Woman's Hour - Reverend Traci Blackmon mobilising mothers in the US against guns

Episode Date: September 18, 2019

Whilst the UK is dealing with a serious knife crime problem affecting teenagers especially in our cities, America is dealing with a gun problem. In the city of St. Louis, Missouri, the number of children who’ve been killed by a gun keeps on rising. According to latest figures 23 have died this year, most of them were caught in the cross fire, doing normal things like playing outside their house. Mothers, some who’ve lost a child,, marched in the City last weekend to express their anger. Siobhann Tighe meets the organiser, the Reverend Traci Blackmon, A new BBC drama series ‘World on Fire’ tells the story of World War Two through the lives of ordinary people, from all sides of the conflict. Jenni talks to one of the stars of the series Lesley Manville about taking on a role that's so different from that of Cathy in the series ‘Mum’. Lucia Osborne-Crowley was fifteen when she was violently raped by a stranger. In her book ‘I Choose Elena’ she's writesabout the aftermath - her silence, shame, and, what she feels is the lasting impact on her body. And we speak to the woman who led Europe to victory over the US in the Solheim Cup Presenter Jenni Murray Producer Beverley PurcellGuest; Lucia Osborne-Crowley Guest; Lesley Manville Guest; Catriona MatthewReporter Siobhann Tighe

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 Wednesday's edition of the Woman's Hour podcast. In today's programme, the captain of the European women's golf team who beat the USA to win the Solheim Cup. How did Katrina Matthew lead them to victory? Gun crime in America and the parents who are marching to express their anger. In the city of St. Louis alone, 23 children have been caught in crossfire this year. In 2007, Lucia Osborne Crowley was violently raped by a stranger.

She was 15. Her book, I Choose Elena, describes the lasting impact on her body and her mind. And another of your best days, Sophie Constance sent us a photo of an adventure holiday. Now, this coming Sunday sees the last episode of the current series of Peaky Blinders and the following Sunday, the 29th of September,

the peak time Sunday night slot of 9pm will be home to a new seven-part serial called World on Fire. It begins in Poland in 1939 as the German troops begin their invasion and over the seven weeks will tell the story of the first year of the Second World War through the lives of people in England and across Europe. In England, there's a stark class divide. Sean Bean plays the father of Lois, who's in love with Harry. Harry's mother, Robina, played by Leslie Manville, does not approve. Sean Bean's character is a working-class widowed bus driver. Robina seems really rather pleased that her son has been sent to Warsaw as a translator, a job

suited to her ambitions for him. Well here, Lois goes to Robina's house to ask if she's heard from Harry as news of the conflict begins to emerge. The thing I know about men, Lois, is they do not write.

They don't understand passion on the page. They have no desire or inclination to express their feelings. He writes beautiful letters. At least he wrote beautiful letters. Romantic letters. They were in his handwriting, were they dear? Well, he wouldn't be the first man to have his secretary add the kind of florid affectations every young girl likes to hear. I know, Harry. Perhaps not like you do. But I do.

He's not like that. No man is ever like that. Until they are. He told me he loved me. Did he really? How very Harry of him. I just need to know he's all right. Harry must have come to his senses.

And I advise you to do the same. Julia Brown as Lois and Leslie Manville as Robina. Leslie, rather different from the last Mum we saw you play in Mum, how would you describe Robina? Well, she's a snob, as you can tell from that clip. saw you play in Mum. How would you describe Robina? Well, she's a snob, as you can tell from that clip. She's an upper-middle-class Mancunian who is a widower and she is wanting the very, very, very best for her son.

