Woman's Hour - Laura Bates on extreme misogyny groups online. Getting into debt. Young women and rheumatoid arthritis

Episode Date: September 10, 2020

Laura Bates is founder of the Everyday Sexism Project. In her latest book – Men Who Hate Women - she traces the roots of extreme misogyny across a complex network of online groups - extending from Men's Rights Activists and Pick up Artists to Men Going their Own Way, Trolls and the Incel movement. She explains how they operate and how she hopes drawing parallels with other extremist movements around the world will help us to understand what makes them attractive to men and boys.. Women – and specifically young women – have always been hugely over-represented when it comes to debt. Since the pandemic, charities are hearing from more and more who find themselves in financial difficulty. Anna who’s now 22 shares how she's managed to clear considerable debt. Sue Anderson from debt charity Step Change talks bout the trends they’re seeing when it comes to women and money. Plus financial campaigner Alice Tapper on why she thinks the increasing use of ‘buy-now-pay-later’ methods need much more scrutiny,. This week is Rheumatoid Arthritis Awareness Week. It's a disease that affects three times more women than men under the age of 65. Women tend to develop it younger than men, with symptoms typically appearing between the ages of 30 and 50 – some can even start to develop it in their teens. So what’s it like to be a young woman living with the condition? Yulanda Sabrina is a singer and was diagnosed five years ago at the age of 28. She speaks to Jenni along with Clare Jacklin, Chief Executive of the National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society.Presenter Jenni Murray Producer Beverley Purcell

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 10th of September. Good morning. In today's programme, a new book by the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, Laura Bates. It's called Men Who Hate Women. What has she learned by spending 18 months pretending to be a young man called Alex, trawling through what's known as the manosphere online? In Rheumatoid Arthritis Awareness Week, the young women who suffer from an invisible but debilitating disability, which is often not recognised.

And the serial, the fourth episode, of prostrate. Now, advice about spending money used to be pretty uncompromising. From my parents and grandparents came neither borrower nor lender be, and if you can't afford it, don't buy it. Well, there seems to have been a significant change in that philosophy. Buy now and pay later which is kind of what a credit card offers you has now become an increasingly common way for the young to get what they want when they want it online. A number of companies offer the chance to defer payment, receive the goods and then complete the purchase in stages. And debt,

particularly among young women, is rising just as the UK goes into recession and job security can no longer be guaranteed. Well, I'm joined by Anna, who's now 22 and has managed to clear considerable debt. Alice Tapper, who's a financial campaigner and author of Go Fund Yourself and Sue Anderson from the UK debt charity Step Change. Sue, how big a problem would you say debt is for women? So there are lots of characteristics that make you more vulnerable to debt and unfortunately being female appears to be one of them. And I think there are lots of reasons for that. Most typically, it's often to do with being a parent.

We know that the costs of children are very high. We see people like single parents overrepresented among our clients, and most of them are women. That can be associated with juggling the kind of employment that works around children and that can often be insecure employment. So there are lots of reasons for this and sort of picking up on your earlier point, buy now pay later, wanting to have things and have them now may be a feature of debt but there are also a lot of women out there who are really up against it on the basics and people are sometimes borrowing, often borrowing to meet the bare essentials of life.

So lots of factors affecting us at the moment. What would you say, Sue, has been the impact of the pandemic on women's debt? It's absolutely worsened it. There's no question about that. Because the characteristics we're talking about there, perhaps working in insecure employment, perhaps working in ways that work around childcare, are often the sectors that have been most vulnerable to seeing people laid off or hours reduced. So clearly what we're seeing there is a disproportionate impact on people who were already perhaps at the lower end of the income spectrum sometimes as well,

which again feeds this idea that what then happens is people borrow or find ways of postponing payment to buy the essentials that they need, even things like school uniform. Alice, why are you particularly concerned about buy now, pay later, when as Sue says, some women are struggling so hard to even buy school things for their children? Sure so the regulate buy now pay later campaign acknowledges that there are a variety of credit and financial products out there but we're focusing on buy now pay later because there's a gap in regulation which means that consumers aren't being sufficiently protected, unlike products such as credit cards. And how that translates into reality is that we're seeing very pink and fluffy advertising, celeb sponsors, the use of influencers, which are really normalising

debt in young people. And then there isn't really any counterbalance. There's no information about the risks of using these products at checkout or in ads, which you would expect with other financial products. And then retailers are also incentivising the use of these products, offering hefty discounts. So I'm interested in this group of young women in particular who ultimately aren't being sufficiently protected by regulation. But you see, Klarma, the best known of these companies, say

