and I just think as the world as a whole, we have a system in place that, you know, supports white supremacist patriarchy in the sense that women, however, you know, they identify,

once we enter into that kind of dynamic, we're always seen as the ones to just be providing. So I'm now a mother, and being a mother, there is that myth of martyrdom as well, that I should be all sacrificing and everything, you know, my child and everybody else must come before me. that myth of martyrdom as well, that I should be all sacrificing and everything, you know, my, my child and everybody else must come before me. But you can't, you know, give, you know, you can't pour from an empty cup. So I've had to look at the way that society has told me I need to behave as a woman, as a mother, and eschew all of those narratives. And she's a narrative that

better serves me, because actually, all of those other narratives make me very, very angry. And it's actually only through the anger that I think we'll be able to change things. Especially as living in a society where black girls are hyper-sexualized from a very young age, they're adultified from a very young age. And those things don't serve us.

It doesn't actually allow us to have a childhood we have to grow up very very quickly and yeah I think that those kind of nurturing aspects of things are the things that I definitely wanted to get myself away from so I could be more whole. I know you have a son how are you going to handle this in terms of raising a son? And I think that I'm blessed, absolutely blessed to have a son because this is this is how we change the narratives. So people are so focused on girls and raising girls and giving girls and women all of this advice on how to avoid the violence that patriarchy inflicts without looking at, well, how do we raise better sons? And I think it was Michelle Obama that said, we love, you know, we raise our daughters and we love our sons. And that we need to raise both, like we need to raise our children full stop. And I think by my son seeing the example that I go out there into the world, and I get what I want,

regardless of the angry black woman narrative and I make a space I carve out a space for myself in the world that he'll know to respect that in other people not just other women but in other people and also know that he doesn't have to be fragile in his masculinity should that be the way that he wants to identify that he can go forth in the world and not have to bring other people down onto their knees for himself to feel taught. Sam, how do you reckon it is that some women seem to be effortlessly and naturally assertive? Oh, I don't know, but I'm jealous of them, honestly. I think it's got to be the way that they're brought up. And definitely

my experience when I was perimenopausal and I was working with a bunch of millennial women, so in their 20s and early 30s, and they were absolutely terrifying, but they were also a total inspiration because they wouldn't take any rubbish. They were very good at saying what they wanted, why they wanted it, and not taking no for an answer. And I really took some lessons from them. You know, they were quite amazing. Did you talk to them about it and ask them where they thought that had come from? No, I was too scared at the time.

I was terrified of them. But I really wished that I had because I kind of had to feel my way on my own. But one of the big, big light bulb moments for me was that famous Kristen Scott Thomas quote in Fleabag, where she's she's talking about going through the menopause. And she says, minus swearing, she says, it's awful. And then it's liberating because you're no longer a machine with parts whose function is to have children. You are just a person and you can be who you are in the world. And that, you know, that was a real lightbulb moment for me. Kelly Cheek, I know, I mean, you've referred to somehow the stereotypes that attach to you because not only are you a woman, you're a black woman.

But all women do seem to be called aggressive, pushy, shrill, you know, all those negative stereotypes that we all hear. How much worse do you reckon that is for a black woman? To quantify it would be an interesting thing, Jenny. I don't think it's something that we can really quantify, but what we can do is look at the way that it plays out in society. We see that black women are five times more likely to die during childbirth and soon after in comparison to white women. This is, you know, stats that we've received from the embrace report and it hasn't changed over the years so we have to look at why is it then that these things are happening and it um part of it is the way that society views black women as unfeeling as angry as aggressive even in even if they are in so many situations being as polite as possible a lot of the innovations that we have in the medical field, specifically when we look at the speculum,

that was created, that was innovated by being tested on enslaved black women. So the system has always kind of seen black women's bodies as sites of colonization or as, you know, sites of objectification and vilification. So they're not afforded. Black women aren't afforded the space to be tender, to be joyful, to be peaceful, to feel love or to have it reflected back to them. So we know that a lot of times, even in the most simple circumstances, black women are told, oh, you know, you're coming across as aggressive or you're attacking me. And these are things that won't change until society's view of blackness actually changes. So while that's happening,

I think that what black women do need to do is reclaim their reasons for being angry. It's okay to be angry. It's okay to be rude. If people are going to call you that anyway, you might as well lean into it and go after the things that you want for your life. Sam, how useful would you say anger is if you want to be assertive? I think women are not encouraged to be angry from a very young age.