But as the series goes on, you obviously start to see the other side of her. You do go inside her head a bit and her heart even a little bit to see what she's really about. But yeah, she's a very, very different mother from Cathy and Mum. What drew you to a series about the start of World War II? Script, really. I mean, for me, it always begins with script. This is written by Peter Bowker

and it's a real rich tapestry and I loved the fact that there is a central character. It is Robina's son, played by Jonah Howard King. He is the thread through the whole thing. But I loved the thought that, you know,

there's going to be Helen Hunt, plays the American war correspondent. There are all these other stories. And so to do something where you are part of a larger plan appealed to me. But script always, really. And what a fascinating character. It is a genuinely star-studded cast. You, Sean Bean, Helen Hunt

as the journalist. And I wondered, I've only seen the first episode, obviously. Me too. But I wondered how much time do the cast of a series like this actually spend together? Oh, well, I didn't ever meet Helen Hunt. I never got to go to Prague,

where they shot the scenes for Poland and France. Yes, I really spent my time with Julia, Sean and Jonah, and that was it. So I'd love to meet Helen Hunt. I don't expect you to be much liked yet. I'm sure she'll improve as the series goes on, as snobby Robina. And I wonder how different is it to be playing a potentially dislikable character as opposed to one who was so loved, like Cathy?

Yes, well, I think the thing that will redeem Robina is her wit. Peter has written some fantastically funny lines, arch, dry humour for me to deliver. And I think that will save Robina from the nation loathing her. Cathy was often described as downtrodden by her really rather selfish son. Would you have described her as downtrodden? Not at all. I think Cathy completely knew who she was.

She was a woman absolutely in control of full knowledge of her emotions and her feelings and the way she wanted to conduct her life. She was as solid as a rock. Yeah, her son misunderstood her, but her son and his girlfriend, you know, they thought of Cathy as old and past it. And the great thing about that series, which so many people have mentioned and admired about it, was that it was a middle-aged love story,

which you don't often see on television. Harry's not the perfect son either we discover even in the first episode and i know you've got a son who's 31 i think what does he think of the sons you play with i've had an amazing cast list of um i've been mother to james corden uh way back in a Mike Lee film. I've had all sorts of sons. What does he think of them? I'm not entirely sure.

I really don't know. I mean, you know, he's been a great, he is a great son. But, yeah, all the others are fiction, aren't they? He's the real McCoy. Does he watch you when you're on the train? Oh, yeah, all the others are fiction, aren't they? He's the real McCoy. Does he watch you when you're on the team? Oh, yeah, he does. And he works behind the camera, on the camera crew. And I have occasionally worked with him.

And that's really nice. I keep seeing him and thinking, what are you doing here? And I forget he's on the camera team. Yeah. Now, everybody did love Mum, I think. And we all thought, oh, there must be another series. Spoiler alert, we know they got together at the end. Will there be another series?

No. Stefan Goloszewski, who wrote it, was always very clear from the get-go that it would be three series. He knew the arc of every series and where it was going to go and how it was going to end. And we're not like the Americans here who love to do eight, nine, ten series or seasons, as they call it. We we we bit more reserved here. And we know when something is perfectly formed and when it's done. And I couldn't I couldn't think of a better ending for Mum than the one we got. It was very romantic. It was. We all adored it.

And naughty as well. Yes, it was. And great for a middle-aged woman to be a bit naughty. Yes. We last spoke when you were Oscar nominated for Phantom Thread. Yeah. What doors did that nomination open for you? Oh, I mean, it was quite bizarre, Jenny, the doors that it opened really instantly.

I mean, what feels like within days I was offered a film which is virtually a two hander with Liam Neeson called Ordinary Love, which we shot in Belfast last year and has just been at Toronto Film Festival. I've just been doing another film in Calgary with Kevin Costner and Diane Lane. I mean, I couldn't have wished for a better career here. I was not looking for anything. I was never going to go to America and sit there and wait for someone to employ me. But Phantom Thread came absolutely out of the blue. And then, of course, an Oscar nomination makes a difference. I wouldn't have thought it, but it does.

So everything's in, for me, everything feels the same. It's just that this American door has opened a little bit. And I'll dip my toe in it when I want to, with the same criteria that I give to all of the jobs I choose to do. Is the script good? Is the director good? Are the other actors interesting? Am I going to be able to do something with it? And those rules will carry on applying.

