Woman's Hour - Riki Lindhome, Dutch appeal, Student loans, Author Lucy Apps

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

Police in the Netherlands have taken the unusual step of launching a campaign on social media to track down women and girls who were blackmailed into sharing explicit pictures of themselves on line. Detectives have found 50 alleged victims of the man who has pleaded guilty. They're aged 13 to 20 and include those in the UK. But they believe there may have been many more. Our reporter Anna Holligan, in the Netherlands, has been following this.Riki Lindhome is a comedy songwriter and actor who went viral for her song Hysteria, about medically induced orgasms, and her break up anthem, So Long Farewell, on behalf of Baroness Schraeder from The Sound of Music. She's also appeared in cult TV series The Big Bang Theory and played therapist Dr Valerie Kinbott in the the hugely popular Netflix sequel to The Addams Family, Wednesday. Currently on stage at the Soho Theatre in London, she talks to presenter Anita Rani about her very personal and poignant one-woman comedy, Dead Inside, which documents her own experiences of infertility and longing for a family as well as having a child through surrogacy. Student loans have made the headlines multiple times this year with critics calling them unfair. But does student debt affect women differently? Amy Brooker from the feminist economics group the Women's Budget Group thinks so. This week she's written a blog post to highlight her own student loan story and why women may be impacted more than men in repaying their loans. This comes as the government’s Treasury Committee calls for people to share their experiences of student loans. Amy joins us along with Kate Ogden, a Senior Research Economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, who focuses on higher education. Lucy Apps’ debut novel, Gloria Don’t Speak, has recently been longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction. The novel paints a tender portrait of 19-year-old Gloria, a young woman with a learning disability. When she forms an unlikely friendship with a man named Jack, it offers her a new sense of connection - but after an act of violence, their relationship is forced to come to an end. Lucy speak to Anita about her book and why she wanted to explore themes of vulnerability, connection, and agency. Presenter: Anita Rani Producer: Sarah Jane Griffiths

Hello, I'm Anita Rani and welcome to Woman's Hour from BBC Radio 4. Just to say that for rights reasons, the music in the original radio broadcast has been removed for this podcast. Good morning and welcome to the programme. Actress and comedian Ricky Lindholm has a one-woman show that will have you laughing and crying at the same time. It's called Dead Inside and she tells the story of her desperate journey to try and become a mother. It's raw and hilarious and she'll be here to tell us. all about it. Are you someone with student loan debt? How are you managing it? Do you worry about the debt your children have acquired? Well, we'll be understanding how student loans impact women's

lives and as always we would like you to get in touch with your own experiences. 84844 is the text number. And a debut novel that's been long listed for the women's prize, Gloria Don't Speak. It's a story that centres a woman with learning disabilities. Lucy Apps, the author who is also a GP, will be here to tell us about that. Get in touch with us about anything you hear on the program. You are always welcome to share your experiences and thoughts. The text number is 84844. The WhatsApp number is 0-3700-100-444. And if you'd like to email the program, then go to our website. But first, police in the Netherlands have taken the unusual step of launching a campaign on social media to track down women and girls who were blackmailed into sharing explicit pictures of themselves online.

detectives have found 50 alleged victims of the man who has pleaded guilty. They're aged 13 to 20 and include those in the UK. But they believe there have been many, many more. Our reporter Anna Holligan in the Netherlands has been following this. Anna, welcome to the programme. First of all, give us an overview. Lots of people know nothing about this. What do we know about this case?

Thanks, Anita. It's shocking and it shows just how powerful and scary one man with a smartphone can be and essentially imprisoned young girls, some as young as 13 years old, in their bedrooms using apps, regular apps that were all on every day like Snapchat to rape, abuse according to the police and the prosecutors, young women all over the world. This is an international investigation. So what he is accused of doing is going online, going on Snapchat, posing as a teenage girl, and then coercing other young women to send him photos.

And then the abuse started to become more extreme, more intense. He started blackmailing them saying, if you don't share more graphic images, more degrading images, then I will share those initial images with your friends and family online. We're increasingly hearing about this kind of sex distortion, as police say. And he was even targeting young girls in class saying, if you don't send me a picture of your body and 10 minutes, then I will share everything. So they had to go into the toilets at school to take these pictures.

A really, really disturbing case. And then he was going on telegram, the app, and selling those child abuse images. How unusual then is this social media campaign that's been launched to, like put into context. He's already been caught. but the police are asking for more people to come forward if they know anything about it. Tell us more.

Exactly right. So he was arrested in January 2025 in Spike Canisou, which is town near Rochardam. And the police have... Oh, Anna's line has just... Sorry, Anna, your line is... You're glitching a little bit. I'm going to just get you to start again if that's okay.

Just to... Canada. Okay, I think we will... I think we will... I think we will, I think we'll come back to, come back to Anna. 84844 is the text number. Let's just fix her line and then we'll get back to her. If you'd like to get in touch with the program and tell me your thoughts on student loans,

then you can email the program. Let's see if Anna is back. Okay, no, we will come back to Anna. Let's move on to the next guest. Joining me in the studio is the comedy songwriter and actor Ricky Lindholm. She went viral for her song, Hysteria, about medically induced orgasms, and her breakup anthem, So Long Farewell, on behalf of Baroness Schrader from The Sound of Music.

She also guest starred in the cult TV series, The Big Bang Theory, and played therapist Dr Valerie Kinbot in the hugely popular Netflix sequel to the Adams family Wednesday. But Ricky's currently on stage at the Soho Theatre in London, with a very raw personal and poignant project, a one-woman comedy show called Dead Inside. It documents her own experiences of infertility, desperately longing for a child.