they don't target young women at all. The average age is 33. Yeah, well, when we look at the products as a whole, firstly, we're seeing arguably very gendered advertising. And whilst the, you know, overall 33 might be the average age of the customer I still think that makes it's very important that we look at who they are targeting on social media which when you look at how they're working with influencers and this overly pink very instagrammable aesthetic and also combine that with the heavy promotion of buy now pay later from retailers who have young customer bases so Pretty Little Thing, Nasty Gal for example last week were promoting Clear Pay Day which is Clear Pay being one of the largest Buy Now Pay Later providers in the UK offering really hefty discounts but only if you

pay later and this you know these target customer bases are 18 to 24-year-olds on average. So how in principle would you say this way of paying for goods is really different from using a credit card? So I think it's different because, as Alice has pointed out, it's not regulated in the same way, which means the way that you are presented with the information won't necessarily be the same. The other major driver that's massively different is that this is presented to you right at the point when you've put those goods in your online basket, and it's then sort of effectively sort of dangled at you as an option. So it's very much in the moment of when you are actually concentrating on the stuff rather than on the payment mechanism, I think. Whereas a credit card, it's something you have in your back pocket.

At some point in the past, you have applied for that, you've thought about it. Now, you may still end up using it in a way that is for emergencies or perhaps spending more on it than you meant to. But I think the approach, the psychology is different in the way that Alice has highlighted. Now we've obviously spoken to Clarma and to Clearpay and what Clearpay said was our business model is the reverse of traditional credit in that it has inbuilt customer protections and is

designed to charge the retailer not the customer which allows us to offer a free service to customers who pay on time. So you don't have to worry about interest, do you, Alice? Yeah, so whilst there might not be any interest, as we see with traditional credit products like credit cards, I think it's important to note that there are other costs to using these services. Some charge late payment fees, for example. And what Klarna aren't mentioning, although if you dig into their terms and conditions, you will see that there is the use of debt collection and debt collectors. And so you contrast. I've now received over 250 case studies, majority from women who have been negatively impacted by Buy Now Pay Later. They're getting into serious financial difficulty. They're being pursued by debt collectors, perhaps,

you know, incorrectly prioritising Buy Now Pay Later debt over another debt, which has a serious knock on effect to their financial future. And then you contrast that with this overly positive glamorisation of finance. And, you know, something's just not right here. Anna, how did you get into debt? So I had taken credit cards out when I was 18. So that was obviously four years ago now. And I basically took them out.

I don't think we really learned enough about credit cards and just debt in general when we were in school. I really had no idea. And I basically took out a credit card thinking, you know, I'll buy something, pay it back and fill the same month. I'll build up my credit score. So I had good intentions, but it didn't really work out as planned. And it basically felt to me as if it was free money which I know sounds silly now but at the time I was an impressionable 18 year old and I was just thinking you know I can buy whatever I want I'll pay it back whenever and I wasn't really fully aware of you know charges and the impact that debt can can obviously have um so I started off with credit cards and then I'd basically maxed those out and then you know when I was kind of 20 so about two years ago is when um kind of buy now pay later schemes

um became more accessible and they were on kind of more and more websites so I had maxed out my credit cards and instead of at that point being like okay I shouldn't use these anymore I should pay these back and just pay what I can actually afford with my own money I started using binary pay later instead so that one was a bit more kind of complex for me even because at least with a credit card I had in my head okay I'm only really going to use this you know if I really feel like I need this if it's going to make me feel better or whatever because I knew I still knew that there was charges even though I didn't know how much whereas with buy now pay later as you mentioned there's not really any charges if you pay on time so I was thinking you know this is totally fine I'm still going to be paying this with my own money

um just maybe at a later date but then that just incentivized me to buy more so you know at least half of the things that I've bought I wouldn't have bought if buy now pay later schemes weren't available. But where did the responsibility lie then Anna with with you wanting to buy now or the buy now pay later companies and the ease of getting credit? It definitely was my own issue you know it's not to kind of you know shift layman anything like that obviously I hadn't really realised that it was a problem until recently um so that was obviously a personal issue but with the buy now pay later scheme schemes I do think that we should be making it a bit more you know obvious as Alice mentioned as well they're kind of um you know most popular um age range usually would be 18 to 24 years old at least on social media you know all the adverts and things like that and as she said as well it's