Now, I think Ordinary Love, it's your next film to open and it'll open in December? In December, yeah. London Film Festival as well in october i know you play a woman who develops breast cancer yes how easy was it to cope with that oh it was quite hard but one of the great things was that uh in the scenes where where um joan is where Joan is going through the biopsy and the chemo. We had real nurses doing that. So they properly talked me through it. And their stories I found so deeply moving.

I felt very humbled to be an actor where these next to these people who really on a day-to-day level do proper life-saving work so that was key for me to be with with the real deal um but yeah not easy and not not not easy to um experience um the the hair loss and um my eldest sister had a breast cancer she went through it um and uh so i've i've had it in the family and experienced it but um but again ordinary love you know the backdrop of it is this breast cancer but it's it is it is also a story about a very loving, long, long together couple who are very much in love still and still desire each other and want each other and who have to navigate this life changing illness that has taken hold of her. Leslie Manville will look forward to it and we will also look forward to a week on Sunday and the new

series and thank you very much indeed for being with us this morning. Pleasure. Now the Solheim Cup for those not in the know about golf is the women's equivalent of the Ryder Cup for which of course men play. Well last weekend a team

from America played against a European team at Gleneagles in Scotland and the European team won. Katrina Matthew was the captain for Europe and joins us from Edinburgh. Katrina, hello. Hello there. Now, it was a very close finish, 14.5 to 13.5.

What exactly do those numbers signify? I think it really just shows how close it was over the three days. It came down to the last game, the last putt, so it really couldn't have been closer or more exciting. It looked kind of the whole day on Sunday as though we weren't quite going to get to 14.5 to win. And then suddenly the last three games we won. So, you know, it couldn't have been scripted better, actually.

What was your response when Suzanne Pettersson dropped in a six-foot putt to win the Solheim Cup for Europe? Just pure joy, actually. The excitement. We had just heard that Bronte Law, who was the group behind had just won her match so us watching we knew that was the putt that had to go in for us to win. So you know when it went in I think the whole team we just kind of raced onto the green to congratulate Suzanne. It's a moment I'll never forget actually and the crowd were just fantastic. I've never seen so many people at a ladies' golf event. How did you go about choosing the team? Well, eight qualify automatically from kind of world rankings and a points list that's run for two years.

And then I have four wildcard picks, of which Suzanne was one. She was a slightly controversial pick because she hadn't played much in the last kind of year and a half because she was just coming back from having a baby. So, you know, I was pleased for her to get that winning point and show everyone that she deserved her spot on the team. Now you are a former winner of the British Open. I wondered, how does this team win compare with a big personal victory?

I think actually nearly better actually. I mean personally for myself and my family that obviously winning the British Open was fantastic but you know to win with a team golf's such an individual sport that it's so nice to have you know your teammates and all the other captains and helpers there's a huge group of us so it makes the celebration very good. There's been more coverage of the women's game this year, I think, than I've ever seen before. How much is the profile of women's golf beginning to change? I think it's really beginning to change. I mean, I think probably over the perhaps about the last 10 years, you've really seen a huge increase in women's sport in general on the television.

And I believe the Solheim Cup had the biggest viewing figures we've ever had for women's golf events so yeah there's definitely more on television which is great and I think that just the crowds that were there just you know I think there was a lot of non-golfers who perhaps didn't go to golf events and you know hopefully that's kind of inspired them to watch more or to go out and play golf. Now the Ryder Cup and the Solheim Cup are slightly different, obviously, in that the Ryder is played by men and the Solheim by women. But what's the difference in tactics when they're slightly different in the way that they're played? The actual format is exactly the same. We play over three days and the first two days is, you know, foursomes and four balls. So the actual format of the tournament is exactly the same. We play over three days and the first two days is foursomes and four balls.

