Woman's Hour - Rape gangs, Playing Nice, Cancer friends, Erotica

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

Victims groomed and raped by gangs have told the BBC's Senior UK Correspondent Sima Kotecha that they are adamant the crime is still happening to girls across the country. Yesterday, a Tory amendment to the government's Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which wanted a national inquiry into grooming gangs, was voted down. Krupa Padhy talks to Sima and Simon Morton, a former senior investigating officer for Thames Valley Police, about what is known about how these gangs operate.Playing Nice, a new ITV drama, tells the story of two couples who discover their toddlers were accidentally swapped at birth. Actor Niamh Algar, who plays one of the mothers, and Grace Ofori-Attah, who wrote the script for the small screen, join Krupa to talk about the moral and ethical issues within the series, and why they hope it will spark a conversation.Two women who've developed a firm friendship through a shared experience of having a rare eye cancer join Krupa to talk about the incredible bond they have forged. Ocular melanoma affects only five in a million people but Tessa Wingfield-Parry and Joanna Denman, who happen to live just around the corner from each other, both were diagnosed. They talk about how they met, the impact the disease has had on their lives, and how they've discovered they've got a lot more in common than just their cancer.Whilst doing her Masters at the University of Cambridge, Times writer Tyler Bennett earnt extra money on the side writing erotica. Having cracked the code to a good steamy story, she joins Krupa along with the Man Booker shortlisted author Sarah Hall to discuss the genre, breaking taboos and erotica's ability to empower.Presenter: Krupa Padhy Producer: Rebecca Myatt

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, this is Krupa Bharti and you're listening to the Woman's Hour podcast. Hello, thank you for being with us. Coming up this morning, the BBC's Seema Kotecha has been talking to young victims of grooming and rape and they've told her it's continuing to happen across the country. We're going to take a closer look at these gangs and better understand the data around them and just how rife they are. And of course, those various calls for action against them. Also, sometimes the people who matter the most enter our lives in the most unexpected ways.

Such was the case for two women brought together because they both had a rare form of cancer, which impacts just five in a million. Now, not only did they share that experience, they also learned that they lived moments from one another and had a lot more in common. We're going to hear the story of their friendship. But here's what I want to hear from you about this morning. Tell us about the remarkable or unusual ways in which you found a friend. It might be a life-changing experience, an unusual hobby or a chance encounter. You can text the programme. That number is 84844. Text will be charged at your standard message rate. On social media, you will find us at BBC Women's Hour

and you can email us through our website or you can send us a WhatsApp audio note using the number 03700100444. And parenting styles, postnatal depression, coercive control, forgiveness. Just some of the themes that feature in the new ITV series Playing Nice. It's a story of two couples who learn that their boys were swapped just after birth in the hospital. Nivalga, who plays one of the mums, just after birth in the hospital. Niamh Alger, who plays one of the mums, Maddy, in the series, and Grace Oforiata, who adapted the book for screen, will join me. Plus, many of us will have had part-time jobs whilst at university or other higher education.

Maybe you pulled pints at the local or tutored teenagers through their GCSEs. Well, I'm going to introduce you to one woman who earned money to support her studies by writing Erotica. How and why she did that coming up, but also how the genre has grown to empower women over time. It's a good chance for me to ask you about the unusual jobs you had to tide you over while studying. Do get in touch. That number again, 84844 or at BBC Women's Hour on X or Instagram. But as I mentioned at the start there, victims groomed and raped by gangs have told the BBC's Seema Kotecha that they are adamant that the crime

is still happening to girls across the country, even if the way it is happening is slightly different. This comes after yesterday's news that a Tory amendment to the government's Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which wanted a national inquiry into grooming gangs, was voted down. There have been many local and national inquiries into grooming gangs over the years, including Rotherham in 2014, which found at least 1,400 children

were sexually exploited in the town over 15 years. We're going to spend some time this morning exploring what we exactly know about these gangs and how they operate. Here to help us do that is Seema Kotecha the BBC senior UK correspondent and Simon Morton a former senior investigating officer for Thames Valley Police who led operation Bullfinch the biggest criminal investigation in Oxford's history which resulted in the convictions of 21 men for offences spanning from the late 1990s to the late 2000s. Thank you to you both for being with us. Seema, I'll start with you. You've been speaking to victims who are adamant that this is still going

on. Share with us what they've said to you. Yeah, morning, Gurpa. Yes, I mean, I've spoken to them at length and I've spoken to a couple at length and they are absolutely 100% sure that this hasn't disappeared, that grooming is very much alive and kicking. And what they mean by that is that girls, when they're young, are vulnerable and can be manipulated through drugs, alcohol, gifts by older men and made to do what they want them to do so let me read this quote to you this is from one victim I spoke to she told me this is not just an Asian issue it's a wider issue issue it's common sense that men want sex and in some cases they will manipulate girls who are vulnerable to get it. I was one of those girls. It's naive to think it's not still happening and the political debate is not focused on the problem but on trying to outdo one another. Now I got that in spades from the two girls that I spoke to that they feel that all the conversation

in the political domain that's been taking place in the last few days, everything that we've been reading in the papers, has a misplaced focus. They say that the attention needs to be on the victims and the attention needs to be on how to sort the problem and not on what was happening over a decade ago. They're adamant they don't want another inquiry.

