Woman's Hour - Remembering Toni Morrison

Episode Date: August 7, 2019

We remember the woman considered the greatest American writer of the twentieth century – the Nobel Prize winner, Toni Morrison, who died on Monday.The number of crimes being reported to the police involving children attacking their parents has doubled in the last three years from around 7,000 to 14,000 incidents. That’s according to data obtained by BBC Yorkshire following Freedom of Information requests. The BBC has been given exclusive access to the ‘Getting On’ course in Doncaster. It’s one of just a handful of similar courses across the country, designed to help parents and children find a solution to this type of abuse.Former Blue Peter presenter, actress and author Janet Ellis joins Jenni to discuss her new novel 'How It Was', the follow-up to her acclaimed debut, The Butcher’s Hook. It looks at the generational divides between mothers and daughters, and deals with difficult topics such as parental bereavement, miscarriage and inappropriate underage relationships.Scottish songwriter and musician, Karine Polwart is known for her politically charged folk songs. In her new album she gives a folk twist to the Scottish pop hits of her childhood and plays her interpretation of Deacon Blue’s ‘Dignity’ live in the studio. Presenter: Jenni Murray Producer: Kirsty StarkeyInterviewed Guest: Emma Glasbey Interviewed Guest: Janet Ellis Interviewed Guest: Karine Polwart

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 Wednesday the 7th of August. In today's programme we remember the woman considered the greatest American writer of the 20th century, the Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison who died on Monday. Janet Ellis has published her second novel, How It Was, sees a woman looking back on her life in the 1970s as a wife and mother with a troubled relationship with her daughter, and will have live music from Corrine Polwatt

from her new album, A Scottish Songbook. Police forces across the country have found that the number of crimes involving children attacking their parents has doubled in the last three years from around 7,000 to 14,000. The figures have been uncovered by BBC Yorkshire after they made a Freedom of Information request. They were invited to attend a course in Doncaster called Getting On. It's one of a handful of similar schemes around the country which aim to help parents and children find a solution to this type of abuse. Emma Glasby is BBC Yorkshire's Home Affairs correspondent and joined us from Leeds.

The figures are from 19 forces around the country. How seriously would she say police and local authorities are taking this situation? Well, the figures that we've had from these 19 police forces, they do show a very significant increase. Those police forces recorded more than 7,000 incidents of children attacking parents in 2015 and more than 14,000 last year in 2018. But the reason that we've got information from 19 out of 44 police forces across the UK is because these incidents fall under the domestic violence category and those 19 police forces are the only ones that actually record the relationship between the suspect and the victim. So they've recorded the fact it's a son or a daughter attacking a parent. In most cases, these incidents are just recorded as domestic violence. So we don't know the true scale of this problem

because of the many different ways that police are handling these reports. And of course, the other issue we have is that some parents may understandably feel reluctant to call the police to report their own children. So it's really only in the very extreme cases that this abuse is being recorded by police. Now, the Home Office is referring to this as Adolescent to Parent Violence and Abuse, or APVA for short.

There's no legal definition of exactly what APVA is, but the Home Office is saying that it's likely to involve a pattern of behaviour. It can include physical violence, damage to property, emotional abuse and financial abuse. Now, I've been speaking to a mum who we are keeping anonymous for the welfare of the child about what she has experienced. Her 11 year old daughter went through a very traumatic ordeal in recent years and she started becoming aggressive. Hitting, shouting, things thrown at you, tables picked up, threatened to hit you with scissors, threatened to hit you with knives. I've had police out three times.

It's hard because you don't want them to get a criminal record. At 11 years old, you don't want them to start that in life, but then there's no support, or we had no support from anywhere. And, you know, you're made to feel like it's your fault, like it's your parenting that's wrong. Emma, so she has no support, but generally what sort of support is being given to families who are going through this? Well, from researching this, it seems very little. We were given access to a course that's called Getting On, and that's run by Doncaster Children's Services Trust.

It was originally developed by the Youth Offending Service in conjunction with Doncaster Council. But the original idea came from two women working for the Youth Offending Service in Doncaster. They were visiting the homes of young people and they were noticing holes in the walls or doors that had been punched through. This was often in the homes of single mums and they just couldn't explain it. Then as they gradually built up some trust with the mums over time, the mums were explaining that their son or daughter had become abusive. I went to see the Getting On course in action. It was in a training centre, like an education centre,

just outside Doncaster Town Centre. In one room, there were just two teenage boys. There are often up to eight boys, but one room there were just two teenage boys. There are often up to eight boys but that day there were only two and there were two facilitators running the course. Now they started by asking the boys to create a character, to draw the character, any character they wanted on a sheet of paper. So the boys called him Bob and they decided Bob was 15 and he lived with his mum but his dad had walked out on them when Bob was a baby. Bob was being bullied at school and he was struggling to cope.