kind of gendered it's you know fits in with like your instagram aesthetic so it looks like those adverts are meant to be on your timeline and they fit in with what's already on your instagram your twitter things like that um so it's not so much that you know they should be um kind of banned and anything like that obviously it is a good service if you can exert self-control and you know how to use them properly but i do think that they should also be making it a bit more um you know kind of obvious and what the actual consequences can be because you see you see anna clarnett said to us that they do invest in financial literacy offer a clear repayment schedule and of course as we've said don't charge interest how much financial literacy did you have so with um you know understanding kind

of financial jargon and things like that again it's not even now to be totally honest it's not something i'm 110 clued up on and totally knowledgeable of. But I do think that, you know, it's not so much that they were, you know, misleading per se, because it does say this can affect your credit score. But I would personally, as somebody that has built up debt and has spent, you know, so much more money than I would have, you know, if I didn't use my NIP later, I personally would have preferred if it was a bit more obvious

what the consequences can be, because although they say at the bottom of their adverts or you know their posters and things like that you know this can affect your credit score it doesn't really tell you the true extent of it luckily I've not really missed any payments or anything to have like a long-term you know kind of financial detriment using buying IP later but not everybody has been in you know such a fortunate position. A lot of people, as you mentioned, have built up more debt and I don't think it's obvious enough, especially to a younger audience,

that you can actually build up a debt with that. How have you got yourself out of debt, Anna? So with my credit cards, I basically just at the start of lockdown, obviously we can't go out and things like that so I just kind of had a bit more spare money than I normally would and I was just like, do you know what, I'm not kind of, I can't go out and things like that so I just kind of had a bit more spare money than I normally would and I was just like you know what I'm not kind of I can't keep going on and just kind of paying the minimum amount and paying so much interest because I did that for you know

basically four years I was just paying off the minimum amount so I wasn't really making any dent in the balance that I had outstanding and it was making me quite anxious and I was just trying to kind of not think about it and obviously the longer I do that the worse it's going to get it's going to affect my credit score um so at the start of lockdown about March time I just kind of had to bite the bullet sit down have a look at you know what was actually outstanding and you know for so long I did put it off but see when I actually sat down and worked out like some sort of kind of budget or a plan it was so much easier than I thought it would be and I'd been putting it off for so long so I wish I'd done it earlier on but um to actually pay it off I just

kind of worked out um you know what I could be affording to pay every month um luckily I was in quite a good position because I have been working ever since lockdown I'm a key worker so I've not had to take any kind of hits my wages or anything like that um and I've been doing as much overtime as I can as well I've been working like 50 hour weeks for like two months um because i just had it in my head i want this paid off and then i won't feel so guilty if i go out and you know spend money on myself or something like that well well done for clearing it and that is really hard work it must have been but i have to say alice both the companies that we've mentioned clear pay and karma say that your credit score will not be affected by using these companies

yeah so so to speak broadly about the whole industry um there are a number of different buy now pay later um providers out there um with different kind of risks and and you know costs to to using their products so but can I just touch actually on what Anna said around personal responsibility because because I agree I think you know consumers should be encouraged to take personal responsibility and that's a great thing but I think the issue here is that in order to take personal responsibility we need to be giving consumers particularly young consumers who perhaps haven't got those levels of financial literacy, and give them the right information that they need to make good financial decisions at the point of purchase. And that includes risks, whether that's credit score

damage, debt collection, you know, whatever those risks are. And Sue, finally, generally, you know, if people are facing mounting debt in whatever way it's been accumulated, what do you advise them to do? Well, it probably won't surprise you if I say, you know, get help from a reputable debt advice organisation like StepChange or one of the other charities who are out there to do exactly this. What Anna was talking about there, about letting debt carry on for a long time, sitting there worrying about it, it's niggling away at you, that's a really typical experience we see when clients come to us.