They say they've been through that. Recommendations have been made. And that took years, seven years in total for the J inquiry, for example, that was published in 2022. They're saying that the attention now needs to be on them and what to do to sort this problem out, which they say, as I said at the top of this, are adamant is still continuing to take place. They've also highlighted the way in which it's happening and how it's happening in a different way now. Just outline that to us. That's right. Yes. I mean, with the evolution of technology, they're saying that, you know, now social media is being used a lot more to lure them in. So communication is done via things like Instagram and WhatsApp, making the reach easier, if you like.

So these perpetrators or these potential perpetrators are able to reach out to these individuals just by finding them online, by looking at their profiles, seeing what their background is, whether they're in care, whether they come from a certain type of family. And in their eyes, they may deem that as them being particularly vulnerable and an easy target. They've also told me, well, one girl in particular has told me, I think Simon will echo this when you speak to him next, that some of the men that were doing this years ago, decade ago, are still out there because victims weren't coming forward to talk about what they had been doing and there's a real fear that these men are still in the community and with the potential to be doing what they were doing back then. Just before I do turn to Simon I do want

to talk about the facts and the data because they are so central to this conversation. Earlier this week we heard from tech entrepreneur Elon Musk making headlines yet again, saying that this is happening to millions of victims. Now, some might say that he's using such language to simply be politically provocative. But what do we actually know about the data? Well, we don't know how many girls there are out there, how many victims there are out there. A big part of this problem is girls coming forward. They don't want to come forward. And the reason they don't want to come forward is because they don't trust the authorities. They don't trust social services. They don't

trust the police. So for them to come out and say this is happening to me, and also they're very young, so they're not, you know, they don't have the maturity always to recognise that something that is happening is wrong and against the law. I mean, some are as young as 11 here. So in terms of figures, we don't know. But we do know from very credible figures like Simon, like charities, like experts, like politicians I've spoken to, MPs in particular constituencies, they are very aware that this is an ongoing problem. And we know that the MPCC, for example, the National Police Chiefs Council, also says that police data does back up the claim that this is an ongoing problem. So that is not in doubt among those experts who know this inside out.

Simon Morton, let me bring you into this conversation. What is your view on the current offending by rape gangs who groom and abuse girls and boys? I mean, this is something that is endemic. It's happening in every city in this country. There is no doubt. I finished Bullfinch in 2013. It had been happening 10 years prior to that. And before that, I would imagine another 10 years. I spent three years going around the country talking to people, as many people as I possibly could, about child sexual exploitation and how to deal with it.

And it is immensely difficult, but there is no doubt in my mind. I've still got contacts within the police. It is still everywhere. Some forces aren't prioritising it as much as they should. I know TVP, Thames Valley Police, it's business as usual because of the amount we've learned from doing the investigation. But yeah, it's rife. And from your experience at Thames Valley Police, what did you learn about how these gangs operate?

It has changed slightly, but with my investigation generally it starts off with identifying young girls and however that might be it might be meeting them in the local park it might be outside schools it might be hanging around near the city centres where they gather. Nowadays, it will be Instagram, etc. It's about identifying a girl. And normally, it's one of the younger offenders who will approach initially, and they will give them gifts, they'll be treating them like adults, they'll be giving giving they're seducing them effectively um as that process progresses um they start introducing drugs and they start ostracizing them from society from their parents from police from social services from their care homes you You know, it's horrendous. That relationship then is sexualised.

The sexualisation starts and that becomes more prolific. And then invariably booze and drugs are involved. And once it gets to that stage, they have got them. They change their personalities. They have to do what the men say. It's coercive control, but it's more than that. They are fearful if they don't. And it can be so brutal.

I can't say some of the things that have happened on air, but my God, it's horrible. That's a sense of how they might operate but i guess the next obvious question is who are they what do we know about who they are for my investigation um we we didn't have anything to start with um we knew the girls were um going missing things were happening to them but it was more rumor than anything else because they wouldn't talk to us so I had to take a very different approach to a lot of the investigations and starting without any victims and so we used we used all sorts of proactive techniques

which I can go into if you want me to but it effectively it took the us from the victims to the offenders now um once we started to identify the offenders we'd then use our police patrols and the morning strategy meetings to send out cars and they would go and turn them over they'd check them they'd see who they're hanging around with we would be doing surveillance as well on them and slowly build a picture so then i've got a group of men who i know are involved with these girls but i still don't know what's going on um we started using covert dna on the girls to find out who they've been with um which was really telling and quite unusual to do at the time. That was obviously with the consent of the parents and whatnot. We then looked at how we could get evidence. And so when the girls gone through this, these guys, they pick up a girl at 11, they turn her into something she isn't. She used to believe in Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny. And and the next thing this five gay guys raping her you know that that is so damaging to anybody so when we then went

back in time we took it like a 10-year gap and went back and looked at the misperce missing persons from previous years and we approached them of course at 16 these guys kicked them out and they left to their own devices which which to some is fatal um through overdoses and whatnot um but these um some of those girls spoke to us and started to tell us who the guys were and it turns out they're the same ones we were investigating right then so that span is 10 years and they're still doing it now we didn't catch all those guys remarkable they're 10 years and they're still doing it. Now, we didn't catch all those guys. But that's remarkable. They're still doing it. They're still doing it. And they will be. I mean, there's no doubt they're right across the country. These gangs, it's like a

crime category. You know, theft doesn't stop. Burglary doesn't stop. Rape doesn't stop. Nor does CSE. You know, it's just there. And unless you look for it, you can't find it because the victims won't come forward. They belong to these guys, these slavers, or how else could you call them? They're controllers. You know, they are linked to the other guys within the group. And then they get together and they sell them. It's really strong language. The word trust has come up a lot. Seema mentioned it, you mentioned it there