It was really interesting because gradually one of the boys stopped talking about Bob, stopped using the word he, and he started using the word I and talking about himself. And you could see that drawing Bob, Bob the character, that was a way for this boy to find the confidence to start talking about what he was going through. There was another really interesting exercise with a balloon. Rob, the facilitator of the course,

is placing a balloon close to the teenage boy's heads and they don't know if or when it might burst. Yeah, close your eyes. So I'm going to pop it just to know when. if or when it might burst. Yeah, close your eyes. So I am going to pop it just to know when. So who's it going to pop on? When is it going to explode? You flinching when that balloon's about to pop in your ear?

Maybe that's how mum feels when you're intimidating her. She might remember that one time when she has been hit. Not a nice feeling to have to live with, is it? Now, in a room just a few doors down the corridor, the boys' mums are also taking part in the Getting On course. They're talking to each other about what they've gone through that week, how they've dealt with any abusive behaviour, and they all had to say something positive they wanted to share about their

son or daughter, something good that had happened that week. Again, there's another exercise. And this time, one mum clenches a fist and another mum wants to get something out of that mum's hand, wants them to unclench the fist. So you see the mums are there trying to pull the fingers apart. And afterwards, the course facilitator asks the question, did anyone just ask the other person to open up their hand? Did they make the request rather than trying to force the hand open? And the idea is it's changing the parents' approach. Why did the police, Emma, think there's been such an increase in the reporting of these assaults? Well, the National Police Chiefs' Council is saying that this increase is because of changes to the way that these incidents are being recorded and that over recent years police have been putting more emphasis on domestic abuse.

So in the past they say many verbal arguments would not be recorded as a crime, but now they would be recognised as common assault or a threat of violence. The figures that we have from these police forces show that whilst the number of these APVA incidents has been increasing, the number of prosecutions has fallen by a third and the number of cautions has more than halved over that time. Again, the Police Chiefs Council is saying that in cases like this, the victim is often unwilling to support a prosecution and so it's very difficult for the police to proceed. There are other views though, in particular from the mental health charities and the social workers we've been speaking to as part of researching this, many of whom believe that we are now seeing the impact of a lack of resources for mental health services for young people this is tom madders from the young minds charity based on what we hear every day on our parents helpline we are seeing an increase in these kinds of

incidents reported by parents and parents seeking help for them. The increase isn't necessarily related to mental health but when a young person is acting in this way, behaving in this way towards their parents, there is a high likelihood that there is some kind of mental distress involved and that young person is communicating that they do need some support and too often that support is too hard to access. Emma how successful do you reckon the courses like the one you've been to are? Well it's difficult to measure the success because there are just a handful of these courses like like the one in Doncaster the getting on course has been running for five years I did speak to a mum and son who took part in the course two years ago and they

believed it had transformed their relationship. The boy, like many of those who take this course, had experienced a very difficult childhood when he started being abusive towards his mum. He didn't want to go on the course. He was very embarrassed about it. But he says now that he needed to be there. And in particular, his mum felt the course had really helped her take a new approach to being a parent, to try and stay calm, to give her son more time to calm down and to talk to him more and she told me they now have a more loving relationship. The problem is of course with just a handful of these type of courses

across the country it's very difficult for families to get this type of support. Emma Glasby, thank you very much indeed for joining us this morning. And of course, we would like to hear from you. If you have experience of what Emma was talking about, do let us know. You can either tweet us or you can send us an email and we don't have to use your name. Now, I'm sure Janet Ellis gets a little bit sick of the two most common descriptions of her. She used to present Blue Peter, and she has a very successful daughter, Sophie Ellis Baxter. It is definitely time to move on now

and describe Janet as a very successful novelist. Her second has just been published. It's called How It Was, and it tells the story of Marion Deacon, who in the present is waiting for her very sick husband, Michael, to die in hospital. She looks back to her life as a young wife and mother in the 1970s with a seven-year-old son, Eddie, and a 14-year-old daughter, Sarah, with whom she has a really rather uncomfortable relationship. She does. Will you read us a little bit? I'd love to, yes.