And just a warning that this discussion may include a conversation around baby loss. Ricky, welcome to Woman's Hour. Hi, thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here. It is absolutely our pleasure to have you here. Why did you want to talk about your, you call it your fertility journey,

Yes. And you explore this in a, like I said, it's raw, it's honest, it's funny, it's hilarious. You cry and you laugh. You put it all out there. Why did you want to do this? Well, it all started when it was a couple years ago, I started having all these calls with people. It was like friends of friends and they would be calling about different things just to talk, so they wanted someone to talk them through a piece of their fertility journey, whether they were adopting or freezing their eggs or, you know, using a surrogate. And I really really. I realized I was like, not an expert, but I had been through all of these things so I could give them my perspective. And then I had, it ended up having several calls a week with people until I was like, oh, we don't know about this stuff and we don't talk about this stuff. And I started looking to see if there was anything about this anywhere. And there's kind of not. And I've been through all of it. And so it kind of felt like I felt like I had to. It felt like I felt compelled because I was like I think it's me.

I'm like, someone has to talk about this and I think it's me. I think you are that person. Yeah. Having watched it. Yeah. You have a lot of experience. Yes. You start by saying, though, you hate it when people call what you went through a journey.

Yeah, because it makes it sound whimsical. And I also think we don't do that for every medical thing. Like in the show, I say there's no gout journey. True. There's no ringworm journey. It's just like, yeah, it makes it sound kind of fun when nothing about it is fun. And you start the show talking. about your plan.

Yep. Right. You were 34 years old. What was the plan? My plan was to find a partner, have sex, and then have a baby in that order. So a real crazy plan. So that was plan A? Yeah, plan A. Did you have a backup? Plan B was science. Yes. I was like, okay, I'm going to freeze my eggs and, you know, I'm going to have frozen embryos just in case something doesn't work out. And then, you know, plan A and B kind of went out the window. And I was on to plan C, D-D-E-F and it took like 10 years for it to happen. See, when I was watching this, I initially, straight away, off the back, by the way, this

opened up so many questions in my mind. So it's delightful that you hear that to answer them. Was conversation around egg freezing happening at that time amongst you and your peers and your, like how did, like it's just sort of not even on the radar in many ways here? I wonder if in the States there's a different, are you told about it younger? How did it even come up as an option? No, it wasn't then. It is now. Now it's a big thing in the States. But back then, this was like, you know, 2015 or something like that. And it, oh gosh, even earlier, it was, gosh, was it 2012 or something? I can't. It was a long time ago. And it wasn't a big thing. But then a friend of mine got her eggs frozen because she was about to have cancer treatment. And she was telling me about it. And I was like 34. And I know that fertility kind of goes off a cliff. sometimes at 35. So I was like, well, maybe I'll just go and check thinking that I was totally

fine. I was like waiting for the good news. And the doctor was like, whoa, this is not great. And you need to start right now if you ever want to have a child. And I was like, oh, the doctor's like, you should have come in 10 years ago. And I was like, oh, I had no idea. Because I didn't know at the time the infertility ran in my family. I didn't know that either. And so I started the process truly that day, which is kind of strange. I went and got my shots and I started egg freezing right then. And I did it three times at 34. And it was my friends were like, what are you doing? Like it was, it was a rare thing to do then. And then I had a TV show called The Garfunkel a Note show. And we did an episode about it. And our props people went to the medical house to get the, you know, all the props for it. And they didn't even have them.

So they were like, this must have never been on TV because these medical prop houses in Los Angeles have everything. There's a million medical shows and they did not have the fertility drugs. So we had to make them ourselves off of photos that I'd taken of mine. So that's how early it was in the process. Pioneering it back then as well,

talking about this in sort of very public ways. But your plan A initially was going to plan. You'd met somebody, you got pregnant naturally and you found out you were having a girl. Yep. Tell me what you're. was this? How old are you? This was, I was 38. Yeah. This was

in 2019. And, or 2018, yeah, the end of 2018. And then in the second trimester, there were complications. And you know, it didn't end up happening. And yeah, it was

pretty devastating. But it was, at the time, I was like, I'm actually too old to mourn this. Like, so I was like, biologically, I don't have time. I have to, like, rush right into the next thing. So I just started like rushing into the next fertility thing and the next thing and next thing. And it wasn't really until a few years later that I sort of emotionally crashed. And I was like, oh, there's a lot happen. And I didn't even like give myself a day to think

about it. Yeah. That bit really stuck with me when you say you've always lived your life with six, seven, or five, six, seven, eight. Uh-huh. Yep. And you realize that you were doing five, six, eight. Yeah. I'm missing out the seven. And the seven is the bit where you're, Yeah, in the hero's journey, you know, step seven is the, you know, approach the inmost cave, where you actually deal with your emotions and you live in how you feel and you process it. And I was just skipping it and thinking I could skip it. Like, I don't know if it was naivete or arrogance or whatever, but I was like, nope, I'm just going to sail right past this. But, you know, a lot of times for women, that's where our power is.

And I was just skipping it. And I was missing it. And it wasn't until I really sat with it and sort of integrated it into my heart and my life and my body that I felt like I could tell this story and move forward. Yeah, that's what I mean. You cover so much ground in your one-woman show, just giving us pause for thought there. Like how many of us, how many women listening, I wonder, miss out step seven. Yeah. Because you just think, well, I've just got to get on with it.

Yeah. There's so much to do. And I need to keep moving. And keep calm and carry on. And when you say that that's the bit where our power is. It really is. Historically, that's where, you know, we're taught to be in touch with all of our emotions except anger. You know, and we, you know, men are taught, you know, the saying they're taught to be in touch with none of their emotions except anger.