and again, so fundamental to your investigations. When you talk about young girls who at one point believed in Father Christmas and have rapidly been transformed into this vulnerable place, how do you go about getting their trust to even commence your investigations? Because without that, there is no investigation,

if I'm not mistaken. You're right. And it was really difficult. And we, in honesty, didn't know how to. So when we actually, strike day came around, we had already got evidence from the historical girls. But we knew approaching the other girls was going to be of no use so what we did was front them on that day so we went round to the houses where they lived and

said hey we're Thames Valley Police we are in Operation Bullfinch we're investigating CSE we know you are a victim we have now got 15 men in custody. Will you please tell us what happened to you? And they nearly all spoke to us because we had taken that step further to give them the confidence that they could talk. And that kind of worked really well for us. Not all of those girls gave evidence, of course. And that process kind of continued.

Once you know someone has got a problem, when you approach them with it, rather than them approaching you, they're more likely to talk. But of course, often you won't have been the first port of call when it comes to this kind of investigation or these individuals seeking out help. They might be social workers involved. They might be medical units involved. What are the steps being taken to ensure all these arms work together you know that the problem is societal um we it there is now it's certainly within the tbp is a there's a kind of multi-agency hub um but all the people that need to be there you know the doctors and nurses um who treat these girls when they come in at 13 with a heroin overdose or self-harming, it's a matter of getting them to talk to us, the outreach workers who know what's

going on, all the youth workers, social services have got bits, probation have got bits, the parents know, sometimes the neighbours, but it's a matter of standing up and be counted you know you everyone needs to play their part the schools you know the girls will start going to school oh there's boys as well of course um but the girls will start going they'll be putting on high heels lipstick they'll be really anti-social and eventually get excluded so they get punted out onto the streets which is where they're getting abused. So, you know, unless everybody comes together as a community to help with the intelligence that comes in, and so at least the police can identify those potential victims for approach. How confident are you that that will happen?

I hear a sense of despair almost in your voice um we we need to stop politicizing these issues we need to stop um using it as a pawn as rhetoric for other issues it just needs to be done so we've got 22 recommendations from um professor gray's team uh sorry jay's team who who worked on it for seven years and we've got 22 recommendations from Professor Gray's team, sorry, Jay's team, who worked on it for seven years. And we've got all the information we need. We just need to get on and do it. Someone in Home Office needs to have the role, as the Jay inquiry says, and kick it off and use the money for something positive rather than wasting it on silly quangos. You mentioned politicising it there. Let me turn back to you, Seema, because an attempt by the Conservatives to have the government set up a national inquiry into grooming

gangs was voted down yesterday. What do we know about who is still calling for an inquiry? Yes, that's right. I mean, the Tories, as you say, are calling for an inquiry yes that's right i mean the tories as you say are calling for an inquiry but they lost the vote yesterday it was a more symbolic vote i think for them and they're making the claim that if this inquiry doesn't take place well it could be seen as a cover-up that the government is trying to cover up some information uh regarding those various um grooming scandals across the country rochdale telford oxford etc so that's their argument but the government is saying that it doesn't want to focus on more inquiries as simon said we know that the jay report took seven years and it says that

it wants to focus on the victims and sorting out the problem. Now, you know, I'm an impartial journalist, but what I can say is from the victims that I've spoken to, they're saying very much the same thing, that they want action rather than more exploration and investigation in regards to historic cases. They say that, you know, lots of time and resources has been spent on that but they now really want the authorities and the government to focus on what can be done to combat the problem which as I said before is very much in existence. Simon mentioned Thames Valley Police there I'll bring you this statement that they gave to us this morning they said tackling the exploitation of children is and continues to be a priority for Thames Valley Police. The nature of child sexual exploitation offending has changed over the last 10 years and group-based offending now makes up just over 5% of child sexual exploitation offences in the Thames Valley which is in line

with group-based offending nationally with a dedicated major crime team focused on progressing these investigations. There are now more police officers and detectives working in child abuse investigation and the management of sexual offenders and a new dedicated team monitor all investigations into missing people and identify patterns or underlying issues. There is more on this story over at BBC

News Online. Seema's piece is there but for now Seema Kotecha and Simon Morton, thank you for joining us here on Woman's Hour. Thank you. Now, what are the things you have in common with your close friends? It could be that you attended the same university or met through a shared hobby or bonded at the school gates. The two women joining me in the studio now have lots of simple things in common.

They're the same age. They live around the corner from one another. They've got young children of a similar age they both love to run and they both have careers in marketing and communications they both have cats this list is long they both even have partners with the same name mark but something much more unique is what brought them together they both have the same extremely rare disease and eye cancer called ocular melanoma, which impacts around five in a million adults. And they are both now wearing a prosthetic eye. They are Tessa