It's at the beginning of Chapter 4. Chapter 4, yes, yes. Marian is reminding herself of the time that she, looking for something else, opened a drawer in her daughter's bedroom looking for a spare sock and in fact found her daughter's diary, a teenage diary. I see myself the day I found Sarah's diary. I'd held it for a few minutes before I'd opened it. It wasn't honour that held me back. I didn't value her secrets. The ebb and flow of her days was well known to me. Her school timetable was pinned to the court board downstairs and I organised all her other appointments. I thought her diary would reveal nothing. It would

only be an amusing catalogue of forgettable events, childish ambitions and daydreams. I was afraid that her adolescent musings might reveal a certain small-mindedness. She was so lacklustre these days, so seldom moved to any displays of emotion beyond anger or spite. What if her assumed indifference to the world concealed genuine hostility? There was always a possibility that she didn't really like us, that she really didn't like me. She can be really quite sniffy about poor Sarah, can't she?

Yes, she can, yes. And I obviously sound as though I'm being incredibly disingenuous here. This is not about my relationship with my daughters. I have two, Sophie and Martha. However, it is about that realisation that you have as a mother that your children, whatever sex they are, are suddenly becoming independent beings. You know, hopefully they're beings that you're going to like, you know you'll love them.

But they will begin to experience the world for the first time in a way that is completely off limits to you, particularly, of course, in the area of their burgeoning sexuality. And it's that aspect of all that Marion finds incredibly difficult with Sarah. Why were you so keen to write about an older woman looking back on her younger self? I have quite a fixation with chosen invisibility of older women. We're encouraged to think that you become invisible simply because society doesn't see you anymore and therefore that you should dress in a way that attracts that attention again.

But actually I think you get to a certain age and you think, I know who I am and I know who I was, but you can't tell by looking at me. And I think we're everywhere. Women with astonishing appetites, passions, good things, bad things, but they're all concealed because you want them to be, not because society doesn't value them.

Now, I've figured out you would have been a teenager. I was, yes. In been a teenager. I was yes. How clear are your memories of what it was like for a young mother in that period? Well of course my memories of what it's like being a young mother are entirely my view of my own mother who was only 23 when she had me so when I was 14 was a very young woman but of course I didn't see that I saw somebody old in fact heading towards their dotage. We had a good relationship too but I was 14 was a very young woman. But of course, I didn't see that. I saw somebody old, in fact, heading towards their dotage. We had a good relationship too. But I was very aware of the fact as a teenager that that was going to happen.

But at some point, it was going to happen differently for me. You know, I was going to reinvent the wheel here and I was not going to be, not trapped. My mother would never have described herself like that. But her generation were kind of weirdly passed over. You know, during the Second World War, women came into their own, of course, because the men were away so they could do the jobs they always knew they could. And they developed friendships and rights and responsibilities because of that.

But somehow faded when the war ended. So this generation were a little bit in advance of women's lib. You know, that was happening somewhere else they were definitely miles away most of them from that one street in Chelsea where the swinging 60s were happening but the little ripples and waves of that filtered through to just create some sort of sense of frustration or a kind of sense that the world could have been different for them which is why Marion really struggles with her teenage daughter who she thinks has it all on a plate. You said very quickly at the beginning,

this is not about my two daughters, Martha and Sophie. But I did wonder, you know, I read it and I thought, this is kind of dangerous territory for a mother of daughters to write about the difficulties of the mother-daughter relationship. It is. I'm having it at the centre of her novel. It is. What did the girls think of it?

They're not girls anymore. No, no, no. Sophie's read it and actually loved it. And I mean, loved it away from our connecting DNA. She really, you know, and I was really thrilled with that because she's 40 now. And this book is very much about women of my age and a bit older who are looking backwards at their lives

and then obviously trying to get back into Marion and the age that she was and the time when she's having her disastrous affair. But my younger daughter hasn't read it yet. And I think she said, I don't know if I'll hear your voice in it. And I hope it's nothing to do with our relationship, certainly nothing that's been revealed heretofore.

But I think she's just too close. She's 28. She hasn't got children yet. I think she's just too close to that part of her life, the Sarah part of her life, the teenage daughter part of her life, to really, really want to muddle herself with the vagaries of the older person.