Anger is frowned on in small children, in small girls, not so much in small boys. And as you grow older, you see, you know, angry men are powerful. Angry women are hysterical. So I think learning to channel, you know, to harness your anger is really, really important. It's not something that becomes natural to most women. What about you, Rebecca? I mean, how do you balance your rudeness, your anger, which it must have at its root often? How do you balance that with not really upsetting people, really hurting people, and in a way, damaging yourself rather than making things better for

yourself? I actually think that's a lot easier since I started being rude, because before, people and in a way damaging yourself rather than making things better for yourself. I actually think that's a lot easier since I started being rude because before there would come a snapping point a week, a month, however long in where I would suddenly go, actually, do you know what? This is what I want for dinner. And I can't believe you're so selfish to my husband rather than having said six weeks previously, do you know what? Actually, I really would rather we have pasta. And I think it's what you find is that you build up this pressure cooker of anger. And if you don't let it out every time somebody treads on your toe or pushes in front of you, those small moments where you just say, oh, excuse me, those let you have less anger inside you.

But if you let that anger cook up and cook up and cook up it will eventually explode and then it's not controlled whereas now I make an official decision in my head am I going to let that go or not and that way it doesn't boil over and I have much much more control over my anger than I ever did before. Now Sam in your book, you write, after a five-decade gestation, I've given birth to a darling little bundle of self-esteem. What exactly do you mean by that? Well, I wish that I had been the person to say that, but I actually stole that quote from a comedian called Callie Beaton because I identified with it so much.

And for the shift, I interviewed 50 women, because, you know, women's experience of menopause is, there are as many different experiences as there are women. And every single one of them who had passed through menopause said they felt much more comfortable in themselves, more confident and more in and of themselves. And I think this is all, it's all tied up with being, you know, more comfortable with your own anger, more, less people pleasing,

more able just to say no. You know, and it's, that's what I mean, really. It's an ability, if menopause gifted me anything, it was an ability to look inside myself establish what i wanted and to put myself first let's have from each of you a role model a real example of a truly assertive woman you admire rebecca taylor swift uh she's good at publicly going head to head both with people she has personal issues with, but also corporations. And she has never let being one person stand in the way of getting what she wants. Kelechi. how you know um annalise keating and how to get away with murder showing black women in a different

um role in a different light on primetime tv having these amazing you know opportunities and whenever she does win an award wherever she does have a platform she always uses it to speak about the inclusivity and diversity that we need to see in society. And I really love that. And Sam, who's yours? Bernadine Evaristo. She has, she is so in and of herself. She's an absolute inspiration. And I really admire the way she has just stuck to her guns her entire career. And now here she is, she's 60

and she is just a massive icon for so many different women. Sam Baker, Kereche Okafor and Rebecca Reid, thank you all very much indeed. And we would like to hear from you on this question. How have you managed to make yourself more assertive? You can send us an email or, of course, you can send us a tweet. And thanks to all three of you. Still to come in today's programme,

Ash Mountain, a novel by Helen Fitzgerald set in a small Australian town threatened by bushfires and the impact of historic sex crimes. How much is it based on her own life as she grew up in Australia? And the serial, the fourth episode of Annika's Stranded. Now, a couple of weeks ago, we heard from a 16-year-old girl, Ria, who lives in Shetland. She'd become concerned about the difficulties in such a close-knit community of finding help if you've suffered sexual violence.

She asked people to report their experiences anonymously to her, and she quickly had more than 60 replies. Similar concerns were expressed by Judith, who was a headteacher in a London school before deciding to retire to a Highland village. She moved in order to be able to afford a bigger house to look after her elderly mother. She told Kathleen Carrahert that her husband came too. Sorry about that, I was expecting you round the back way. Hello, Judith. I'm Kathleen, nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you, come on through. I've got some coffee through there. So how long have you lived here for then? 14 years. We moved in with my husband and my mother. I was 82 when she came to live with us. Now it's just me. My name is Judith.