So, you know, when we don't do that, we're really doing ourselves a disservice. And I was, I, and it really hit me later. There's so many bits of it that are quite shocking as well. So you name your, the pregnancy and it's a little girl, your honey bear. Honey bear, yep. And you're famous at this point, right? You're on cult TV show The Big Bang Theory. You're in Wednesday.

Yeah. And you were recognized in hospital. Yes. That was really wild. It was actually one of my best friends was in the same hospital giving birth. I'd had to have a procedure for my pregnancy, the one that didn't for Honey Bear. And it was botched and I ended up in the ER. And I was in the emergency room while she was giving birth in another wing of the hospital.

hospital. And then while the woman had an ultrasound wand inside me, she recognized me from the Big Bang Theory. And I was like, this is so surreal. But it also was like a germ of how this show could be a comedy. I was like, this is so ridiculous. And then my friend and I had a joke for years like, well, she got a baby, but I got recognized. So we both had great days. You know, that was a horrible day. I was like, you know, trying to make light of it, I guess, in my mind. Yeah. But well, I kind of It breaks the tension as well, doesn't it? Yes. Because you're telling us a very hard story. We're kind of on this journey with you.

We're living it with you and you're living it again. Yes. And then in that moment you make us laugh. Yeah. That's what I try to do because I don't want to sit in it too long. I basically want to walk people through the same emotional journey I was on. Yeah. Which is like at first it was like, oh, I'm freezing my eggs.

And I thought that would be my whole journey. It was like, I had to do egg freezing. Can you believe it? And it was like, that was like, mile one of a marathon. And then as the show goes on, I let my body have more gravitas. I let there be more moments between laughs. But at the beginning, I just want it to be funny and light. And lots to think about as well, because you talk up, you, you ponder the question as to why we keep the first trimester so secret. Yeah. And you bring up that word shame. Yeah. I think that's,

it's, I understand if people want privacy. Like that makes sense to me. some people, you know, keep things private, but there's no other thing where there's a preset timeline for silence. And I think it's because of all the shame of losing a pregnancy and thinking it's our fault. And then also I think it's because, you know, they don't want women to make other people uncomfortable with their pain. So women have to go through it totally by ourselves. And when I started having all these fertility problems, I could not believe how many friends of mine had had them to close friends and did not mention it to me or anyone. I'm like that is that's horrible. They should people should be able to to talk about it and also women get shamed if they

announce that they're pregnant before the second trimester. They're like well you shouldn't have told us you should like I'm like why why what is that? Yeah and it happens more than we have ever known about because we never talks about it. Right. there's lots of songs songs that have gone viral in fact you're totally part of my demographic your song popped up in my algorithm a long time ago which I then forwarded to all my friends

and one of the songs that went viral is about your experience of trying to adopt yes and you realize that you're at the bottom of the suitability list because of your age what else? Single woman single woman and I'm not a great Google because of my band Garfunkel-a notes

we have so many dirty funny songs And when you Google me, it just is not really, you know, mom material. They are so cutesy and brilliant and very naughty. Yes. And yeah, which is what I love. Like nothing has changed, you know, is becoming a mom and getting older. Like, it hasn't changed my sense of humor. I still like dirty, funny songs.

What comes first then when you were writing this show? Was it the storytelling, the songs, were the songs already there? Well, the songs came first. I wasn't sure if I could pull the show off. So when I started, I was like, I'm going to start with my strength because I'd never written a play. So I'm like, I'm going to start with comedy songs and see how that goes. And then I just started playing them at comedy clubs and seeing if they were working. And then once, and they weren't at first.

But then once they started working, I was like, okay. And I decided to do the show at Edinburgh. Before I'd even written it, I signed up. And it was like, okay, I have till August. I'm going to write this show and just gave myself a deadline and did it. Good. That's some work ethic there. We need to go back to your baby story.

Yeah. Because after years of trying for a baby naturally, then with frozen embryos, you looked into adoption. And then you found out that you've got silent endometriosis. Yes. That was very, that was like such a disappointing time because it had, that had been wrong the whole time. And I'd been to a bunch of fertility doctors and nobody caught it. No one knew. And I was just like, how did I go so many times?

I'd had five egg freezing surgeries. I was like, how did nobody ever think that something else was wrong? And basically silent endometriosis means there's no pain, and the only symptom is infertility. That's how you find out. And usually they catch endometriosis because it's painful. And so the fact that I didn't have pain, I was just, it was really hard to carry a pregnancy.

And your yearning for a baby was so strong that you even looked up what drugs you should take to help you. Yeah. Well, my doctor prescribed me this drug. And when I got it in the mail, it was a chemotherapy drug. And that's when my body was like, I'm done. It was just, I literally was standing in my kitchen, holding the drug, and it was just like, you know, your body tells you, you know, what's okay. And mine was like, that's not for you.

And how did you feel in that moment? I was really sad because I knew the journey was over. And it had been so many years of me doing whatever. I'm like, I'll take hormones, I'll do surgeries, I'll do anything. For so long, I was on this momentum and then just like the inertia of like, everything's fine. And then it was like the absolute opposite where it just all kind of crashed down because I just knew that that was not for me. You frame this whole one woman show right at the beginning. You sort of set the stall out by saying, you know, most sort of fairy tales are not centered around the female narrative.

and you explain why brilliantly. And then, sorry, spoiler everybody, there is a happy ending to Ricky's story. You have a son. Yep. Through surrogacy. Yep. And you're also married now.