They've often tried to juggle this stuff for years. So I think our top bit of advice would be whether you're at an early stage of debt or you're really sunk in the mire and feeling you can't easily get out of it, there is help out there. Please use it. That's exactly what it's there for. Sue Anderson, Alice Tapper and Anna, thank you all very much indeed. And there are, of course, details of organisations that can help with debt on the Women's Hour website. And if this has happened to you, we would really like

to hear from you. You can send us an email or you can send us a tweet. How did you get into debt? And if you've managed to get out of it like Anna has, then let us know how you did that too. Thank you all very much. Now still to come in today's programme in Rheumatoid Arthritis Awareness Week, the young women who have to deal with a painful disability which is often not recognised and stigmatised because it's invisible. And the serial, the fourth episode of Prostrate. Now eight years ago, Laura Bates set up the Everyday Sexism Project where anyone who'd suffered unwanted attention or abuse could post the data details online it became a huge phenomenon she's now spent 18 months posing as a young man called alex to

investigate what's known as the manosphere tracing the roots of misogyny across a complex network of online groups the result of her research is a book called Men Who Hate Women, From Incels to Pick-Up Artists, The Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All. Laura, what prompted you to start this long and complicated investigation? Well, as a feminist and somebody who speaks out online, I'd been aware of these groups for some time. There's a great deal of crossover between members of these groups and the men who, you know, send regular death threats and rape threats, as almost any woman in the public eye will know.

But there isn't a great deal of awareness of them more widely. And there was an argument that you shouldn't really give them the oxygen of publicity, which I was very sympathetic to. What changed for me was a couple of years ago, in my frequent visits to schools, I spend a lot of time working with young people in schools across the country, perhaps two schools a week on average before lockdown, I suddenly noticed that something really quite chilling was shifting in the teenage boys I was working with. Of course, there'd always been awkward conversations and difficult moments and, you know, embarrassment to get through in those conversations. But suddenly boys were arriving with very, very firm and clear ideas about things that simply weren't true.

And really, the only word I can use for it is radicalization. These boys had been groomed online, and they were so confident that all women hate men. They were so confident that our world is a feminist gynocracy, that there's a government conspiracy against white men who are the true victims of society, that false rape allegations are so rife, that they're at enormous risk, that men everywhere are losing their jobs and being stealthily replaced by evil women who've made up false claims of sexual harassment. And these stories really went on and on. And suddenly I started to realize that these boys in schools from rural Scotland to inner city London were repeating the same quotes verbatim, word for word, and even using the same completely false statistics. Let's deal, Laura, with some of the terminology. What is the manosphere? So the manosphere is a sort of complex web of thousands of websites, forums, blogs,

videos, groups, organisations and campaigns. It's not just confined to the internet, but it does have a large presence there. And what I'd realised was that it is starting to have a massive offline impact on boys as well. That grooming, that sense of radicalisation was what made me decide it was time to investigate this and to write the book, that we couldn't ignore these groups any longer. Now, incels is one group. Who are they? That's right. So incels are perhaps the most violent and extreme of these groups. Incel stands for involuntary celibate. And these are men who believe that they want to be having sex.

They're not. And as a result, instead of investigating their own extreme misogyny as a potential cause for their lack of romantic success, they blame women. But they take this to an extreme. They believe that evil women are denying them the sex that is their birthright as a man. And as a result, that women ought to be raped, kept as sexual slaves, stripped of even being considered people, or that they should go on what they describe as an uprising or a day of retribution where they carry out mass killings of as many women and sexually attractive men as they can. Pickup artists is another group. Who are they?

So the international pickup industry is valued at $100 million. When we talk about pickup artists, we tend to portray them in popular culture as the lovable rogue, you know, the sort of slightly hapless guy with a chat up line in a bar, somebody like Barney Stinson in How I Met Your Mother. But when you look at the reality of this industry, you're actually talking about gurus charging thousands of pounds to train men in cities around the world, essentially to sexually harass or even assault women. The men training them are men who have in many cases committed, boasted about committing sexual assault themselves, posted videos online of themselves sexually assaulting women, argued for rape to be legalized. And a great amount of their doctrine focuses on things like overcoming what they call last minute resistance. In other words, pushing a woman into having sex with you, even if she's changed her mind and says that she doesn't want to. Now, there are other terminologies, which I'm sure will come up as we continue our conversation. But you are very careful right at the beginning

of the book to insist this is not all men and that there are many men who support the feminist movement and certainly would not be speaking in the way you've just said. How big is the manosphere? How many men are we talking about who you are genuinely worried about? Of course, absolutely. There's a huge critical mass of men who don't know these groups exist. There's wonderful men, a huge number of men who are very supportive of feminism. But I think what's important to say is that while while of course, we're not suggesting that this is all men, it is nonetheless a very significant number. So we are talking about groups, about networks,

about communities that number in the hundreds of thousands. We're talking about websites, videos, blogs, which are receiving millions, tens of millions of hits, even on perhaps a single video about this kind of thing. We're talking about communities where thousands of men are online discussing and egging each other on on a daily basis, day, minute by minute. As you log on, you can see. But, you know, we've all had a kind of idea that these things exist, and we've generally assumed that these men are sad, lonely, sitting in a basement in their underpants, as you describe them, and not at all dangerous. Who really are they? So I'd say two things. I think the first thing to emphasize is that these are the kind of men you might walk past on the street. I know this because I've met them because going undercover for this book,