I was involved in an abusive marriage for over 30 years. What happened when you moved here? I would say things became worse. When we lived in London, we had a car, but he didn't need to drive it. He could walk to the pub or, you know, jump on a bus or two. But here he had to drive places and within weeks he was banned from driving. And that happened twice. The second time he was banned permanently from driving. He felt more closed in as well, so the drinking took place in the home much more. It was different also because I had had a very demanding job,

and I would be out at 7 o'clock in the morning and home maybe 10 o'clock at night, and now we were here every day so things really took a turn for the worse. Can you describe for me what was a typical day like here then? In the morning times because I was caring for my mother I would we would have breakfast together my husband was never up early and there was always that tension waiting for him to get up because the first hour you just couldn't speak to him. I mean, he would, well, he'd be very hungover and just incredibly nasty. And then I would watch him and he would go to the garage

where he used to keep all his booze. He'd have the first drink of the day and then for about an hour or so he would become pleasant and charming and but as the day got on his mood would change so there was this constant walking on eggshells, waiting for him to explode. And there'd be at some point that you'd have a kind of Jekyll and Hyde moment when he'd be quite pleasant and you'd be having a conversation. He'd go to the garage, come out, and he would be raging about something. And then as he continued to drink drink he would get more and more unreasonable and the threats would get more and more strong and frightening. Was he violent? He was he never

hit me I mean he would pin me up against the wall. He never slapped me or anything like that. But it was the constant threat of violence, especially when we were here. He had a fascination with fire. And he would build up the fire. We have a big two-sided fireplace. And his threat was always, I will burn this house down with you and your mother in it. And it was so real, because I would see him when he was really drunk, he would even put petrol and things on the fire and that whole place. So I couldn't really sleep, because I was always checking that, you know, the fire was OK. Your mind plays tricks on you because you don't think like a normal person.

You just think about survival. How can I get through today without making him angry? Some people would find it hard to believe that you were a headteacher, you had a very responsible job, and yet this was your home life. Why did you put up with it? Yeah, well, that's a question I've asked myself many, many times. And there's no one answer. The Highlands are very similar to where I was brought up.

I was brought up in a Welsh mining community. There's a sense of, well, you know, you've made your bed, you lie in it. I suppose you always hope that things will change. And people who control and manipulate have an ability just every so often to just throw a crumb of something nice. And you would think, oh, this is okay. This is okay. But it's really just to keep you on that string, really. Was there no one here that you felt you could turn to? Absolutely no one. First of all I didn't know where you would go to for help. The whole issue for me was how do you deal with the

shame? I think that's very hard for professional people because you feel well I'm so successful in this area why am I failing in my marriage and that's how I felt I'm failing it was always my fault what have I done wrong never it was his fault so tell me what happened I volunteered one day a week at the high school my mum was quite poorly by that stage and she had a care package put in. So she had a social worker, and they arranged for somebody to come in and make a lunch on a Wednesday so that I could have a day at the school. And I came home that day, and this room was quiet, and I kind of knew something was wrong.

And I rushed in and found my mother being pinned up against the wall and my husband screaming at her and telling her she ought to die and you know that nobody wanted her and she was distraught and he was a tall, quite big guy and she was a tiny tiny little woman and it was horrific I don't know why this happened at that moment but at that moment mum's social worker let herself in and walked in and saw everything and she sort of took control my husband just went off into another room. She didn't deal with him at all. But she spoke to both of us and said to me, you have to get out of this situation.

And I said, I can't because I'm looking after my mother. I mean, some people don't leave an abusive situation because they've got children. When my mum was like a child, she had to be, you know, she was in a wheelchair and all that kind of thing if we went out. So I couldn't just get up and leave. And so she spoke to my mother and said, well, unless you go into care, Judith's never going to be able to leave him. So my mum did go into care. She went into care back in Wales.