Parry-Wingfield and Joanna Denman. Thank you for joining me here in the Woman's Hour studio. Thanks for having us. Tessa, I'm going to start with you. I'd like to start with your health journey, because in many ways, that's where this whole relationship began you were diagnosed first what when did you realize things weren't quite right it was just a day like no other I was out on a jog along the river close to where I live and I just had this sort of feeling sensation if you like that my eyes weren't working together for the first time and that was that's quite a strange sensation to try and describe and optometrists said to me

later on well what do you mean, what do you mean, but all I could say. 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. They're just not working together. I have quite myopic vision. I'm used to going to the optician, so I just checked in a few days later and tried to describe this sensation, and they looked deep

into my eye. Started getting very nervous. I still had my jacket on, my smart watch was going crazy saying you're experiencing high levels of stress right now. They'd get other consultants to come in, have a deep look in my eye. And they said, you have a choroidal freckle or a melanoma in your left eye. And sorry, these aren't the words that you were hoping to hear. And you're just knocked completely sideways because I went from running to, you know, optician to possible cancer diagnosis, you know, within a few days. Then referred to a suburban eye hospital

who confirmed it was probably a melanoma. Then to an ocular oncologist and two weeks after that, so three weeks from that fateful jog where things started to go awry, I had my left eye removed, indeed due to ocular melanoma. This is just in a matter of a few weeks. Weeks, three weeks from the jog, two weeks from seeing an ocular oncologist, words I'd never even really heard of before. Huge learning curve, this kind of thing. So yes, shock and awe is probably the right way of describing it. I was very, very lucky, actually, that speed was of the essence

and that this could all be done really quickly. But I suppose in terms of sort of mentally dealing with it, it's quite a lot to come to terms with in such a quick amount of time. And we will explore all of that. But Jo, let me turn to you because a year later, you found yourself in a similar situation. Yeah, exactly. Very similar to Tess. I felt like my eyes,

I felt like I was very sensitive to light. When I walked outside, I almost felt drunk, like I felt kind of dizzy, like I couldn't cope with the brightness. I also had a prominent red vein in my eye, which was actually the tumour's kind of source of blood. And I had blurry vision. And yeah, very similar, went to the opticians, then straight away to the next day referred to a local hospital and then to see the same ocular oncologist as Tess. And I actually had to have a biopsy on the tumour to find, to be sure that it was a melanoma. And a few weeks later it was confirmed it was and my right eye was removed. Life changing in a matter of weeks. Yeah.

And then you guys met. I mean, how did that happen? So we have a mutual friend. Obviously, this is a very niche thing to happen. So if you hear about it from one person and then suddenly hear that someone else you know about it, she immediately put us in touch. Someone who's a mum at the same school of Joe's and a friend in my circle. We do literally live around the corner from each other. So we have quite a few mutual friends we've discovered, you know, later on. I spoke to this friend on the phone and I said, Are you sure because there are only 600 cases of

oculomelanoma in the UK every year, it's incredibly rare. So for someone my age, as you say, with cat's particle mark around the corner to be going through the same thing. I also didn't want to terrify Jo because I didn't know what her diagnosis was. There's only a quarter of ocular melanoma cases have to have eye removal. It's called enucleation, which is a pretty horrific term for what we had, the surgery we had done. Three quarters is treatable through radiotherapy. So I didn't, I was concerned that if, you know, she didn't have to have that type of surgery, it would be very scary for her to talk to me, things like that. But she said, no, indeed, Joe was probably looking at that outcome. Can she get in touch? And sort of, I think within a couple of hours, we were in touch, texting, speaking on the phone, and then meeting as soon as possible.

But, you know, the parallels came apparent within seconds. You know, the fact that we have the same surgeon, we have the same oncologist, we have the same ocularis, which is a prosthetic, eye prosthetic expert. You know, it couldn't be more parallel. The world works in wondrous ways. Jo, what was that first meeting like when you came face to face? I just looked at Tess and talked to Tess and thought well she looks incredible her eye looks incredible she's a very strong woman she runs her own business she's super fit like this has not stopped her so it was actually really comforting to me to go okay I can do this I can get through this I hadn't had a diagnosis at that point I was still going through the testing so I didn't know if it was melanoma and if I would have to have my eye removed but it just felt so confident

to me to talk to Tess and to see her and think I can get through this. I do want to talk about the process of losing an eye and as friends you must have had some very difficult yet honest conversations about that process and how it feels to to be in this situation yeah I think Tess being a communications expert really thought about what information to give to me like because we didn't know if at the beginning if I was going to have that you were very I think you didn't go into too much detail about that until it was confirmed my eye was going to be removed and then Tess really helped me through every stage of like what the surgery is going to happen, how you're going to feel, what to take with you. How long is the recovery going to be?

When are you going to get your prosthetic? That whole kind of period, which when you talk to the doctor about it, it kind of goes like over your head a bit. It's so much information to take in. Yes. Hearing it again and talking to tests on a really detailed level. Yeah. It was just so helpful to have all that information. I think it's so rare to, I've never come across with anyone with a prosthetic eye in my life,

let alone due to eye cancer. So going into it was quite a lonely experience because you have no reference point. There's no competition, no cancer diagnosis is better or worse. It's all really, really scary. But I just, I couldn't sort of envisage what this all would entail for me what it would be like um and people just didn't know how to comfort me either because it is very niche it is very unique it is very individual individual um and so and I and I remember meeting Joe that day really vividly I remember walking it was a very gray day we met in a very bright cafe and I remember this sort of very strange emotions, I was excited, you know, and relieved, just the relief of having, you know, serendipity at its finest, you know, having someone coming into my life at a moment when when I really needed to,

who truly we could truly understand what each other were going through. You know, but also, I was nervous, I didn't want to be too overwhelming. I was a year on, which in terms of having the surgery and kind of getting through everything emotionally is actually a really long time because so much happens within the 12 months physically and emotionally. And I didn't want to be too overwhelming because I think that's that's not very helpful either. You know, and Joe said to me, I just wish I was where you are now. And I could see that, you know, desperately wanting to kind of fast forward time. So it's a difficult balancing act of not, you know, being too sort of gung ho and like you can do this. It's going to be totally fine. But also the realities of some bits are tricky. This I had no idea about, but this is going to happen.