So the actual format of the tournament is exactly the same. It's just obviously the Ryder Cup's the men and the Solheim Cup's the women. So tactics-wise, I think a lot depends on how the first day's gone, how the second day's gone as to how you put out your team. So at the outset then, how do you plan a team game tactically from the outset? I think certainly for the Friday the first day a lot goes on perhaps you know people's form coming into the event how they've perhaps played you know for probably the four or six weeks before that obviously I had some vice captains so we kind of look at different pairings you look at lots of

different things personality what golf ball perhaps they play what the golf course is like what perhaps strategy four sims is where you know one person hits and then the next person hits to the next shot so that's quite a tactical game so it's lots of lots of different things you look into to think up your pairings. Now, obviously, the captain and the vice captains don't play in the Solheim Cup. How much do you miss actually playing and just watching other women do it? Yeah, it's quite strange. I had played in nine previous ones, so this is my first time captaining. It's very different. I think I'm kind of over having to play under that kind of pressure so it was quite nice sitting back and watching them

actually. But yeah it's a different kind of pressure because you know you can't do anything. You just put your team out and then it's really up to them and you're kind of sitting on the sidelines and you can't really do anything. You're just hoping that they perform, which luckily they did. But why does the captain not play? I think it's too big a job. You wouldn't be able to, you know, because when the people are out playing in the morning, they're maybe halfway around

and you have to put the pairings in for the afternoon. So, you know, I think it's just not, there's just not enough time and it's the kind of thing I think it tends to be. The captain is a player who's probably played in a few before and is coming towards the end of their career. So it's like an honour and a privilege for having played in so many before. Well, congratulations on your win. And thank you very much indeed for joining us today.

Thank you very much. Now, for the last few years, the UK has been reeling from the serious problem of knife crime, which has been affecting young people in cities across the country. America is also losing children and teenagers to violent crime, but there, the weapon of choice is the gun. In the city of St. Louis alone, in the state of Missouri, the number of children who've been killed by a gun keeps rising. The latest figure from only a few days ago is 23 this year. Most of them were caught in crossfire doing normal things like playing outside their houses.

Mothers, some of whom have lost a child in this way, marched in St Louis at the weekend to express their anger. Siobhan Tai met the organiser, the Reverend Tracey Blackman, as she put the arrangements in place. Call Stacey Newman. Calling Stacey Newman. Like millions of Americans, the Reverend Tracey Blackman spends so much time in her car, it's become a kind of office.

The hands-free is always on, and it's perfectly legal to make calls this way. Hello, this is Stacey. Hey, Stacey, it's Tracy. How are you? I am good, thanks. How are you doing? I am well, and you're on the car phone, so be nice. When I was with Tracy, she was planning a mother's march. Just a few days before, a seven-year-old had been shot and killed.

And just days afterwards, two children, eight years old and five years old, had died. Tonight I'm having a call about doing another mother's march. You remember five years ago in October we did a Mother's March in Clayton? Sure. And someone called me last night reminding me of that Mother's March and saying it may be time for us to go in the streets again. But the same kind of ethos, remember when we did it before? Mothers who had lost children all kinds of ways showed up. And we want to make it a community cry of mothers saying we cannot continue to sit by while our children are dying.

The 23 deaths this year include children who've been killed by playing with a gun, which happened just a few days ago to a three-year-old. But mostly the number refers to children who tragically were in the way when a bullet was fired. For you, Siobhan, it's knife crime because you are coming from London. But in the United States, it's gun violence.

We have an epidemic of gun violence. In St. Louis in particular, we have a problem with gun violence in our inner cities. So what is happening this summer is that we have had a rash of young children being killed. How young? As young as four and averaging about eight and ten. These are not kids who are involved in any kind of action with guns. These are children who were being children and were in the wrong places. Some of them were killed in drive-bys.

Some of them were killed while they were in their parents' arms. Some of them were killed while they were playing with their toys. Some of them were killed in their homes. And is this widely reported? It's widely reported here, but in the United States, we have this happening all over. Chicago has as many deaths as we do because of gun violence, and largely it's communal violence. The media has been reporting on the deaths of the children pretty accurately, and there's no common thread except that it's random violence. Some of it's random violence.