Yeah. And it all happened in very quickly. In like, yeah, well, falling in love and having a baby, it happened in like the span of two weeks, which was the biggest surprise of the whole thing. I mean, it was shocking. Like I was in Romania. You know, my surrogate, I was about to have a child.

and I ended up falling in love with someone I'd been friends with for a very long time. And it was, it was just shocking. In Romania filming Wednesday, which I'm a huge fan of, by the way. Oh, thank you. I mean, in the UK, surrogacy is altruistic, but some people do believe, feel it's exploitative. What kinds of reactions have you had? So many. Mostly positive, but I get a lot of very strong,

negative reactions and I understand but that's you know their path to you yeah direct like online or oh online yeah no one says anything to my face except for like I guess some people are like must be nice and I just go yep it was I don't feel the need to explain my whole journey to them they like no people who got like a free baby their first time on their honeymoon I'm like you don't understand and we'll just I'll just say yep it was it was really great thanks you know that's a good way of dealing with it how do you deal with it inside though i it's funny i i i just feel like until you're in someone's shoes you don't know what you would do and i know i know my choice is extreme and i knew when i wrote this show that i would

have backlash i it's such a hot button issue i knew i knew that going in and i sort of just mentally prepared for it and it has not been as bad as i thought there's it's been overwhelmingly positive so that when I have, you know, Instagram comments for people who've never met me. I'm like, that's fine. And what's it like sharing this story every single night? Because there's so many, it's so powerful. And I've, the, you can see you're getting upset. And when I saw it, you got quite upset at the end. Yeah. Like, it must be quite an emotional journey every evening. It's really draining. I don't really do much else when I'm doing the show. I kind of am like, I'm a hermit. I don't drink alcohol. I don't.

go out. I just kind of sort of sit in this state for however many weeks I'm doing the show just so I can like be present because I want every audience to have the same experience. And I know a lot of theater actors do the same thing where you, you know, you just kind of build your life around having a couple hours where that's like your maximum energy. And then yeah, it's, it's pretty draining. And then right afterwards I like, you know, have like chocolate or I watch TikTok. I do something to like yeah tell myself like it's over it's it was a play it's done you know it's because i do try to like be in like each moment every night and then go back to your real life yes and how is that it's great my real life is great my son and i are you know i go home and i start my son's bedtime

routine so there is there is like that piece of it which is kind of amazing because i tell this whole story and then i go directly home to him and we start a bath in the story and And, you know, so it's kind of fine, but it is, it is draining. Yeah. Yeah. But we appreciate you sharing it. Yeah. I appreciate you sharing it.

I think it's an extraordinary piece of work. Thank you. Very powerful. Thank you. And thank you for coming in to talk to us about it. And I hope it's a huge success. Thank you. I was so thrilled to be honest.

Thank you. Ricky Lindholm, thank you. And her show, Dead Inside is on at the Soho Theater in April until the 18th of April in London. Thank you. And I have to say, if you've been affected by anything you've heard in this conversation, then there are support links on the BBC's Action Line website. And now we will go back to Anna Holligan, who was telling us about this case in the Netherlands where police have taken this rather unusual step of launching a campaign on social media to try and track down women and girls who were blackmailed into sharing explicit pictures of themselves. I think we might need to do a bit of a backtrack there, Anna, because your line was glitching. a little bit. So briefly give us an overview

of what we know about this case, about this man who's been arrested and how he found his victims. So 22-year-old man from the Netherlands he was using an alias. He was using the name Terpine online. He was targeting young girls between the ages of 13, up to 20,

asking them, he was pretending to be a teenage girl, asking them to send images. Then when he had those images, he was blackmailing them. So sex distortion, he was asking them to send increasingly degrading images, intense, abusive. Some of the girls, they were at school at the time, he would message, say, send me a picture within 10 minutes of your body, or I'll share these photos online with your family, your friends.

And then when he had those images, often he would ask the victims to either write on their bodies or hold a sign saying owned by tarpeen, so branding as well. and often he would go on to sell those images of child sex abuse, sex abuse on other social media platforms as well. So widespread as well. The reason why the Dutch police have released this campaign, this social media campaign in English, is because his victims, survivors were all over the world, at least 50 of them in countries, including the UK, the US, the Netherlands, Germany, Montenegro and Canada. So it just gives you an idea of how widespread this whole phenomenon of sex distortion is.

I think let's have a clip of the video. Terpian's demands kept getting worse. I didn't want to do what he told me to, but I was so scared. Young girls were forced to send nude pictures of themselves or were given a horrible task that they had to carry out immediately. They had to take photographs while they did it, even if they were at school or at their part-time jobs. But if they refused, the pictures were made public.

I even had to go to the toilet during class because if I didn't send a photo of my body within 10 minutes, he would share the photos with my friends, family and classmates. We call this extortion, and unfortunately we are seeing it more and more. So why have the police done that campaign specifically for this case and how unusual is it? It's very unusual and there are three main reasons. So they want to identify more victims.

Going through his devices, they believe that there are many more victims beyond the 50 who've been identified. They want to ensure that the survivors know that he's in prison. He's locked up. He no longer poses a danger to them. They also want to send out a message to anyone who receive those images that they should delete them immediately because there is a paper trail even when it's online. They're offering help, so there's a website that they link to for anyone who has been a victim of this kind of abuse online. And they really want to alert parents and other young people about these, the risks, these online risks that cause real world harm.

What do we know about the suspect? We know who's 22 years old. He's been identified by police only as Damien S. He's from Spike Inesa, which is in Netherlands near Russia. Dam. He's been charged with online assault, online rape, extortion, producing and possessing and distributing child sex abuse images. He was arrested in January 2025. Prosecutors have asked for a nine-year jail term and psychological treatment. We understand he has confessed and he went on trial on Wednesday and we are expecting a verdict and sentencing within weeks. You would not. You would

never get a video like this launched from the police whilst a court case is ongoing. Why can this be done differently in the Netherlands? It's very different over here. So they don't have jury trials. So there's no danger of prejudicing a jury. And that's why, especially in this period now, between the trial starting and the sentencing, they want to gather as much evidence as possible from those women, from those survivors, children as young as 13 years old, so that that will be used by the judge to decide on the sentencing. He's also gone through psychological assessment and all of that kind of thing. And I think they want to send out a message that people who commit this kind of online abuse on social media platforms can be tracked down. And I had a quick look at his profile.