I also went undercover offline in real life. I turned up to their meetings and events. And I met, you know, a young white man in his 30s, extremely smartly dressed. He was affable and charming and polite, the kind of man you might work with, walk past in the street, sit next to you on the train. Moments later, he was on stage baying for the blood of former Crown Prosecution Service director Alison Saunders for the crime of having supported female victims of sexual violence. And when we think of these men as harmless, when we talk about this as a group of sort of internet trolls who never come offline, it's really important to say these men have committed mass atrocities explicitly in the name of these ideologies. There isn't any doubt about it. They've left clear manifestos. They've gone out and massacred women in real life. And in the book,

I trace these movements specifically to 100 murders or serious injuries in the last 10 years alone. But we don't know about it because we don't describe these acts as terrorism, even though they meet every international definition. Think, for example, about the Toronto van attack, which I think many people have heard of, where Alec Manassian deliberately drove a van into pedestrians, aiming for women, killing 10 and injuring 16, the majority of them women. He very clearly said online before he carried out the attack

that this was an incel rebellion. He made it very clear he was attacking women for not sleeping with him. It met every definition of terrorism, and yet he was never charged in that way. And the newspapers, the reports of that attack, didn't mention the motive or use the word terrorism to describe it. But why? If these things are out there, has it not been widely covered? Why have they not been accused of terrorism or seen as having been radicalised? I think there are two issues. The first is that we tend not even to know about

these communities, but when we do know about them, we tend to dismiss them and we tend to brush them off and see them as harmless and pitiable. But the other issue, I think, is that we are so used to violence against women. Violence against women, men killing women, is the wallpaper of our daily lives. Two women a week, over two women a week on average, are killed by a current or former partner in the UK. And so we don't recognise these as forms of terrorism because they don't shock us because we are so used to it. And we don't take sexism seriously in our society. The backlash against people trying to get misogyny defined as a hate crime is a really clear example of that. And in the same way, men who carry out these massacres against women are not described as terrorists as we would other groups. And crucially, you know, we have very, very robust systems in place to look out for the grooming

and radicalisation of boys. But something like the government's Brent strategy, for example, which is so overzealous that it's seen boys arrested and taken into custody by police officers because they made a spelling mistake and said they lived in a terrorist house instead of a terrorist house, doesn't mention gender at all. And when I spoke to a project facilitator at the Good Lad Initiative, Ben Hurst, who is probably the person most locked in on this in the UK, talking to the most teenage boys about this stuff, he told me he would estimate 70% of the boys he works with in schools are in contact with this material and he estimates that absolutely he would say almost none of the teachers or parents he comes

into contact with have any idea that this even exists. You wrote that you wept at some of the things you saw and read about. What for example? The thing that i found the most difficult was the extent to which these communities idolize and canonize the men who have raped and murdered women offline in their name and for me that there was i had to push through it i had to just get on and do it but there was one day when i i stopped and let myself cry But there was one day when I stopped and let myself cry. And it was a day when I was reading messages from men about a woman who'd been killed in one of these massacres. And they were speculating about the fact that the killer might have stalked or fantasized about one of these women and been rejected by them and how great it was that he'd

killed her as a result. And somebody wrote that he just hoped that he'd raped her first so that she would die knowing that the man she rejected had been inside her. And that was what broke me, I think. You argue that there's often a close connection between these communities, the alt-right and white supremacists. Where's the evidence for that? Absolutely. That's really important to say there is huge evidence that these groups are massively interlinked and you really can't tackle one without tackling the other, which is why there is so much in the book about white supremacy

and neo-Nazism. There's a great deal of evidence for this. First, many of the current leading lights of the alt-right and white supremacist movements rose to prominence during Gamergate, which was a manosphere, deeply misogynistic online trolling campaign. You also see how the language, and there's a very complex lexicon of invented vocabulary used in the manosphere, crops up enormously in the alt-right and in those communities. But also, most chillingly of all, members of those communities, like Andrew Anglin, for example, one of the sort of foremost members of that white supremacist online community, has actively and explicitly written a style guide for anybody who wants to recruit young boys to that movement in which he advocates not only using memes and viral videos

and cultural jokes to draw young people into the movement, which he describes as adding cherry flavour to children's medicine to target boys as young as 11. But he explicitly says that anti-feminism and hatred of women is the ideal gateway to the alt-right. They use it deliberately to pull boys into white supremacy. So if these groups are as dangerous as you say they are, what can be done? Well, the good thing is that there's a huge amount that can be done because we're currently doing nothing.