One case that's up now probably is less random, and it was the killing of an entire family. But all we know for sure is that there's violence in our streets that is uncontrolled and that our children are suffering the brunt of that. Is it affecting black youngsters more than white youngsters? Absolutely, absolutely. In St. Louis, it is heavily impacting our black neighborhoods and mostly neighborhoods who are economically challenged. We've just stepped outside because every evening you can hear the insects in the trees and they're buzzing away. As a faith leader, what are you going to do about this problem of gun violence?

What are you suggesting that you and your colleagues do? Well, we're going to start by calling mothers into the streets to cry out for our children and to cry out for the blood that's been shed in our streets and hopefully mobilize our communities in ways that begin to form techniques and practices of protecting our children for ourselves. And that's going to take the entire community. It's not to leave fathers out. There will be a role for fathers to play as well. But as the carriers of children, we want to come together.

Not just, you don't have to have birthed a child to be out there, right? That's not what I'm saying. But we want to cry out as women and say, we need to stop the blood from pouring in our streets. Reverend Tracey Blackman was talking to Siobhan Tai in St. Louis, Missouri. Still to come in today's programme, another of your best days. Sophie Constance sent us a picture of a holiday adventure and the serial episode eight of Blackwater.

Now, you may have missed earlier in the week, Jane's interview with the president of the Liberal Democrats, Sal Brinton, on Monday. And yesterday, she discussed flexible working and how to convince employers to offer more flexible roles right from the start. If you've missed the live programme, you can catch up. All you have to do is download the BBC Sounds app, search for Woman's Hour Hour and there you will find us. Now in 2007, when she was only 15 and a brilliant gymnast, Lucia Osborne Crowley was out with a group of friends when she was singled out, dragged to a toilet and violently raped by a strange man. Her book, I Choose Elena, describes the aftermath of that crime and after years of silence and shame, she's tried to regain her sense of self and her ability to form relationships. Lucia, what's the significance of the title I Choose Elena?

Well, thank you so much for having me, Jenny. So the title of this book is a reference to Elena Ferrante, who is a writer. Famously, she wrote the Neapolitan series, which is four novels about two women growing up in Italy. And I was reading the novels. I was very, very immersed in them when I started acknowledging personally that this had happened to me. very immersed in them when I started acknowledging personally

that this had happened to me. I started having more and more nightmares about it. And so I was very involved in her world when that was happening. And the novels are, to me, very much about survival. The two women's lives are beset by violence in so many different forms. And this was the first time I'd read a story about women being able to squarely confront that. And it was the first time I realized that accepting that I had been a victim of violence might not be an admission of weakness, but might actually be an act of courage,

which was all I could see in these two women that I was reading about every day and thinking about all the time. Why did you decide finally to write about your experience? So this is an interesting one because I didn't decide, I definitely didn't decide to publish it until right before I did publish it. So when I was getting treatment, I went into all of my medical appointments pretending that I was reporting a story about someone else. I'm a journalist and I found that was a really good coping mechanism

and it gave me some emotional distance from what was happening. And I was very bad at, uh, vulnerability at the time, but I was very good at showing up for work. Uh, so I just pretended I was writing a story about someone else and I collected all my notes, uh, and I never intended to do anything with them, but I got to the end of that process and I realized how much I had learned and that I had these pages and pages of notes of all this information

that I had never known about trauma and about sexual violence. And it just occurred to me, you know, the journalist in me just thought, people really need to know this. This is really helpful information. What did actually happen that night in 2007? So I was out with some friends doing karaoke in Sydney. I grew up in Sydney. And we were approached by a group of men. I would say that they were about 35 at the time. And one of them took me away, kind of grabbed me by the hand and took me up a flight of stairs in a McDonald's and locked me in a

bathroom stall and raped me multiple times. And pulled a knife on you as well. Yes. You didn't talk to the police, your family or your friends. Why not? To be honest, it did not even cross my mind to tell anyone because I was so convinced that this was my fault and that I had done something to deserve it.