It's anonymous, you know, there is no face there. He can't be identified, but obviously they've managed to because a young girl in the US came forward and because of that connection between the authorities in the Netherlands and in the US they were able to conduct this operation. But this, you know, it's a huge problem all around the world. And here in the Netherlands, it's increasing really dramatically. So 3,000 cases a year police picked up on in 2025, which is an increase of 46% compared to the previous year, 46%. So that's another reason why they're pushing this out online to try to stop the problem

where it's actually starting. What happens next? So a verdict within weeks and police are hoping that there will be a conversation here in the Netherlands and beyond between parents and children and peers about just how dangerous it is to take pictures of your body and share them online. And, you know, they would also say we're not just talking about people who you don't know online or you think, you know, but also with boyfriends and partners, it's often the case that those things, those things, those things, images can just come back to haunt you. So if anything good, the police say, can come from this. It's that more women and young girls are protected from these types of crimes in the future. Anna Holligan, thank you very much for joining me.

I'm glad we got the tech sorted as well. And if you've been affected by anything you've heard, then please do go to the BBC's Actionline website where there are links to support. Now, student loans have made the headlines multiple times this year with critics calling them unfair, but does student debt affect women differently? Amy Brooker from the feminist economics group, the Women's Budget Group, thinks so. This week, she's written a blog post to highlight her own student loan story and why women may be impacted more than men in repaying their loans. This comes as the government's Treasury Committee calls for people to share their experiences of student

loans. Well, I'm joined now by Amy, along with Kate Ogden, a senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, who focuses on higher education. Kate and Amy, welcome both of you. Amy, I'm going to start with you. So why did you want to write this blog post? Where did this desire come from? Yeah, good question. Was it a desire? I think it was more, it's been within me for the last 15 years really, the story. And I have spoken about it. I think I started the blog by saying I've had conversations with friends and colleagues about it and have quite often been dismissed for the lived reality that I know to be true, the impact of these knowns that they have on, especially women from low-income backgrounds, listening to the conversations

over the last few weeks. I think that anxiety has just been building and where there's a lot of policy conversation, especially in the fields that I work in, actually the real-life impact conversation wasn't there and I just wanted to write something that would take people through the story from start to finish of what it looks and feels like to be in this position. And you're highly qualified to do that because you were among the first cohort of students to pay £9,000 pound's student fees because you started in 2012. So tell me about your personal experience in terms of the amount of debt that you've accrued. Yeah.

So currently it's sitting at just under 90,000 pounds. That's split between an undergrad loan and a postgrad loan for my master's study. So I went in 2012, I went to the University of York because of my family household income. I received the Chamberlain award. So I got 2,000 pounds towards my living costs. I received the full government grant and I also got 50% off my tuition fees. Like many students from lower income backgrounds, I struggled with the culture at York and I transferred to Loughborough University.

Actually, what I didn't understand at the time was my mum had moved in with her partner, her boyfriend, she'd been with for one year. But she would have lost her housing benefit because her house wouldn't have been my primary residence anymore. And because of that, his income was taken to account, even though he has three children of his own and I lost all of that support so I ended up having full tuition fees and having a maintenance loan and not the grant

so then I took on two part-time jobs as a cleaner from six to nine in the morning and a spin instructor in the evenings to fund my studies so I mean they were the perfect jobs to do around my studies but not your normal story I suppose for back then anyway why do you think women are impacted differently or more than men? Yeah it's really interesting I think I'd always

looked at this from a socioeconomic perspective, but especially working at the women's budget group and now I'm 32 and I have a mortgage, not a huge mortgage. We haven't maxed out what we're able to borrow purely because of additional costs like this and I'm pregnant due in September

so now looking at the cost of childcare and actually it's made me reflect on how it will impact me as a woman and the women's budget group has done a little bit of work on this too. So if we look at women's position within the economy, women are the majority of those who take time out of work for unpaid leave

for family members, so that includes for childcare after birth. Women will obviously take time out of work for maternity leave. During that time, the debt interest keeps accruing. Actually, what you then see is also women are the majority of those on low to middle incomes. And evidence has found that those are the people who will be paying back their loans for longer over the lifetime of the debt. And that has a cumulative impact on women's economic freedom. So a lot of people who pay off their loans earlier,

quite often will switch that payment onto paying towards their pensions. We're seeing a really big issue with the gender pensions gap in the UK now. Government is trying to encourage people to pay more towards their pensions. If women are less able to do that, we're going to see a long tail of this impact onto us when we're in retirement age. And actually, government will have to be paying for that anyway. So there's an argument here to sort the problem. problem out. I'm going to bring you in Kate. As we just heard from Amy there, so much to pick

apart there, so much to discuss. And we've got a couple of messages coming in, by the way, 844 is the text number. I'll read them out in a moment. So we've heard that Amy is part of that first cohort to pay nine grand a year in fees. So who are these graduates now on what are they experiencing? So these graduates who started in 2012 were the first to pay the £9,000 fees. They're on what are called Plan 2 loan terms. There are five different loan plans, which we won't go through, but plan two terms, you start repaying once you're earning 29,000 pounds, and you repay 9% of what you earn above that.

And after 30 years, whatever hasn't been repaid gets wiped off. But there is also, as Amy mentioned, interest added onto these loans. That starts when you first study, and it carries on. And the amount of interest that gets added depends on your earnings. So higher earning people get more interest added. and they're also making more repayments because more of their earnings are above that £29,000. Some argue that these loans should be interest-free.