So tell me then what did happen with your husband. Did you go to court? It actually went to court twice. The first time it went to court, unfortunately, my solicitor was on holiday, and so somebody else in the firm had to pick it up. He rang me and said, I'm sorry, they've not granted the exclusion order or the restraining order. And he said, and I quote, the sheriff had said concerning the death threats, oh, well, that's just what drunk people say. And I think of all the hurt and all the trauma I've been through,

that was perhaps one of the worst things, that people would not believe me and that they would say, it's OK, it's acceptable. And I wondered if that's a Highland thing. I don't think that a sheriff would get away with that somewhere else. But there is a culture of drinking and lots of drunkenness. Anyway, very soon after that, my solicitor came back from holiday, resubmitted, and I got the exclusion order.

How easy was it then to rebuild your life here? came back from holiday, resubmitted, and I got the exclusion order. How easy was it then to rebuild your life here? Not easy at all. The first 10 months, I had to move out of the house because all the locks had been changed and the windows had been nailed down, but he broke windows and was squatting in the house so I couldn't come back to the house um then he was re-arrested and the windows boarded up but I was too frightened to stay in the area and that's the difference again if you live in a small community, the chances of you meeting your abuser are very high. So I was just petrified. I wouldn't walk down the main street of Fort William.

He saw me once in a shop and came on and made a big scene and I had to just put my food down and run out. After about 10 months towards a year, it seemed that he wasn't breaking the order, he wasn't coming up to the house or anything. So I decided to move back in. And I got involved or approached by an organisation called Lochaber Hope. I had some counselling. So it's been a slow process. A little while ago, my husband actually died. So there is freedom from that. And what did your neighbours,

when all of this was happening or going on, did they say or talk to you about anything? No, they didn't. But I have to say, when I came back into the house, the one neighbor came to see me and she just said, I'm just so sorry. We really communities, you know, like the Highlands, is that people respect privacy and they think, you know, we have to mind our own business. And also out of fear, I think, you know, what are you going to do if you get involved and he turns violent on you and so on? I hope that people out there will just want to step in

when they see something that's just not right and just say, you know, you're worth more than this. Judith was talking to Kathleen Carraher, and there are links to support groups on the Women's Hour website, including Scotland's Domestic Abuse Helpline, Ref refuge and women's aid. Helen Fitzgerald's novel Ash Mountain, described as a domestic noir thriller, is set in a rather similarly tightly knit small town where secrets are kept within the family, but this time it's in Australia. There's a history of bullying and sex crimes and the town is under threat of the kind of terrible bushfires we saw earlier this year. Helen is so far best known for her television series The Cry in which her baby disappeared after a flight to Australia. She now lives in Scotland but was raised in Australia in a small town not unlike Ash Mountain to which Fran has returned to care for her father as the fire

begins to make itself felt. Dear God, dear God, dear God. Someone was praying, which meant someone was alive. Not Fran. She never prayed, did she? Dear God, forgive me. It was Fran. She lifted the beanie from her head, coughed and covered herself with it again. Holding the blanket over her head, she ascended the stairs on her hands and knees, making one blind plea per step, Dear God, please God, till she reached the top. She wrapped a sleeve round her gloved hand to push the hatch door open and crawled out onto the edge of the smoking lookout. This was the highest point in the shire. If Fran took the beanie off, she'd see all the way from the Ryans to the Gallaghers. She'd know everything. Fran did the sign of the cross and said a prayer. Forgive me, Lord, for all the times that I have wished this town burned down.

Helen, how familiar are you with bushfires from the time you lived in Australia? Hi there, I'm quite familiar. I mean, I remember it was never as bad when I grew up as it is now, but I grew up in bushfire territory. It's only about an hour north of Melbourne, but it's where the sort of great dividing range starts and it becomes very bushy and very, very dry in the summer and it's farming territory. So great dividing range starts and it becomes very bushy and very very dry in the summer and it's farming territory so all around me were a lot of farms and there was always a thread of bushfires and we did have a few sort of smaller ones when I was little but nothing like the fires that we've seen recently in Australia. Now Ash Mountain as you describe it, has a population of just over 800, a big Catholic boarding school and a church and terrible secrets about child abuse.