You have a son as well. I do, in the middle, yeah. And I thought, you know, why can such a loving relationship be such a difficult one for mother and daughter, often much more so than for mother and son yes it's interesting and I've had to sort of really think about this thinking about my motive for writing the book what it revealed about me in it because obviously it is any book

is confessional you know it has to be the way you see the world even if you're trying to interpret it through someone else's eyes and I think it's probably indicative of my relationship with Jack that the little boy in the book, who for most of this book is a small child, is forgiven everything. You know, he's a typical normal seven-year-old. He doesn't do anything terrible, but he's babied. He's kept very young. He's doted on. He's admired everything from the snot falling out of his nose to his terrible scabs you know he's he's an object of beauty for marion he's an object of beauty and maybe that is my daughters will have something to say about that no she does have michael is a bit dull her husband i have to say he is he probably is but i i'm sort of trying to defend the dullness that isn't isn't concealing anything boring he's he's not a boring man he's

just capable kind tolerant wise he is the man that Kathleen Moran so memorably says you should be looking for the man in the cardigan you know ignore the man in the jazzy shirt go for the cardigan and eventually if we're lucky I'm touching my ever present present handy number we find him. We think we want devilish and difficult and people who keep us on our toes and with whom every relationship has an element of great stress and tension. And Michael isn't that. I think Michael and Marion just met too young. I think she might have come to realise that when she was older. Marion does have not just one affair, a couple of affairs How easy was it to write about the sex?

Because I'm sorry to remind you of this but you did win a bad sex award I was a runner-up and I'm really cross I didn't win because you know I haven't won a prize for a book and that one I would take Anything you write about which people think they know how it feels you are always hostage to fortune. Because what you are endlessly saying in a very arrogant way is, I think I know how you feel, but I'm going to show you what it feels like for me. So of course, it is. It's all of that. And I have to say, it's, it's pretty disappointing, her sex, you know,

it's pretty, because I think the one fallout from the swinging 60s that I was talking about earlier is that men picked up pretty quickly in those days. The fact that most women were very likely to be on the pill and that you could then accuse them if they didn't want to sleep with you of being frigid or at least, you know, move on to the next. Because that was that was a very odd little wave that came out of the tidal wave of proper liberation and emancipation somewhere else. But yeah, it's embarrassing to read it. I'll tell you that for nothing. I did the audio of this book and I could not meet the producer's eye through the glass. You waited until you were 60 to write your first book. Yeah. And you had some training. And I always wonder, how much do you really learn by being taught how to write a novel? Or is it just that you really know how to do it? I think, well, having started as an actress, which has a very similar approach, really, is that you can't teach someone to act either.

But what you can do is make them listen to the actress that they could possibly be once they've got rid of all the reservations reserve whatever it is that's hindering you from really relaxing and being another character and I think it's the same with writing really that you you know you can't say make this sentence better but the way I really learned because I did a very short course actually it was it was one evening a week for three months which was perfect for my attention span and also we had a brilliant teacher, Erin Kelly, who I can still hear what she said. But what I really learned from was workshopping other people's work

because I could really clearly see how it might be improved simply by doing that, by moving things around, all the things I've been afraid of doing before. Janice Ellis, thank you very much indeed for being with us. And a reminder, the title of the novel is How It Was. Thank you.

Now, still to come in today's programme, the music of the Scottish musician, Corrine Polwart. She'll perform live from her new album, A Scottish Songbook, and to Wales for the serial, episode three of Curious Under the Stars. Now, earlier in the week,

you may have missed a discussion on Monday about a new free sexual harassment at work helpline. And then yesterday, the Yardley girls on working at the factory and living in the East End just after World War Two. Don't forget, if you've missed the live programme, all you have to do is catch up by downloading the BBC Sounds app. Now, there are certain women in my rather long career on Woman's Hour who have stood out and remain in my memory, none more so than Toni Morrison. When I met her in 1992, she'd just published a book called Jazz, which, unusually for her, was set in a city. She played with words as Miles Davis would have played with notes. I had, of course, long before we met, read what I've often described as the hardest and most beautiful novel I've ever encountered. In Beloved, a mother

is haunted by the fact that she killed her own child to save her from slavery. When in 1992, this powerful African-American woman sailed into the studio and spoke with the softest of voices. Jazz was about history and memory. However they came, when or why, the minute the leather of their souls hit the pavement, there was no turning around. Even if the room they rented was smaller than the heifer's stall and darker than a morning privy, they stayed to look at their number, hear themselves in an audience, feel themselves moving down the street among hundreds of others who moved the way they did,