Yes, some people do. I think part of the reason that the interest is added is so that people who can afford to not take out the loan initially don't do so. From a government perspective, if those people who could afford to not take the loan, take it and then don't repay it, the government, the taxpayer will be worse off.

So the interest is partly to make sure that people who don't need the loan don't take it out. Is it right, Kate, that low to middle earners will end up paying significantly more interest over the extended repayment period of the loan compared to their higher earning peers who can pay it off earlier? So I'm not sure that's not quite how I'd phrase it. It's definitely true that if you're a very high earner and you pay off really quickly, then you might pay less interest. If you're a low to middle earner, you're still likely to repay less on average than someone who's a higher earner

because you're not earning so much above that threshold. So there is a lot of protection in these loans for low and middle earners. Let's bring in gender here. So how in your mind is this going to impact women more than men? So for lots of reasons, Amy mentioned, we know women tend to earn less on average. And we see that whatever degree subject they studied. We see it particularly for women in their 30s,

once childbearing has become an issue. That means we expect women to repay less on average. we do expect them to repay for more years though so particularly for the most recent set of people who are actually on a different kind of loan plan the government has published some statistics by sex and they expect women to repay about four grand less on average towards their loans but to repay for up to seven years longer

what's your situation like how much you're paying back yeah I had also a point on that I'd say you can have like this top line figure of women are paying less but as a proportion of their income actually it's important to think about that and the impact on their economic freedom day to day as well. So I think that's an issue, not just these headline figures. What comes out of your account to pay towards your student loan? I didn't put it in the blog, but I think it's useful to talk about what my income is and it's not,

you know, I'm not 100,000 pounds. So I'm on just under 45,000 pounds. My undergrad is around 130 pounds a month and my postgrad added onto that. It's just under three, it's just under 300 pounds in total is what those two come to. And you're in your early 30s? 32 I am. About to have your first child. Yeah. And kind of in that moment in your career where you're thinking what happens after like where like where are you in your life? Got a mortgage. Yeah, exactly. We've got a mortgage for a two bed flat outside of London. My husband's on a similar wage to me. So in total our monthly outgoings is just under £600. In some areas of the country that is your mortgage. And you know, then we're looking at the cost of childcare for next year.

we won't be in a position to put aside any savings next year, essentially. And we aren't in a position to upsize our living arrangements, even though we have a child coming along. Are you concerned about that? What about childcare and what are you thinking? Obviously, somebody who's thought things through. Yeah, I think it's one of those things, we just have to make it work. There is no other choice.

I'm not going to choose not to work. I'm happy to my child in childcare, but I think it's difficult when you think about, the choices that people in generations before us faced who didn't have these loans and the economy was totally different at my age, earning my wage as well. I earn more than my parents ever earned and yet they had a house at my age. So I think it can be quite frustrating when you think of it in the round. I'm going to read out a message or two and see what your take on these are, Kay. Someone here said, I started university in 2013 just a year after you, Emmy. It was a year after

the change. I have a massive debt. I'll never be able to. to pay off. I think of it as tax. It comes out every month and it doesn't affect me getting a mortgage like other debts would, but it's a lot of money and the interest is insane. Only the very wealthy can pay for it up front. Everyone else has to put up with it until they've done 30 years work. Someone else might think, well, why are you so worried when it's going to be wiped out after 30 years? This is a difficult one, right? People get a student loan statement. It worries people when they see the balance, even if they think that some of it's going to get written off at the end, it's hard to kind of ignore that headline figure. So I know Martin Lewis is called for kind of a

redesign of the student loan statement to make it really clear to people what they might actually repay to kind of reduce this focus on the headline debt number, which for some people is going to be misleading as to what they might actually. And anxiety. Yeah, I see that's a really important point. I think when we talk about treating it like a tax and ignoring that headline figure, you don't account for the different experiences that people have financially. And I think I spoke in my blog post about people with experience of family debt. I grew up in a family. We had two threats of house repossession when I was in primary school.

So the psychological relationship you have to debt like this is totally different to someone who comes from a household that hasn't had those experiences. Well, you had first-hand experience of it in your sixth form, right? Yes. Because you knew the head teacher was talking to when they were talking about students. A teacher, not the head, a teacher was talking to you about your student loan debt. What did you recognise in the room? Yeah, so it's just a comment.

I don't even remember the whole conversation. This comment has just stuck in my brain ever since. They essentially said, you don't need to worry about this. You'll be able to pay it off. The minimum income, which I think was £21,000 at the time, is what people stacking shells and Tesco's earn. My mum was a teaching assistant and then a cover supervisor, so unqualified teacher essentially in a secondary school earning less than that.

So it just, yeah, I've never got over that comment, to be honest. It's sensitive. Yeah, another one, I'm going to read this message out saying, my daughter did a four-year robotic engineering master's degree, by the way, side complement well done on the daughter doing a robotics degree. She went straight into a job three and a half years ago, so started paying it back. We were expecting an initial debt of £72,000, £18,000 a year.

She received £9,000 maintenance a year. She logs in to check her debt recently and she owes £90,000. And this is the sentence. I've asked her to contact student finance to check if they've made a mistake, but I think it's a difficult thing for her to face. What advice would you give? That's a really difficult one. I think it's totally possible because the interest accrues from when you start taking out the loan.

And while you're studying, interest is added at RPI plus 3%. So at the kind of maximum rate. so by the time somebody graduates they tend to have more debt particularly over the last few years when inflation's been so high so it's still worth getting in touch with student finance and making sure they haven't made a mistake. Yeah, they might not have done. I think, yeah, I think the advice is just as hard as it is, it has to be faced.