And I don't remember ever forming that opinion, but I know that by this time in my life I understood on a fundamental level that I would be blamed for what had happened and that I shouldn't ever admit it to anyone. So there wasn't a process by which I kind of decided not to tell anyone. I immediately, as soon as it had happened and I got in a taxi and I was on the way home, I immediately just turned my mind to covering it up. You were a leading gymnast.

You represented Australia. How conscious were you of your body and what it was capable of before this happened to you? Very, very, very conscious because I had to be because I was kind of, I was performing routines every day that were very dangerous. And so I had to be so aware of everything that was happening physically so that I didn't hurt myself. And that was kind of the one thing that we were always taught as gymnasts, how to avoid injury, because the last thing we wanted was to have our careers derailed. So I spent so much time thinking about exactly how all my muscles worked and studying physiotherapy books and studying sports medicine and understanding the biology of it all. And I was kind of an expert in it by the time I was 15 because you have to be to be at that level of athleticism.

And how did that change after the attack? So it changed very suddenly because firstly, I think I was very badly injured by the attack and I had been a very serious gymnast for a long time. And a big part of that is knowing how to treat injuries when we do get them to make sure that we can go back to training as soon as possible. So I'd always known what to do when I was hurt. And this was the first time in my life that I had absolutely no idea and I had no textbook for what was happening to me and I was internally very badly injured and I was bruised and I had no tricks to kind of help my body recover

and that was really confusing to me. So I just kind of waited for it to heal. And then after it did, I just kind of stopped having that conversation with my body because I felt very disgusted by it. And so I didn't really acknowledge it at all. You developed some acute abdominal pain, all kinds of problems, ended up in hospital. How much do you believe that there's a link between the trauma and the subsequent pain and physical suffering that you've had? Yeah, I really do believe that there's a link. I mean, I'm not a doctor. And, you know, I say this in the book, it's, I will never be able to know for sure whether my pain was a consequence

of this. But what I've learned about trauma and about shame and about holding trauma in the body for long periods of time is that it can cause dysfunction and it can cause physical pain. And I mean, it really does seem to me that these two things are connected in my case. Now, you have felt shame for such a long time. Why? When the attack was clearly not your fault. And we've heard that endlessly for years and years. If you're raped, it's not your fault. Shame is really, really interesting to me. I've been thinking a lot about it in the last 12 months because it is an emotion that's based on ideology. It's always given to us by others.

So shame is kind of put on us by society. It's not an organic feeling. It's not something that we come up with ourselves. It's something that we're given. And it's something that we're given in such a way that it becomes an emotional response. So it feels the kind of hot shame that you feel about sexual assault, for example, feels like an immediate response, but actually it's based on a whole history of society telling us that we should feel ashamed of this kind of thing. So it's really interesting to me because, you know, I don't believe that this was my fault. I

really strongly don't believe that now. And I would hope that if you'd asked me as a teenager, I wouldn't have believed it then. But those kind of rational thoughts are powerless against something like shame, which I've realized is one of the most powerful and dangerous emotions. You suggest in the book that the damage done to you is irreversible. Why? Well, what I have learned from a lot of my doctors and a lot of the books that I've read in writing this book is that the body responds to trauma that is held on and not resolved in a particular way. Doctors are very good at treating post-traumatic stress symptoms if they are able to deal with them straight away. But if they're held in the body

and the muscles and the nervous system, and particularly the autoimmune system, they can break down certain parts of the body and they can cause pain that becomes chronic. So I think that if I had not felt the amount of shame that I did and if I had been able to say, I need a doctor, I need to go to hospital, I need to see the police, it would have been possible to have all of the physical therapy that I'm having now, all of the psychotherapy that I'm having now, in a way that could have resolved my symptoms. Whereas, because I took 10 years to do any of that, it seems to me like the pain

and a lot of the physical symptoms are more permanent now that this happened when a 15 year old teenager under normal circumstances just coming into thinking about boyfriends going out with boyfriends and maybe sometime later having consensual sex and i know that you've tried to use consensual sex to kind of erase the assault. What happened as a virgin because that was the conversation we were all having. And it was the only way I could think about it. And I thought, well, I don't want to think about that anymore. So I will just solve that problem myself and go out and have sex consensually so that I can, you know, never, ever think about this again. And then I kind of continued to do that, I think, because I thought that it would take over in my mind this kind of memory of the assault because the rape happened before I had had sex consensually or done anything sexually intimate.