How much is it based on the town where you grew up? Well, all of the things you just said are absolutely true of the town I grew up. I was there from the age of three to 16 and I uh left in around 1989 something like that might have my dates wrong but I was there from the age of three to 16 and there was always a it was a town of about when I left was about a thousand people it was a farming community um as I said it wasn't very far from Melbourne but it was very rural with a lot of farms around it. Now Fran is absolutely desperate to get away from the town but obviously has had to go back for her father. How much is she based on you? Well I was desperate to leave the town. I got out of there as soon as I was 16 really so

she's a very different character from me. I deliberately made her not as nutty as me. I think she's very sensible and practical. And when I thought about Fran, I thought about my sister and my sister-in-law, both of whom are just very calm, practical, get-on-with-it people. And I think Fran's like that. But otherwise, you know, I had very similar experiences to some of the ones that I gave her in the book. Growing up in a town with a college that was called Assumption College, and it was a real, it was a boys' boarding school, so boys from all over Victoria came there,

and it was largely a footballer's school too, so it had just such a macho culture about it, and it didn't take any girls in. So we had this little town of, you know, 800 or so with, I don't know how many boys, but maybe coming on 1,000, who swarmed the town after school finished. And they were really, really scary. And when I started writing this book, I really hated them. And I, you know, intended that, you know, I would have my revenge in the book a bit. But as I wrote it, I realised, and I was looking up about Kilmore,

and realised that there were a lot of secrets in the town, things that we didn't talk about, things that people I think who were victims felt had only happened to them. And, you know, you realise what an unhappy and unhealthy environment it was for girls, for young girls who I think were, you know, at risk of the, you know, there were a lot of predators in the town. I remember a lot of predators and looking in the public domain now, I know it's true, you know, there were a lot of predators in the town. I remember a lot of predators. And looking in the public domain now, I know it's true. You know, I wasn't just imagining it.

Now, some of the nastiest characters are the boy boarders at the school, but lots of her male friends are also abused. I mean, how easy was it for you to see the young boys and men around you as victims and as abusers? Well, I didn't really interestingly ask that because I just didn't think of that until I wrote this book. I just hated them so much. They made our lives hell that I didn't even really consider it. And it was only when I started looking up the Internet, OK, what did happen in Kilmore when I was there? And you realize that, you know,

boys were abused, quite a few of them, and, you know, and their behaviour towards women and the way that they were taught at the school to behave to each other and towards women was just incredibly sad. So it sort of changed my view on the borders a little bit. I still hate them. They were awful to us. But they definitely, you know, they were victims before us almost.

It was like a cycle of abuse. I think in the book, Fran calls the town a serially abused serial abuser. Why did you go on to train as a social worker, eventually working with the probation service and sex offenders in prison? Well, I think when I went for my social work interview, essentially, working with the probation service and sex offenders in prison? Well, I think when I went for my social work interview, I was always interested in crime and why people do bad things. And when I went for my social work interview, I told them actually about Kilmore and the fact that, you know, I knew I'd had a couple of one-off incidents with predatorial, you know, guys who were very opportunistic,

male adults. And so I remember telling them that and saying that I thought at the time that the hush-hushedness that came afterwards, I didn't say anything, no one ever talked about it, I thought I was just me when obviously it was just so many people in the town, became, yeah, so, yeah, that's why I think I said to them, that's why I wanted to do social work because I thought, what are we doing at the other end of this?

You know, what's being done about this? Why are these guys behaving this way? What are the issues and what can we actually do? That was always my interest based on personal experience from the town. Now, you call your work domestic noir thrillers but why are you drawn to these harrowing themes dying in a bushfire i mean the death you describe in there is just horrible uh the disappearance of a baby yeah i don't know sometimes people ask me that all the time and i think maybe it's just because I'm a little depressive, you know, and actually I always do go to dark places in my mind.