And just a bit more detail, really filling in the gaps was important. But yeah, yeah, difficult to get right but also are we going to like each other like what if she hates well that's it the fundamentals of friendship you know what if she hates my eye and i can see it in her her expression and that would be really difficult for me it sounds vain but you know it's very confronting cosmetically having your eye removed and having a an acrylic eye put in in its place All these, I mean, it was hugely complicated, I suppose, meeting on many levels, but it was just such a relief.

We instantly got on. We have so much in common as we've already talked about, but also just the shared experience that can otherwise be incredibly lonely. And we also have, you have to have very dark humour about these things. So we're often in stitches. We go very deep, very quickly. And yeah, it's just

been it's been wonderful for both of us but yeah that first meeting was definitely um extraordinary in many ways you're now on your own healing journeys and hopefully in good health how has the friendship changed as you've gotten better in yourselves I think we all we always still talk about eyes don't we do every time we every few weeks, they'll be like, oh, I saw our professor or I saw someone or I had this experience. You know, we talk about lots of things in our lives now, as any friends would, but there always seems to be some kind of eye story, doesn't there?

I think we're on a sort of voyage of discovery. There's always information coming out with every meeting that we have with our team. You know, we were nattering on the tube on the way in today about my latest appointment and some interesting stuff that come out of that and yeah shared knowledge I think we're still learning a lot about about this thing yeah but what a foundation you have inspired a conversation amongst our women's hour listeners I'm going to read you some of the mention the messages we've had in about friendships and the strange and unusual ways in which people have become friends. This one says, I met my best friend as a client.

She was my outdoor boot camp personal training client. She's 26 years younger than me. I'm 61. And we get on extraordinarily well. We are about to embark on a six week travel adventure in backpacking to South America together. Well, that sounds incredible. Jen, thank you. Let me read this message from Lottie, who says,

I met my lovely friend at a bus stop. I said, I love your skirt. It's so beautiful. She was wearing a skirt of many colours. It swelled around and lit up the bus stop. Beginning of February, cold, grey, deeply miserable. Actually, I was on my way back from the funeral of a dear friend who had died so young.

Helga said, I really love your coat. It was my best coat with beautiful buttons. We caught the same bus, sat side by side. Let's meet again, we said. And so we did. And we do. What a lovely story. Thank you, Lottie.

And let me squeeze in one more if I can. I met my wonderful friend Sarah in the break at school, not as pupils, but as colleagues. She was sitting at a computer looking at a picture of a beautiful Greek beach. That looks amazing, I said. She was looking for someone to go with her. She said, I'll come. And I said without thinking, it was a Greek island of Skiros. We learnt to mosaic, to meditate, sing and dance.

Thank you for sharing your stories. Sarah lives in Devon now, far from my own home in Scotland, but we have wonderfully long and funny and rich phone chats. Keep your messages coming in. Thank you, Jill, for that message. And thank you to you, Tessa, and to you, Joanna, for joining us here on Woman's Hour.

Next, Times feature writer Tyler Bennett had a very different side hustle to most university students trying to earn an extra buck. She would retreat to the shed in her parents' garden and write erotica, earning money through commissions

for various websites and blogs. And it's through her research and practice over time that she's managed to crack a certain code to writing the perfect steamy story so what are the components to a good piece of erotica how can it empower us as readers and what does it say about the breaking down of taboos in our reading habits and life in general well ty, Tyler joins me now alongside man, booker, shortlisted author Sarah Hall, whose short stories and novels are celebrated for their intimate scenes. Good to have you both with us, Tyler. I'm going to start with you. Now, most students will think of working in their local bar, maybe their supermarket. How did the idea of writing erotica come to you? I mean I'm sure my parents wish that I'd worked in the local bar or the supermarket. It didn't actually it didn't drop into my lap. It was the pandemic. I was doing

my master's and I was at a party and there was a lull in conversation and I said something to the effect of so is anyone here particularly sexually adventurous which I think is a normal question to ask and the girl next to me turned to me and told me that well she she was in the sense that she had recently written an erotic piece for a library and I should consider it and so I contacted them and they commissioned me immediately and the commissions just kept coming. Did you know where to start or were you busy researching? And how do you research? I didn't know where to start. I think the good thing is that my commission, there was a topic.

I was told to provide an orgasm filled experience. But as a journalist, research was the first thing I did. And the first thing I did was I turned to porn, I read chick lit, I watched a lot of very steamy television. And I felt my way out from there as it was. Those were those starting points. Sarah, how would you define the difference between erotica and other genres like romance for example oh it's really difficult and in some ways i'm not sure how helpful it is to try and create genres and sub genres and categories because everything under erotica which is quite a broad title whether in literature or art it's

to do with sex and sexuality human emotion uh sexual love bonding bonding, you know, and perhaps if you're thinking about the pornographic end of things, it's more performative and dealing with pure sex, where erotica and romance might be bringing in human emotion and love a little bit more. But it all blurs. And I think especially in this day and age, we understand that these borders aren't very helpful and that experiences, particularly in relation to women and women's pleasure and women's agency and empowerment in relation to sexuality are very broad. And there are secret corners and there are areas that are surprising. And so you can't quite fit them into categories anymore. But what about within erotica itself, Tyler? What are some of those key tropes?