I think the first thing is that we need to recognise these groups for what they are, see them as a form of terrorism, prosecute them as such, describe them as such, and train and support teachers to recognise these as forms of radicalization. We can also do a lot, I think, in terms of social media and recognizing where these groups are inciting violence and hatred that social media platforms, in particular YouTube, are playing a

big role in this radicalization. But for me, what's really crucial is to recognize the complexity of this. Caught up in these communities, yes, there are killers and men who are inciting violence against women, but there are also very vulnerable men, men facing very real offline issues, boys who are anxious and lonely and have gone online and become sucked into this. And actually, to tackle a lot of the offline issues affecting these men, increasing funding for male mental health, giving young people a community to feel part of offline, tackling, for example, the cuts to youth funding, youth services, the fact that 600 youth centres have closed. It leaves boys vulnerable to the clutches of these people who want to

radicalise them. So if we could provide those kinds of offline communities, places to talk and explore these issues about gender stereotypes, about sexual violence in schools and elsewhere, then we'd be helping, I think, to inoculate boys against it before it happened. Laura, why have you continued to do this work when we know you've suffered terrible trolling and threat? Well, I think once you see it it once you know it's there there is a sense of such urgency that you need to to try and do something about it i suppose you know i feel like i can see this meteor speeding speeding towards us i can see these men actively planning to go and kill women they've done it and still no one's talking about it.

And I'm meeting the boys who have been groomed into that ideology. I can see it. But almost no one I've ever spoken to outside of the online feminist world has ever even heard of these groups. So we have to start talking about it. And there doesn't seem to be any other choice, really. Laura Bates, thank you very much indeed for being with us this morning. Now most of us I think would stand up on a bus or a train for somebody who was clearly suffering from a disability we might even think it's perfectly okay for a young person without a

blue badge to park in a disabled space if it was again obvious they had real problems with getting about. But that's not always the case when the person is suffering from rheumatoid arthritis because whilst it can be extremely painful it's often an invisible disability. The stigma suffered because of that fact is at the forefront of concerns in this Rheumatoid Arthritis Awareness Week. What is it like to be a young woman who suffers with RA? Well, Yolanda Sabrina is a singer who was diagnosed five years ago at the age of 28. Claire Jacklin is the Chief Executive of the National Charity. Claire, why does RA affect women more than men under the age of 65? Well, it's a good morning. Thank you, Jenny, for having me on.

Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune condition. And so there are various triggers and there's certainly a train of thought that hormones do play a part. So often it might be after the birth of a child, or it could be stress that triggers it. So again, you know, you're young, you're starting your career, perhaps going through a stressful time like that. But that, you know, there still needs to be an awful lot of research as to what it is that triggers the immune system to basically turn upon the body itself, and it starts attacking the healthy lining in the joints. And the problem for younger people when they're, you know, first displaying symptoms

is arthritis is not something that immediately springs to mind. Far too often young people are, you know, sent away from their GP saying, oh, it must be repetitive strain injury. Or perhaps you've been working out too much in the gym and it's something else. And that's why it's very, very difficult often for young people to get diagnosed. Yolanda, you were very young, Yolanda, when you began to have problems. How did it begin to affect you? Hi, Jenny. Thank you so much. Yes, I was 28 when I was first diagnosed with RA.