and who, when they spoke, regardless of the accent, treated language like the same intricate, malleable toy designed for their play. How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city, it is forever, and it is like forever, as though there never was a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them. They know they are born for it. There, in the city, they are not so much new as themselves, their stronger, riskier selves. Now, most of the previous novels are set in Ohio

and drawn in part from your own family history and childhood. Jazz, too, is built on history and memory. Why are those two things so important when you write? I think the history of African Americans has been ill-thought through, probably not properly imagined, well-documented but not well-imagined. And novels, fiction, can re-imagine the past, showing that there was agency. There were opportunities for African Americans in slavery and afterwards to exercise a lot of imaginative control over their interior lives as well as their exterior ones.

So do the two fight against each other in a way, memory and history? Oh indeed and it's the tension that's attractive to me that is the collective racial memory is posited as something that really exists but for me it's simply a kind of archaeology where you sort of find a shard or piece and you try imaginatively to put the whole thing together. History can only deal with the large, abstract, almost nameless aspects of a culture. Now, like Beloved, love is very much the central theme of this and the difficulties of love.

What are you trying to resolve in this? I wanted to find out how it is possible to love under duress. It's what we were born for, loving and knowing. And also, I wanted to explore what people can do whose bodies have literally been owned and was not yours. In Beloved, that was one aspect of what it meant to love your children that much. In Jazz, these are people whose parents, if not themselves, were recently owned, physically owned. So part of freedom is the freedom to fall in love,

to choose whom you love, to inhabit your body, to express things through the body. And it may appear, as it did during the Jazz Age, to be a little naughty and perhaps even some instances illegal, but it is the way in which many people who came to these large cities were able to say, we are now free. But for women, love is never easy in your work, as perhaps in life. It always seems to mean some sort of sacrifice, self-sacrifice. Well, it's true. I do tend to

push my characters to the edge of a precipice. And it's not really like everyday life. And I do put them in extreme circumstances to see what they are made. But I think it's generally true that love is not easy, and it shouldn't be. It's not something, it's not a muscle response, you know. It's an effort of the will, and it's an act of intelligence. And so it really should be a difficult thing to do, but it certainly is worth exploring. Now, you've published alongside this book a series of lectures, Playing in the Dark, where you've argued that American critics have ignored the use made by

classic American authors of a shared history. How have African Americans informed classic American literature? There is no topic in the United States that does not involve black Americans, whether you're talking about neighborhoods or schools or government or money or health care, it all has a silent partner or an overt one, which is what to do, how to respond, and how to handle or govern African Americans. Writers from Poe to Melville to William Faulkner all lived in the world. And they, being artists, responded to that presence. There are moments in practically every one of those books where the presence is there. They didn't ignore it, but the critics have,

and have erased it. I am only saying that part of American literature must include the presence of African Americans. The Nobel laureate, Toni Morrison, who died on Monday. Corrine Paul-Watt is very well known on the folk music scene, but her new album, Scottish Songbook, which has just shot to number six in the charts, is a little different.

She's given a folk twist to some of the Scottish pop hits of her childhood. This is a little bit of The Hole of the Moon by the Waterboys. You were there at the turnstiles With the wind at your heels You stretched for the stars You know how it feels To reach too high

Too far Too soon You saw the whole of the moon Corrine, which were the bands that most inspired you? Well, the Waterboys were one of them. I'm a child of the 80s, and Scottish pop music was kind of in its glory days in the 80s. And quite a few of those bands are represented.

Big Country, who were a band that kind of really spoke about industrial central Scotland, which is where I grew up. The Blue Nile, who were a bit more experimental, kind of electronica. And Simple Minds. I mean, yeah, there were just so many fantastic bands to choose from. And of course, iconic female writers and singers like Annie Lennox. So yeah, it's been rich pickings to put this album together. So why were you keen to make this album,

which is different from what you normally do? It is and it isn't. I mean, the inspiration was a major exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland last year called Rip It Up. It was their main summer season exhibit and it was a 70-year kind of romp through Scottish pop history and in connection with that the Edinburgh International Festival curated a series of events that I was

asked to be involved in and I offered to put together a night of some of my favourite songs from the past 50 years. I'm not far off 50 so that saw me kind of go from John Martin and Jerry Rafferty the kind of songwriters of the 70s, through that classic 80s period and right up to kind of contemporary bands like Biffy Clyro and Churches. But what unites them all, actually, for me, is what the songs are about.