Well, I think there are sort of healthy tropes and there are unhealthy tropes. I think, as Sarah will attest to, there are problems with all kinds of erotic material. And there are stereotypes that I think we look to naturally. You can think of your Fifty Shades of Grey. I think there's a fetishisation of billionaires. There's a sort of a beta alpha trope. And lots of those can be done very healthily and wonderfully. And that's in the narrative side. And then within the writing, which Sarah has actually written about, there are things that don't work as well, such as overdoing cliches.

I don't know if I'm allowed to say this on radio, but there was a phrase I heard that was something to do with the fact that her glittering mountains gushed, which I think should never be allowed. That kind of thing doesn't work so well. Neither does overly pornographic terms and very medical terms. I had a friend told me recently that the least sexy thing anyone can say is the phrase front bottom. And I completely agree with that. So I think that those are the tropes that exist. I mean, what I'm hearing from you there, Tyler, is that realism is the way forward for this genre.

And I wanted to ask Sarah whether you'd agree that it's about realistically representing the female experience. In some ways yes and I totally agree with Tyler it comes down to the level of language and and how dexterous and and artful you are with language because ultimately what you want really is for the reader to be experiencing the piece of literature that you've written and immersed in the experience um not always I mean sometimes kind of a voyeuristic perspective is is you know that's still an experience in some ways but uh you're positioning the reader in different places while reading

and it really does come down to language can you create a scene activate something in the imagination and the sexual and erotic imagination of the reader so if you hit the right language and you're using the right ingredients in the scene and overall in the text, then you're bringing the reader with you. And that's really what you're aiming for as a writer. What role does sex play in your writing, Sarah? I mean, I really like writing about it. I think a lot of writers tend to shy away because it's difficult,

partly because of the language challenges. But I think, you know, to avoid it seems artificial to me. It's an important part of life and it's also a very dramatic part of life or a very mundane part of life for human beings. So you can often wind dramas around it. The short stories I've written offer feature sex and eroticism front stage. You know, as Tyler's doing, writing these smaller pieces, perhaps, you're using sex as a feature, whereas in a novel, there's a greater span of text.

It might be one component part of a relationship. It might be politicised. There might be a rift between a couple or an exploration going on. And so you have more room between, for example, the first kiss building up to something later. So a novel, of course, is a far more layered and complicated literary device where the short story might be just featuring, for example, a woman who suddenly has an alteration of personality and starts behaving hedonistically because she has a medical condition. And you can really bring it forward and use it as a very dramatic centerpiece in a story. Tyler I do need to ask you about your family and friends and how they reacted.

Well as you can tell I don't I'm very comfortable talking about sex and it was not a secret that this was something I was doing. And I have a great relationship with my family. Like I said, I was writing from my parents' shed. And comes to think of it, my mum actually asked me to read Fifty Shades of Grey to her aloud on a very long car journey when I was about 13. So frankly, had she not wanted me to pursue this career, there were other things. But it's been great in the sense that I have very honest and open conversations with my friends about sex. And I think that's really, really important as women and as people. I think that it's fostered a really judgment free attitude in me. And I also think Sarah sort of touched on the fact that

erotic writing and erotic material is really empowering. And part of the reason I enjoyed the work is that I learnt so much from it. I started as a 23-year-old and with, you know, a couple of sexual experiences and I ended up learning a lot more than I thought I would. And when you say you learnt so much about yourself, did that therefore impact your own dating experiences? Yes, I think so. I think when you're writing about sex a lot, it becomes less taboo in your mind. And so on dates, one of my questions would be, you know, do you have any sexual preferences? And I've written before that somebody once said to me that they chose safe words based on Sylvia Plath poems, which was Doom of Exiles.

Not that sexy. I mean, lots of people told me very amusing stories. Someone once told me that they performed magic in bed. I don't know whether that was literal or not. But it's had a lovely impact because it becomes something that is light and humorous, which I think sex sometimes should be. And have any of those individuals ever read any of your work? I know you don't write under a pen name or you didn't. Well, I tried to write under the pen name Iona Whip and that was promptly refused.

I wrote under a similar pen name. I don't know if anyone's read my erotic work, but I'm a fiction writer and it's definitely inspired and helped me write about sex from a slightly more serious way. And I hope one day lots of people will get to read that. Sarah, we've got to bring in men into this conversation and speak about their reactions specifically. How important is erotica as a genre to them, in your opinion, or should it be? Yeah, I think it's very important. And there are a number of challenges. I mean, if you look at the data, a lot of young men fall off in terms of reading fiction when, you know, when they hit sort of 12, 13 upwards. But I think it's a very broad conversation about about female sexuality that is taking place now.

But it should be broader, particularly as we heard earlier in the programme. There are a number of dark sides to sex in relation to women and exploitation. And I think the more we can make the situation positive, and there are writers trying to do this. You know, Alan Bissett's written a book about consent and he's talking to young teenage boys about it. There are men out there that are trying to include themselves in this very important conversation uh but i think the more female pleasure and um reciprocation can be talked about and men brought into the conversation the better society will be as a whole i mean when we're looking at the dark side of things as discussed earlier on we really do need to find ways around that and ways of re-educating and ways of uh turning to the joyful side the positive side of it all, instead of having this, you know,

terrible imbalance that often can be found. Interesting thoughts there. Tyler, I want to ask you this just before we wrap up. There might be people listening saying, you know what, I want to break into this genre. What would your advice to them be? To break into the writing of it? Well, writing and erotica maybe as well, who knows? Oh, well, my first piece of advice would be to steer clear of Reddit, which I think can be a bit of a dark hole. My second piece of advice would be to lean into the fantasies and ideas that you have within yourself. Because I think erotica is a really nice balance between sort of titillation and turn on and narrative storytelling and soft porn. And it taps into those desires that we have, like Sarah said.