It was shocking. It was surprising because I myself, you know, was under the impression that arthritis or any type of arthritic condition is strictly, you know, reserved for older people. And when I was first diagnosed, well, actually, sorry, before my diagnosis, my GP actually assumed it was, like Claire mentioned, repetitive strain or carpal tunnel syndrome. So I was actually sent away just to kind of pop to my local pharmacy and buy myself like, you know, one of those, they call them wrist splints. It's kind of a bandage that you wear around your wrist. And I suffered with that for a few days,

but then all of a sudden other joints started coming into play and I realised it was something a lot more serious. And how eventually did you get the diagnosis where was the pain when somebody finally said yeah this is rheumatoid arthritis? So after going back to my GP the second time with you know with concerns that it could possibly be RA. And I discovered it could possibly be this because I did my own research and kind of put my symptoms into Google and, you know, it came up with RA and I was like, it can't possibly be this thing. And what struck me was the fact that with RA, it kind of, excuse me, the body kind of mirrors itself. So if it's one wrist that begins to hurt, then you'll all of a sudden begin to experience that same pain in the other wrist or

the other hand and, you know, one knee and then the other knee and so on. So that kind of made me think, oh, maybe it is RA. And so I brought that information to my GP and she said okay we'll get you some blood tests and measure your rheumatoid factor and see see what's going on there so when the blood tests came back and I was positive for this this rheumatoid factor which not I don't I'm not sure if this is correct but I don't think everybody with RA has a high rheumatoid factor but I happened to have have um display this so I was then yeah referred to a consultant a rheumatologist and um yeah sat in his his um his office and he sort of popped me on the on the bed and was kind of going you know um testing each of my joints and he said yeah you've got a lot of swelling in your joints there's a lot of redness a lot of heat um and it was quite it was quite a quick diagnosis he didn't

you know mess about he was like yeah you have you definitely have RA so that was shocking really shocking so so Claire when a young woman or indeed a young man, but obviously it's more common in young women, what sort of symptoms should you absolutely not ignore, go to the doctor, and insist that further investigations are carried out? Yes, Yolanda's story is far, far too common. And it often means that you do your own investigation and think, oh, yeah, I ticked that box and that one. And it is that, you know, hot, swollen joints. You know, sometimes you can actually feel the heat radiating off of the swollen joints. And it sometimes starts in

the smaller joints first, so the toes or the fingers, but it might be a bigger joint. And as Yolanda said, it's symmetrical. And it's that early morning stiffness as well, that, you know, even after a good night's rest and you, you know, you can't get your joints moving for maybe an hour or two hours, you think that's not right. But also one of the key things for all autoimmune conditions is of course, is fatigue, this overwhelming tiredness, fogginess of the brain, sort of feeling like you're walking through treacle almost, and you just haven't got any energy. That is a key sign as well. And of course, if you're a smoker, and you have perhaps a family predisposition to,

you know, autoimmune conditions, that's a big red flag as well. Smoking can be a trigger. Fortunately, more young people, less young people are smoking these days, but it's still a very, very key message that people just don't associate, perhaps triggering arthritis by smoking. Yolanda, you've obviously had to learn how to manage it but this question of it being invisible even though you're in terrible pain how have people reacted to you if you appear to need a seat on a train or park in a disabled spot without a badge? Yes in terms of of parking I remember um early on when I was diagnosed

it was it was so painful to get in and out of the car it's painful to turn the steering wheel it's painful to use the this you know the gear stick it's just painful so you know at times like that it would have been nice to be able to use a disabled bay or or something like that but I'm you know people with RA they're not well I personally wasn't eligible for a blue badge I didn't tick all the boxes so I've never had a blue badge um even though it would have been very very beneficial to me um in terms of public transport, I travel a considerable amount for my work. I'm a singer and I tour. I'm in bands and what have you. So I travel the globe with my work.

So I'm up and down on the tube, on the train, on planes. And the tube I struggle with because, well, not even the tube, the train actually, mostly because the tube is usually quite a short journey, but the trains, if I can't get a seat and I'm having to stand for like, you know, half an hour to 45 minutes, it's painful. You know, at the end of a long day, my feet are hurting, my ankles are hurting, everything's hurting, my hips are hurting, everything's in pain. So there was actually one time where I was in so much pain and I really, really, really needed to sit down. So I actually had to pretend instead of because I knew the guy in the seat, the priority seat wouldn't understand that, you know, I don't I don't know.

I just didn't know how to explain to him that I needed to sit down. So I actually pretended that I was pregnant and he got up straight away and let me sit down. I know that's probably quite, you know, a taboo thing to say, but, you know, in desperate times, that's what I've had to do. So, you know, yeah. And Claire, how common do you reckon that is for people with RA to suffer stigma because it doesn't appear an obvious disability? Yeah, it is far too common.