I didn't know I was going to write that way until I started writing and when you suddenly put a crime in a story, it really ramps it up and it's quite energetic to write. So there's that element of it. But I'm always writing about my fears and I think most writers are and so those things, you know know they might come out as very very dark but the fear and the cry really is of okay you know what if I did some something to harm my child you know so I'm always always exploring that and feels like a safe thing to do on paper

and that maybe it helps me in real life avoid those there's also a lot of humour in the book. I mean, the lovesick ostriches are hilarious. Why is humour important to you within the horror? Because just in maybe in Australia and in Glasgow, it just is there, you know, in worst case scenario, which I've set in a social work environment in Glasgow, people are just funny. And okay, a lot of things happen and behaviour happens and events happen, but that doesn't stop real life. And in real life, you know, no matter what you're talking about, people can still be funny. And where I came from in Australia, actually pretty similar dark sense of humour

to, you know, where I've been working in Glasgow. And maybe that's because of hardships that you're dealing with that you have to sort of cope that way. But I can't explain it any other way, just that these characters are funny and not the behaviour, not the events, but the characters. I was talking to Helen Fitzgerald, the author of Ash Mountain. Lots of you responded to this week's How To discussion on assertiveness. Linda said on Twitter, I'm a 58-year-old working-class woman and have always been pretty assertive. I put it down to having parents who always encouraged healthy debate. Don't be a sheep was one of my dad's favourite pieces of advice and I have taken much notice. Someone who didn't want to be named emailed,

even though my dad took the role of lead in the family and it was quite a traditionally gendered household, I was always encouraged to speak up and speak my mind. I've never felt I couldn't share my feelings with a man or someone else. I think this has caused more issues for relationships because I will not just do what the man wants and challenge men on the word compromise, which is sometimes packaged as do things my way. Maybe this is the negative of being an outspoken woman. Society doesn't know what to do with you. I'm also black and very familiar with the angry black woman stereotype, especially in

the workplace. Dr. Jack Dish Barn tweeted, I so relate to assertive women being seen as aggressive or highly strung, where in men talking over others, relentlessly pushing their opinions, speaking out is seen as strength. The way we nurture our girls needs to change for narratives to change. Sabina Ahmed said, So many of us, especially those of us born and brought up in a society where women are deemed obliging creatures, can identify with this. Though I was nurtured that way, Melanie Hick tweeted, Absolutely shocking when I first arrived here from Australia. Still do. I've never felt afraid of speaking up and I wonder if it's in part cultural. Louise Lepick said,

This chat is making me realise I've been rude for at least 20 years. It never occurred to me I was doing anything other than asserting my right to occupy space under my own terms. No apologies for perceived rudeness from me. It's worked a charm. And Chris, who makes clear he's a male Chris, said, After listening to this discussion on rudeness and assertiveness, I think again about how much better it would be

if boys were raised to be kind and accommodating and so on, rather than for girls to be encouraged to be loud. If we follow the model implied by the participants in your discussion, we will simply increase the number of egocentrists and, frankly, awful people in the world. And there are already more than enough of those. And in response to the conversation about rural domestic abuse and Judith's story, Jane had this experience to share. My situation is exactly the same as the lady speaking. I was a teacher with two children and a redundant professional partner who became alcoholic, except in London.

Pride plays such a large part and it becomes compounded by secrecy, as I felt a failure, as Judith did. My partner and I eventually separated and he drank himself literally to death. Fortunately, times have moved on. I'm retired, my sons are grown and can speak openly about the abuse. I stupidly thought that the boys and I could stop him drinking but thank you for continuing airing items on alcohol and abuse with the impact on families. Well thank you for all your responses to this morning's programme. Tomorrow, Jane will be talking to Hilary Swank. She twice won an Oscar for Boys Don't Cry and Million Dollar Baby. And she'll be talking about a new role where she's playing an astronaut.

That's tomorrow, two minutes past ten. Do join Jane. Bye-bye. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. A new podcast drama series on BBC Sounds. Bye-bye. When I first saw the hotel, when it dived out the water, so big, so strange, I couldn't help looking at its reflection. And when I did that, it was so weird. I think I saw, I mean, I know I didn't, like an optical illusion in the water, in the reflection I saw someone standing there waiting for us to arrive

No Place But The Water a new drama podcast series from BBC Radio 4 set in a future flooded world when there is no place but the water where do you go? Subscribe to No Place But The Water on BBC Sounds. 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.