And I think to tap into what you want and think about first is a really good first step. And then to think about where you would get your erotic materials. I'd like to just briefly echo something we've mentioned, which is that we're really turning a female gaze onto sex at the moment. I think it's on TV, it's in our books,

it's everywhere. And I think we're looking at it from a women's first perspective. And I think if you're thinking about getting into erotica think about where you see it first. Thank you so much for your thoughts there. Tyler Bennett and Sarah Hall for joining me on the subject of erotica. On the subject of unusual jobs whilst at university

Julia's got in touch to say that while she was studying for her postgrad social work training she got a job cleaning the family home of a college professor and that they had the most incredible library which she was given access to between dusting and plumping cushions i got to immerse myself in the world of simone de beauvoir and jean-paul sartre and carl rogers i think i was very fortunate to have found this job which both funded and educated me i eventually trained as a psychotherapist, which I think this experience definitely played a part in. Thank you for your thought. 84844, do keep your messages coming in. Now, it's a situation that for any parent is unthinkable.

Finding out that your newborn baby was swapped in the hospital and the child you thought was yours is in fact completely unrelated to you. Now, I do want to stress that there is only one known documented case by the NHS of this actually happening in the UK, but the concept forms the basis of the storyline for a new series on ITV called Playing Nice. Based on the novel of the same name by J.P. Delaney,

the TV series tells the story of two couples, Maddy and Pete, who have a son called Theo, and Miles and Lucy, whose son is called David. And they discover that their boys were accidentally swapped just after birth in the hospital. And what follows is a series of moral dilemmas. Do they keep the sons they have or do they choose their biological sons? It is an emotionally tough watch. Joining me now are Niamh Alger, who plays Maddy in the series,

and Grace Ofari-Atta, who adapted the book for the screen. Welcome to you both. Thank you so much for having us. Grace, I'm going to start with you. Why was it important for you to bring this story to life? I think that, you know, there are so many ways that the characters respond to this really traumatic situation. I think for me in particular,

I really responded to the character of Maddie. And Maddie has had this very traumatic birth experience and then she's gone on to suffer postnatal depression. And as a psychiatrist in my former career, I really wanted to explore that aspect of the story and how people respond to it and how it can be used against them. So your NHS background really encouraged you to want to explore this? Yeah, it did.

I mean, I think for a writer, the premise is a bit of a gift from a psychological point of view. You've got this really, really traumatic thing that happens and then you've got four characters who respond to it in their different ways so yeah it's really it was a really great as I mentioned Niamh this was an emotionally droning watch in many ways it um so many emotions were evoked was it difficult to play that role for those reasons? I think when I was surrounded by a really beautiful cast, like James Norton, James McArdle, Jesse Brown Finlay.

These were actors whose work I admired. But, you know, we bonded so well as people. And when you have that bond you can there's places emotionally that you can go because you can you can trust the person that that's that's sitting opposite you and I think there is depth to each and every one of these characters and I think emotionally from as as Grace said as like how she, like I related to the entire story in the sense of these women's reaction to finding out that the children that they have been raising isn't theirs.

And it's such a, I don't know, it's like one of those stories where you want to put yourself in that position and go, God, what would I do? But I think for characters with the depth that Maddie has in the sense that, you know, she's a woman who is not afraid to fight for what she believes in. She's also a woman who has experienced this immense trauma. And for me, tackling especially women's mental health issues and giving it a voice and I suppose bridging that gap between when you're sitting at home and having a place for women,

perhaps you've gone through a situation to be able to open those conversations in the play that we can see visually. And yeah, I was like, any time I get the opportunity, I've worked with Grace before in my practice and I was like, anytime I get the opportunity, I've worked with Grace before my practice and, you know, I've sent into, you know, the privilege of shadowing a consultant within this. I spoke with women who had gone through postnatal depression because I want to hear it from their perspective, because you can look at it in writing of what that means, but to actually hear it directly from people who themselves have gone through it like it's so common like one in ten women will experience this

it's um but also yeah you want to you want to explore it with the most amounts of sensitivity and truth and you grace chose to portray maddie's postnatal depression in a different way to the book. It's striking how it was weaponized in this drama in many ways. Explain that to us and why you made that call. So I feel like people have so many varied reactions to mental illness. There's still quite a lot of shame and guilt that surrounds it from people who've suffered it and from people who are close to people who've experienced it. And we don't talk enough about why people react to it and the different ways that they do. I think in a drama like this, having a character like Miles

use something like Maddie's past mental history against her in quite a vicious way, really highlights, you know, how people stereotype these illnesses and see them. You know, he's talking in the mediation scene about how is she potentially a danger to her own child rather than understanding that this is a parent who currently has a strong, loving, you know, nurturing relationship with this child