I think it also speaks to another problem where the interest accrues even whilst you're, so they say it doesn't matter if you're earning under the limit, you're not repaying, but the interest is still accruing. Yeah. So they shifted the threshold when I started work. So I earned under the threshold of the first few years. And it's only until about two years ago that I am earning what I'm earning now. So I earn a lot more and paid a lot less back before.

And so the interest has just kept building and kept building. And there's nothing I could do about it. And that's exactly what that situation sounds like. Kate, the government are asking for people to share their experiences of student loans online by the 14th of April. Why are they doing this? So there have been lots of calls in the last few months for reform to plan two student loans. These have come from lots of different quarters and people are calling for different things. They have different solutions they've proposed.

The Treasury Select Committee has opened this inquiry to hear the evidence and particularly to hear from people like Amy who have been affected by this. At the moment, we don't have really good quantitative evidence on the kinds of things people are concerned about, mortgages, pension saving, whether people are delaying starting families. And we're not going to have that really solid, like quantitative evidence for a while because the first cohort of people are just getting to that age where it becomes important. So I think that makes the kind of live reality that Amy's spoken about really particularly important that we listen to. So I'd encourage people to go on to the Treasury Select Committee Inquiry website. And if they have sort of feelings about their loan, if they've been affected, if they've got children, they can also

give evidence to the committee. Amy Brooker from the Women's Budget Group and Kate Ogden from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Thank you for joining us this morning and opening up quite an interesting conversation and debate. Keep your thoughts coming in. We did approach the Department of Education and a spokesperson told us threshold freezes have been introduced to protect taxpayers and students now alongside future generations of learners and workers. The student finance system protects lower earning graduates with repayments determined by incomes and outstanding loans and interest being cancelled at the end of repayment terms, but we recognise that the war in the Middle East and the potential inflationary effects are causing anxiety.

That's why we're capping the maximum interest rates on Plan 2 and 3 student loans at 6% from 1st of September for the 2026-27 academic year. 844. Now, my next guest, Lucy Aps, is a GP and author whose debut novel, Gloria Don't Speak, has recently been long-listed for the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction. It's set in East London in 1999. It paints a tender portrait of 19-year-old Gloria, a woman with learning disabilities.

When she forms an unlikely friendship with a man named Jack, it offers her a new sense of connection, but after an act of violence, their relationship is forced to come to an end. The novel explores themes of vulnerability, connection, and what it means to navigate a world that often moves too quickly to understand. Lucy, welcome to Women's Hour.

Thanks. Congratulations. Thank you. I mean, debut novel and long listed for the women's prize. I know. Well done. It is a beautiful book. Thank you.

Where did the idea for the story come from? Well, I just wanted to write something that centered a character with a learning disability, an adult with learning disability. So I started thinking about the character and then Jack popped into my head as well. And that kind of friction just sort of, it just came from there, really. So tell me who are Gloria and who are Gloria and Jack? So Gloria is the main character. She's a woman with a learning disability.

The book starts off when she's 19 and she's just finished full-time education, but it follows her all the way through for about 20 years, kind of picks different points in her life to kind of meet her at. And then Jack is a guy that she meets when she's 19. She's looking for some company. And he's quite dodgy. He's kind of got this angry energy. A lot of people probably avoid him,

but she sees past that and they end up having a kind of friendship. How? How? Because I think she doesn't necessarily read people in the same way that other people would. And he seems to meet her at face value and afford her a respect that not everybody affords her when she first meets him. And so I think it goes from there for her really. Yeah, because a novel takes us into Gloria's life because she often feels lonely and finds herself wandering the streets of East London. And that's when she meets Jack in a park. can you describe that a bit more about their relationship?

So I think for the reader it's probably quite a troubling relationship. Yes, because we see it through our eyes. Yeah, yeah. And I think for Gloria it is as well. And there's points when she feels like actually, you know what, I need to just walk away from this. But there's also something there, I think for both of them, I think they're both quite isolated, they're both quite lonely.

And in some ways they complement each other. and in some ways they find something together, but there's too much going on there for it to ever really be. When I was reading it, it's very uncomfortable because you see that there's the connection between them, but then there's also control. Yeah, yeah. And Jack is abusive towards her.

Yes. Because he's very angry at the world. Yeah. What were you trying to show there about power and vulnerability? I mean, I think I just had this dynamic between them And I was just exploring it. So I wasn't like, let me say this about parent vulnerability. I was just like, this is where the relationship's at.

So let's just write it and see what happens and see how they interact. But I think, you know, it's not uncommon for people, maybe especially for women, to have relationships with people where there's aspects of that relationship that keep them there when there's other aspects of a relationship that are abusive and that, you know, as an outsider, you look at it and you go, oh my God. But as the person that's in a relationship,

you don't necessarily always see it or you see it but you're also quite torn. Yeah, yeah, it's very complicated. Why did you want to centre a story around a woman with learning disabilities? I just think that you don't really see stories of people with learning disabilities, especially not adults. Sometimes, like, there's space for children. I'm talking about, like, not just books, but like film, TV. You just don't really see these stories.

And I particularly wanted to write about an adult. because I think, you know, a few times I have seen people with LD represented, it's usually been a younger person, a child. It's quite interesting to me, actually, that I've noticed that kind of in, like in articles and stuff about the book that people do refer to her as a teenage girl. And I'm just like, well, actually, you know what? She's 19 for about a third of the book. And then for the rest of the book, she's definitely, like, she's an adult woman, you know.

And I feel like if this was a novel about a woman who didn't have a learning disability, and it started off with her as 19 and then followed her for like 20 years. I don't think people would be describing it as a book about a teenage girl. Isn't that interesting because you're sort of writing a book about a young woman and trying to give her and there's also a sense of agency. You know, she's making her way into the world. She's out there. We meet her kind of wandering the streets because her mum is like go out there

and she has a young adult. She's got a sense. And you're trying to challenge assumptions and people are making them. Yeah, I don't know about making assumptions. I just think people just find it easier to kind of relate to people with learning disabilities when they understand them as children, you know, but I think there's just no space for adults with learning disabilities in narratives and stuff. I think I'm hoping that's changing.