The number of calls we've had to our helpline of people being very distressed where people have really verbally abused people for parking and displaying their blue badge saying oh well you've probably stolen it or you're a benefit cheat or in the workplace where they've said oh you're just you're just being lazy because of the fatigue and you know people can't you cannot see the excruciating pain. You cannot see the fatigue. And I think it's amazing how people can make such assumptions just on how somebody looks. And it's fortunate because of the modern medicines,

we're not seeing the amount of joint deformity or disability that perhaps was more visible you know 20 years ago but that doesn't mean the pain and the fatigue isn't there and that's why this campaign is you know we're trying to make RA a priority we are a priority um to say you know we need to take this condition as seriously as other autoimmune conditions. And Claire, what about this blue badge question? Why is Yolanda not eligible for a blue badge? Well, that's different criteria in different boroughs. And, you know, we often have to help people fill in the forms and guide them through that because it is really

tricky and you know it could you know some of the questions can be very varied about you know can you walk 100 yards or 200 yards or whatever it be and you know most people say yes I can but what they're not saying is yes I can but that means when I get to that point I really have to sit down I can't go much further. I was talking to Claire Jacqueline and Yolanda Sabrina. Janice on this question of rheumatoid arthritis said very interested to hear about RA can we also recognize osteoarthritis so often seen as age-related wear and tear. I was diagnosed in my mid-30s with arthritis of the spine. There are no replacements for this hidden disease.

Ruth said, I was diagnosed nearly four years ago. It's changed my and my family's life. I was 58 and everything you said on today's Women's Hour is the same for me, except I can no longer work. I was a nurse, then a teacher of A-levels, then a foster carer. No unemployment benefit and had to fight for everything. Thank you for highlighting this systemic disease. Please do more as and when you can. NRAS are fantastic. Stephanie said, I've had an appalling year with an entire surgery of male doctors who have dismissed my RA symptoms.

Changed to an all-female practice, progress at last. Seen three rheumatologists, no diagnosis yet. And Diane said, my granddaughter was diagnosed with RA with rheumatoid factor at the age of 15, which was devastating as the drugs that were on offer made her really ill. She's now 25 and has learned to live with this and injects every week. And at the moment, these drugs help. Through sheer grit and determination, she passed all the GCSEs, straight A's and A-levels, straight A's, and a first-class degree in journalism and media and works in London.

None of this has been easy, but she's living her life. I call her a hero. And Rebecca Taylor tweeted, London Underground offer a badge which simply says, please offer me a seat. I had to go to lots of appointments at Charing Cross to treat my cancer. It wasn't obvious from the outside how ill I was and in need of a seat. It did work most of the time. I also used it on trains. Lots of you responded to Laura Bates.

And George in an email said, I fully support Laura Bates and the struggle against misogyny but I'm very uncomfortable with this word manosphere. Man is a gender which applies to all men including me and therefore this indiscriminate use of the word man feels like a smear on me and all decent men. This will not help men to accept this important and challenging research. I feel the use of our gender in this very negative term is sexism. I would strongly oppose any similar generalising and defamatory language using the word women. Communications, who advises government and the UN, and therefore know from a large body of research that the choice of frame terms such as this is powerful and shapes attitudes.

Susie Ballantyne tweeted, hearing Laura talk this morning had me gripped. As a mother to both a boy and girl, it made me realise how critical this issue is as they approach their teenage years. As a psychologist, I've researched radicalisation and the hallmarks Laura talks about are chillingly familiar. Helen Field tweeted, Laura Bates, you are amazing. It's absolutely horrifying what's going on. I had no idea there was such open terrorising of women going on in these groups. This needs to be publicised widely. Well done, Woman's Hour, for starting the publicity. Ellie on Twitter said,

Thanks for covering this. Parents of boys especially need to be aware of what they can encounter online. Please revisit this soon. Laura Bates is a brilliant, coherent and important voice. Very informative lesson. Thank you. And again on Twitter, Deb in the Garden wrote horrifying insight by the very brave, smart Laura Bates of misogynist radicalisation of young men. How do we expose it further? And then lots of response on women and debt. And Jen said, I'm older with still no more technical financial knowledge than the heady days of catalogues in my day. But like Anna, I learned the hard way. Pay it back, you'll sleep better at

night. And all any of us need to remember is that nothing in life is free. Well, thank you for all your contributions to this morning's programme. Do join me tomorrow when, in the latest of our How To series, we'll be discussing timekeeping. Are you always early, late, or right on time? We'll discuss it in the morning. Join me two weeks past 10. 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's 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.