I mean, I'm a folk singer and a songwriter, so for me it's always about the narrative content, the social history, the kind of emotional undercurrent, and the fact that with a lot of quite big production songs, you can pare away those layers, and what you get left with is this skeletal framework of a song, which is actually, in its essence,

not that different from a 200-year-old ballad. So I take the same kind of approach to arranging these songs as any song. You've also created extra material to go with the music some of which is artwork what were you hoping to achieve with that? Well it was such an immersive process I think and paring down the material for this project which is also a live project so there's twice as many songs existing in the kind of live iteration of this. The songs are so meaningful it was like I kind of romped through

key moments of my life. The songs reminded me very strongly of people and place and they spoke to kind of the political time that I grew up in, the kind of Thatcher era and I really had a hankering to produce a beautiful artifact not just a collection of songs and so the songs have not been chosen randomly and I commissioned a visual artist from Morayshire in the northeast of Scotland called Jen Frankwell who's amazing she's exactly the same vintage as me basically we had a conversation between us never having met about what we thought these songs meant and what we thought they were about and it's been one of the most exciting collaborations of my life to work with someone who's got such incredible imagery.

So, yeah, the album itself exists almost like a little book, not only with Jen's beautiful kind of collage-based artworks, but with a series of stories and essays and bits of memoir writing by me about why the songs matter. You've worked with children in the past, I think first teaching philosophy and then working in child protection and domestic abuse. How do those experiences feed into the music that you write? Well, they massively affect the music that I write and the music that I choose to sing,

so the way that I interpret songs. Because I think I've always been interested in the kind of nub end of human experience. Why? Is it that people treat each other as they do? I mean, some of that was mentioned earlier in the programme today. When we were hearing about children attacking their parents. Yeah, totally. And that's kind of the meat of what's of interest to me.

And I think that comes from, very strongly, I have a memory of working in the field of domestic abuse for women's aid and going one night to a concert to hear a singer called Gordina McCulloch sing a 400-year-old song about domestic abuse. And I was just really shocked and moved by this kind of lineage of of experience across time so that's really what's important to me both in my own writing but also in the way that I go about arranging songs. You've also mentioned Donald

Trump and the golf course. A few times he's quite quite hard to avoid. Obviously these days, very hard to avoid. But yeah, long before he became, you know, was on the international scene. President of the United States. Indeed. Yeah, I've written about his use of land in Scotland over the past

10 years, in particular his golf developments in Scotland, which have been very environmentally controversial. Essentially he's ruined a site of special scientific interest in the north east of Scotland. So he's been a very controversial figure in Scotland and he has Scottish ancestry. His mother was from the Isle of Lewis and I have a piece that I wrote about that migration journey of his mother Mary Marianne MacLeod, from Lewis, called I Burn But I Am Not Consumed, which is the clan motto of the MacLeods,

which is his mother's family. And it's kind of an address to Donald Trump from the rock of the island of Lewis. And I guess it tries to address a feeling of brokenness and loss in him. There's a kind of humanising. It's hard to do, I confess, but an attempt to kind of address him as a wayward son.

Yeah, so Donald Trump has been a spectre in my music for a few years now. How popular is the folk scene now across the UK? I think it's very very resilient and in no small part due to the support of the BBC but also an amazing network of festivals

and community based teaching organisations so it's thriving, there's a lot of young people coming through. I think in Scotland the situation is quite distinctive I think folk music perhaps has a higher kind of cultural store in Scotland, it's just a smaller place

and you know nowadays even still if you go to a wedding in Scotland the odds are still on that you'll find a ceilidh band at the end of the night and most people can sing a few traditional songs and Burns songs and often those songs appear at funerals and important

markings in people's lives so yeah I think it's I think it's very very healthy and to me it should continue to be healthy for as long as it's relevant so it's important to me that folk music isn't a retrospective

art form it has to be resonant now. What's it like for young women? Because some of the folk venues are quite small and the audience is very close up to you. How welcoming are they to young women performing? I think like any kind of public performance environment, there are pluses and minuses. One of the things I enjoy about the folk scene is the kind of community nature of it, the intimacy with which you can very much not a distant figure and I think

sometimes they can be difficult environments for people to navigate and I think in this era of of digital contact as well I think there can be a lack of I don't think we've quite caught up with the digital realm in terms of what it means about how well you actually know someone in physical life. And I think perhaps for young women, that can be a live issue for some of them. But I think that's true in the rest of culture as well. You have your guitar ready on your lap. Going to sing Deacon Blues, Dignity.