I mean, like I love Kojo on EastEnders and like I'm hoping to see my representation, but I just think that it's not really there. And I think it's just something that people with the best will in the world are just not necessarily quite sure how to relate to. How did your experiences as a GP and a volunteer? volunteer, help you shape Gloria's character? I have to say that, unfortunately, being a GP, like, you get 10 minutes with each patient, and it's very, very hard to kind of establish relationships.

Those seem to happen over time. But especially for someone with a learning disability or someone like Gloria who was minimally verbal, it would be quite difficult. It's quite difficult to kind of build relationships in the way that we have to work, unfortunately. I would say that the novel was really more informed by volunteering. And also before that, I used to work with kids with special needs going all the way up to age 19, 18, 19. So, and just got to know different people and different families and stuff. So I think, like, all of that experience kind of allowed me to create this character.

Could you tell us more about the volunteering? Yeah, I volunteer with women with learning disabilities in Newham. Just a great bunch of women. We have really, like, we have a laugh, to be honest. It's so well written and you do take us into Gloria's world. I just wonder how you then set about writing this experience. Like how long did it take you to craft it and how careful did you have to be and who proof reads it to make sure that, you know, you are,

like, you know, how did you know that what you were doing you were setting out on this road that you were going to do it with respectfully? Yeah. So I spent, I mean, I think probably most of the most of the way, writers do this, I just spent a lot of time thinking about Gloria and who she was. And then kind of little bits and pieces of events would come to me and I would really think about her perspective, how does she feel when that's going on? When I first started writing it, actually finding the voice was quite difficult because I was like initially trying to write in the first

person and that didn't really work. And then I even thought about writing from the perspective of people around her, but I was like, that's not what I want to do. I want to write from her perspective and I want to center her worldview. And yeah, it was when I started writing like third person but really close third person and just allowing myself to be a bit fluid with the language and to kind of think about the language that she might use or like the things that she might repeat herself in her head and stuff and put them in and then it kind of took shape from there. When I asked you about the volunteering, your face lit up.

There you go. Yeah. Is this about you wanting to shine a light on women who are overlooked in society? Yeah, I think so. I mean, there's lots of different women who are overlooked for different reasons. And I'm not going to say that I want to write the story of every single woman that's overlooked. But I do think that, you know, I mean, I love the voluntary role that I do. I've been doing it for years.

And you said my face it up. I genuinely have a good time. like I really enjoy the company those women and I just think that they are people overlook people with learning disabilities and why you know like I just think yeah let's tell the stories and

let's sort of let's become curious about people with learning disabilities let's get them involved and let's just make a bit more space for them What do you want people to take away from the book? I just wanted to write a good book that people would enjoy and but you know if people read it and then they do kind of make a bit more space for people with LD, become a bit more curious about people with LD, that would be wonderful.

Do you know what? The other thing that really struck me in this book is Gloria has selective mutism. So she's very silent in parts, but she's also, when she's asked, I don't want to give any spoilers away, but when we finally see her speaking up for herself, she's encouraged to stay silent. And I suppose lots of women can relate to that generally about being made to speak and not speak. Yeah, yeah.

And then there's this added layer of women with learning disabilities already people kind of taking control of their lives. And I think that's really complicated. And I think, you know, in terms of people with learning disabilities, like in terms of, for example, the situation that Gloria was in,

you know, the people who were telling her to stay quiet were doing it for the best reasons. And maybe because they could see consequences that she couldn't actually see. So it's difficult. It's not like there was, an easy answer that yes she should have been able to say what she wanted to say and everything could have worked out fine if that was the case

and she fully understood what she was sort of committing to but at the same time obviously that was extremely frustrating and difficult for her so I just think it is it's an interesting an interesting point an interesting thing to think about but I don't think that there's a straightforward answer to that particular scenario you're a GP yeah volunteer and now you've written a book that's being long listed for the women's prize. When did you write it?

I actually wrote it in 2018 mostly. Yeah. I started writing it. Well, some of the books set in like a particular date in 2017. I actually started writing it then and finished it, finished a draft in 2018. And then I was just trying to get people interested in it for ages and just couldn't. And then this amazing publisher called Weatherglass, like this tiny press, they picked it up, worked on me with it, like did some edits and stuff. and now it's out.

So you wrote it because it's your passion. You had to get it out. Yeah, yeah. And then you took it to publishers. Yeah. And now you're here. Yeah. What a story.

Congratulations. Thank you. Good luck with it. It really is a beautiful, very tender piece of work. Thank you. And congratulations for being long listed for the 2026 Women's Prize for your debut. Thank you. That was Lucy Apps.

And the book is called Gloria Don't Speak. I'm going to end with a couple of your messages. I started university in 2015. It was the year after the change. I had massive debt. I've never been able to pay it off. I think of it as tax. Another one here is saying,

I feel we were missold at university, my son, school, and told them not to worry because they wouldn't have to pay it back until they're a certain age. But I couldn't persuade him to stay in Northern Ireland where fees were much lower. Join me tomorrow for weekend, Woman's Hour.

That's all for today's Woman's Hour. Join us again next time. Some events have far-reaching consequences that white and noise, everything goes black and apparently I was screaming, that that's the moment that my life changed forever. I'm Dr. Sean Williams and I'm meeting the people whose lives have been reshaped in unexpected ways. That brought my heart. I just thought that it's so cruel. Personal stories of loss, discovery and starting over. We do talk about it time to time and about how grateful we are

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