So the rape was the only script that I had and I thought that if I went out and engaged in sex that I thought that I was choosing, I could override that, but it didn't work. Why? Were you not really choosing? You said you thought you were choosing. No. So, I mean, I was choosing, but I was choosing based on a reason that didn't really hold up because what I was in fact doing was re-traumatising myself quite significantly. this very violent encounter because I thought that doing that might put me into the realm of people who can, you know, have sex for pleasure or, you know. But because I didn't understand how trauma works and because I didn't

understand how much my body was kind of reeling from this assault, it affected me very, very badly, both physically in the sense that it was very, very painful and often for days and weeks I would be debilitated by the pain I would be in after having sex, and also emotionally because I felt a lot of shame connected with it every single time. And I just really hated myself when I did it. What do you hope other people will take, other women will take away from your book?

The main thing is that while I, you know, I don't have a solution to the ubiquity of rape or sexual assault, I wish I did, but I can't stop those things from happening. But shame is something that we can do something about. It is so destructive, but it is also relatively easy to fix in that every single time we have a conversation about this, you kind of add a little crack to the big wall of shame. So what I want people to take away is just that every time you talk to someone about this, every time you ask the question, every time you make someone feel comfortable talking about it, you are doing something incredibly powerful and incredibly beneficial. Lucia Osborne Crowley, thank you very much indeed for being with us this morning. And there are links on the Woman's Hour website for help and support if this maybe has happened to you or touched you closely. I was talking to Lucia Osborne Crowley and we've had a lot of response from you to what she said. Someone who didn't want us to name her said her comments on the shame being held

in her physical body and how she would be blamed if she'd spoken up at the time really spoke to me and have helped me with some things which happened to me as a 10 year old 46 years ago. I've felt shame all my life from not being able to defend myself against a physical abuser who sexually abused me. I'm still working through it. I appreciate so much the comments about the physical impact and I would like you to pass my comments onto that wonderful, brave sister in trauma. Charlotte said, Such bravery and open honesty from Lucia. It's so refreshing to hear her perspective,

which I wholly share. It's not only rape that inspires this reaction to sex. Traumatic sexual experiences of all kinds at all ages can make sex a burden or horror for many of us. Thank you, Lucia. Langley said, listening and feeling a mix of rage and sadness about what happened to you, but full of admiration for the way you're able to talk about it so articulately. I'm sure your book will help others. And Helena said the problem is the low rates of investigation, arrests, prosecutions and sentencing.

Rape is being effectively decriminalised in this country because of this. Unless you're from the upper middle class, then you get top quality service. Tomorrow, I'll be talking to Cecilia Ahern about why, after 17 years, she has finally decided to write a sequel to P.S. I Love You. The British-born Mauritian cook, Selina Periampile, takes us on a journey around the diverse cuisine of Mauritius and its neighbouring islands. She'll cook the perfect Maldivian tuna curry. And Dr Xu Ping Wang exposed the spread of hepatitis and HIV infection through contaminated blood and plasma in China two decades ago.

The story of how tens of thousands of impoverished villagers and hospital patients were infected in Henan province is performed in a play, The King of Hell's Palace at the Hampstead Theatre. The whistleblowing former public health official and the playwright Francis Yotu Kauhig

will join me tomorrow. I hope you will join me too, two minutes past ten for the live programme. Until then, bye-bye. You're Dead to Me is a new history podcast for people who just don't like history, or at least people who forgot to learn any at school. In each of our episodes,

I'm joined by a top-notch comedian and an expert historian to rummage through the most fascinating things you should know about the global past. You'll learn about Boudicca, Captain Blackbeard, Harriet Tubman, the Spartans, the history of men's and women's football, and so much more.

To fill in the blanks in your historical memory banks, subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake.

No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.