and that her illness was something that she went through and has been treated and isn't an issue in, you know, the current situation. That was important. And I know, Niamh, as part of your research, you have had contact, interaction, and you spent time with women who have gone through this. What's their reaction been? Very positive. And also, what I find is like, you know, you've got Instagram, I've got my Instagram but the response from men um especially has been kind of quite surprising and overwhelmingly positive in the sense of this was so it was such a stressful watch and I you know it is a stressful watch it's it's also you know it is a drama we're dramatizing we and this is not a broad stroke representation of postpartum depression. I think that's it is that it is a

varying degree from a loss of appetite all the way through the extremities of psychosis or self-harm. And what I found so interesting is that, you know, we are looking at Maddie reflecting on that time because she's, you know, this is a, this is a, it's almost like PTSD. You're being forced to relook at something, but also to relook at it from a point of view where you were in a state of, you know, your hormones are finally balanced out and you're able to look at it with a perspective and a new perspective on it but also just trying to join the dots of like how traumatic the birth was and why I can't remember these two people that for some reason have a poignancy now in my life and um yeah I think what people are saying is like I just wanted like I want I'm like I want to scream with yes scream with the tv scream with the TV and also like to take, you know, to take a woman's mental health and weaponise it against her.

Like for me, when I read that, when I was reading in the script, I was like, okay, I want to see where this goes and continue reading. And for her to regain control over that, to allow her to speak from her own perspective of how she felt is so important. Grace this also opens up a conversation about the nature versus nurture debate what did you want people to take away from that?

So I think you know what you see with Maddy and and I think often people who've experienced mental illness postpartum feel that maybe there's a difficulty in those stages of your illness of bonding with your child sometimes if you've been admitted to hospital as maddie's character had been there's a period of time where you physically haven't really been able to bond in the way that you'd like to with your child and i think people can fear that that will affect the relationship but what you see with Maddie is that she recovers, she bonds with this child and she loves him, you know, more than anything in the world. And he's not actually her biological child. It doesn't really matter that he's not her biological child.

She loves him regardless. And I think what you also see and what I'd love people to take away from the show is that this kind of loving bond and parenting style that Pete and Maddie have versus maybe the more financially secure ritual lifestyle that Miles and Lucy have actually starts to bring David out of his shell. And you really see that David is not the child that Miles describes at the beginning, necessarily with the developmental delay, who, you know, you think isn't going to speak very

much, who Lucy says won't really, he doesn't really like going to other people. You know, when you have this warm, nurturing presence of Pete and Maddy, you see him respond and you see how that is likely to affect his development positively. And that's nurture. Yeah. We did mention at the start of this conversation your previous career in the NHS and some of our listeners might be wondering how you made that leap from working in the NHS as a psychiatrist to screenwriter and was there an overlap at all? Yeah so there was an overlap so I became a consultant about gosh it was about seven or eight years ago now and I was working part-time for a period doing sort of three days a week and screenwriting around that working on some comedy comedy series and then I got a show called My

Practice Greenlit and I was working part-time I went back full-time during the pandemic and once that kind of took off I had to resign from my job and work full-time as went back full-time during the pandemic and once that kind of took off I had to resign from my job and work full-time as a screenwriter but I'm still fully registered with the GMC and clearly your experience is informing your writing as well which is really yes yeah and Niamh what about you and new plans for the coming year to maybe produce write or hey go into NHS Lycaunt, who knows, the opposite way. No, I think it's like listening to Grace. And, you know, when I was reading the scripts,

I always wanted to make this more about Grace, but the mental understanding that she has for a character can help an actor and inform them so much in how they're meant to be feeling. And it's always a gift to, like, it was a gift to work with Grace on Malpractice and, you know, to look at it from a point of view of, you know, someone who is doing this, you know,

doing a job that is some, as a lot of the time, overlooked and, you know, we don't look at them as real people, you know, doing a job that is some, there's a lot of the time overlooked and, you know, we don't look at them as real people, you know, and then you get the opportunity to make them real and make them accessible to people, to viewers. And, yeah, and I think one day I'd love to direct and then hopefully something Grace will write, I'll get to Grace. Grace is putting it out there live.

Yeah, yeah. And then you can also be a doctor.'ll get to go to Grace. Grace is putting it out there live. Yeah. And then you can also be a doctor. I'll just be a doctor. Teamwork. Teamwork. Teamwork. Thank you so much, Niamh Algar and Grace Afori. Good to have you here in the Woman's Hour studio.

Playing Nice is now available to watch on ITVX. There are two episodes out now and the third is on ITV1 at 9pm on Sunday. And I should say, if you have been impacted by anything that we have been discussing here today, there are links to support and resources on the BBC

Action Line website. Thank you for all of your messages that continue to come in. I'll try and squeeze in a few before we end, but I should flag up that tomorrow we have the award-winning writer Reni Edo-Lodge with us

telling me about new plans to publish writers that help us understand our past and we'll be discussing the role of the eldest daughter in the family don't miss that at 10 and do keep the conversation going that's all for today's woman's hour do join us again next time i'm michael gove and in a new series for radio 4 i'll be discussing how to survive politics. I'll be joined by fellow politicians to discuss how politics really works. It is only because of your principles that it is worthwhile. We'll be talking about how to build alliances. You're all trying to make the world a better place, and you have quite a lot in common.

How to cope with being unpopular, and how to stick to your principles when things get tough. Faith, family and friends are very important. Has there been a time when you felt betrayed? Do you think you've ever done the betraying? Surviving Politics with me, Michael Gove. Find it on BBC Sounds in the Politically feed. 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.