Why that one? It's such an iconic song. Even if people hate this song in Scotland, everybody knows the words. It's a song of the 80s. It's a song of de-industrialisation. It's a song that kind of rides the knife edge between having a dream and despair.

So this is Dignity. There's a man I meet Walks up our street He's a man I meet Walks up our street He's a worker for the council Has been 20 years And he takes no lip off nobody And litter off the gutter Puts it in a bag

And never stops sinking How good it would be To be here one day On that ship, on that ship called dignity On that ship called dignity That ship Beautiful music from Karine Polwart, but I'm afraid music rights rules mean

we haven't been able to include the full live performance. On the question of abuse from children to their parents, someone who didn't want to be named said, people have to consider undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder. My daughter can be very aggressive, violent. She's only just been diagnosed aged 13 after 10 years of trying to get help. We got nothing. You just get blamed. Now we know what we're dealing with.

We are different kinds of parents and there are hardly any aggressive meltdowns. That course wouldn't help antonia said adolescent to parent violence and abuse becomes a lot more complicated if the child has learning difficulties a devastating situation for families nicola said god bless yvonne newbold i really hope this subject becomes less taboo and the family is less fearful and ashamed and better able to seek support one day. And someone else who didn't want to be named said, here's a hidden truth from 20 years back. My son was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and became extremely violent from adolescence. After various attempts to kill me by throwing knives and chairs at me, suffocation with bin bags when I was laid up, and much more too painful to uncover here,

unsuccessful police calls ended with him leaving to live with his father, to whom he was also violent. I was too ashamed to tell anyone else then or since. Someone else who didn't want us to use a name said we have a son who abused us throughout his teens and culminated in a horrendous attack six years ago since when we've not had any contact on the advice of abuse agencies and we didn't even realise it was abuse until the input of the various agencies who had to teach us that it was. There is so much I could say in fact only yesterday we were talking to our victim support worker saying that child on parent abuse is just never talked about and I feel so isolated because of it. And finally, someone who said,

I, two years ago, ended up going to my local domestic violence team in my hometown. My son, now 23, was punching holes in my rented home, had been for years, being verbally abusive to me and his sister, stealing money from me and my bank account and much more. I told the lady I saw what was going on and asked if this was abuse or was I imagining it. You become numb to stuff after a while, but then something happens. For me, my son beating his girlfriend up in my house to make you realise it's not normal. He's a very damaged young man with a huge bunch of problems,

including autism. He was let down by cams in our area, and even as an adult, they can't get their heads around how to help him because of his autism. My family, like your guest, accused me of bad parenting, and I should chuck him out. Despite my fear of him, I was his mother. Their attitude and lack of help isolated me more. Carers or parents of kids like this are growing and I know I felt

ashamed to tell people what was going on in my house to me and my daughter. Had I not had a supportive friend who's listened and hugged me over the years, I would still be in that place. I talk about it now because the world needs to know it's not just partners who are abusive. And then on Toni Morrison. Bronte said, Toni Morrison today is amazing. Beloved was a book that defined my reading in my teens and again in my twenties. She was a giant of our time, never to be replicated. And Alistair said about Karine and her music, one minute I'm just

driving into Hartford enjoying the sunshine and thinking about my day ahead, the next, that rendition of dignity has me bawling out loud, but in a good way. So thanks. Now tomorrow's programme is going to be all about money, and we are not going to be scared of it, are we? We'll talk about student debt, pensions, buying a home, saving for a pension, the costs of paying for care or doing the caring, and of course the gender pay gap. We examine where things go wrong and how we might begin to fix them. So join me tomorrow to talk about money. Two minutes past ten if you can. Bye bye.

Hello, I'm John Ronson, the author of So You've Been Publicly Shamed. This is my journey into the lives of the shamed, people ruined by a badly worded tweet or work faux pas. Along the way, I turned from being a keen shamer myself into somebody unsettled by this new zeal to judge and condemn, often on very weak evidence. That's So You've Been Publicly Shamed, read by me, John Ronson, and abridged specially for BBC Sounds. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered.

There was somebody out there who'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.