Woman's Hour - Saffron Hocking, French presidential elections, Midwives, Afghan girls and SMS education, Author Jendella Benson

Episode Date: April 8, 2022

The new season of Top Boy currently on Netflix, shines a light on the reality of life for those involved in London drug gangs and the people who live around them. This season covers social issues such as deportation, homophobia and child neglect, with the character Lauryn’s experience of domestic violence being a central storyline. Actor Saffron Hocking, who plays Lauryn on the show joins us to talk about her portrayal of the issue.Sunday 10th April sees the first round of the French Presidential elections. According to the latest polls the two candidates likely to go through to the next round are the current President Emmanuel Macron and The National Rally’s Marine Le Pen. She’s rebranded her party and herself for this latest attempt. The Economist's Sophie Pedder joins us to discuss the potential first female President of France.Just over a week ago Woman’s Hour devoted a whole programme to the long awaited and landmark Ockenden Report into maternity services at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust - in what has been described the biggest maternity scandal in the NHS's history. We had a huge response from our listeners as well as a significant number of midwives. We speak to two - Sarah and Ruth.It’s been just over two weeks since the Taliban went back on their plans to allow girls in Afghanistan to return to school. Schools were set to open nationwide after months of but at the last minute the education ministry abruptly announced girls' secondary schools would stay shut. Sara Wahedi, a tech entrepreneur joins us to explain her new idea of helping Afghan girls get access to education - through their phones. Do you know much about ‘farming’? Author Jendella Benson has released her debut novel, Hope and Glory, which explores the topic of private fostering - ‘farming’ - which was common amongst British West African communities during the 50s-70s and even into recent years. Jendella joins us to talk all about writing her first book and reflecting the experiences of those in her community.Presenter: Andrea Catherwood Producer: Claire Fox Photo Credit: Joseph Sinclair

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, I'm Andrea Catherwood and welcome to Woman's Hour from BBC Radio 4. Good morning and welcome to the programme. There's an increasingly close presidential race in France where Marine Le Pen, populist right-wing politician who's rebranded herself lately to try and soften her image, is calling on French voters to take back control. Sound familiar? Well, she's edging ever closer to President Macron ahead of Sunday's vote to look at her appeal and what she stands for. We'll have

more from Paris. Now, we've devoted a lot of time on the programme recently to the crisis in maternity services following the damning Occedon report into the deaths of mothers and babies in the Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust. Today we're going to hear from two midwives on what it's like to be delivering care right now in England, the challenges midwives are facing and what they see as the future of maternity care. And with Afghan girls being excluded from education by the Taliban, one woman Afghan tech entrepreneur has come up with a way to teach girls through text messages. Sarah Wahidi will be joining us from New York, where she's studying,

and she's going to explain what it is she's trying to achieve and how she's going about doing it. Actor Safran Hocking is with us. She plays Lauren in a Netflix hit, Top Boy, and she's going to talk about one of this season's main storylines, coercive control. And Jandela Benson's debut novel, Hope and Glory, explores informal fostering. It was quite common that West African parents who arrived in UK cities to work from the 1950s onwards paid for families, often in the English countryside, to look after their children. Yet, until recently, it was rarely discussed. And I wonder if this kind of informal fostering is something that you've had experience of. Have you or any of your family been brought up by people other than your parents for a few months, years or even permanently?

Was it talked about? Why did it happen? It may well be that this is actually quite a lot more common than we think. And I'd love to hear from you on this. You can text Women's Hour on 84844. Text will be charged at your standard message rate. On social media, it's at BBC Women's Hour on 84844. Text will be charged at your standard message rate. On social media, it's at BBC Women's Hour. And of course, you can always email us through our website. Now, overnight, Ketanji Brown-Jackson made history

by becoming the first black woman to serve on the US Supreme Court after she was confirmed by the Senate. Meanwhile, in France, another woman with a very different background is hoping to be the country's first woman president. Marine Le Pen's poll ratings have surged in recent weeks as she focuses on the cost of living. This Sunday sees the first round of the presidential elections in France. It's expected Le Pen will go through to the second round against the current president, Emmanuel Macron. Well, it's expected Le Pen will go through to the second round against the current president Emmanuel Macron. Well, this election marks Le Pen's third go at the presidency.

She's rebranded her political party and herself for this latest attempt. Well, here to tell us more, I'm joined by Sophie Pedder. Sophie is the Paris Bureau Chief of the Economist and author of Révolution Française, Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation. Sophie, welcome. First of all, could you just remind us about how the French election system works for those of us who aren't across it 24-7? Of course. It's a two round vote and it's a direct vote. So there is no electoral college. The first vote takes the first round takes place on Sunday, on April the 10th.

And then two weeks later, the top two candidates go through to the second round and it's a straight majority vote. So whoever gets over 50 percent is elected the next president of France. Now, many of us know Marine Le Pen. She's been around for some time. As I said, this is her third go at the kind of presidential race. But she has rebranded her party quite considerably. The name, of course, has changed from the Front National to essentially it's the National Rally Party now. I know that President Macron

is still very keen on calling her somebody who's on the far right. But where is she and her party politically right now? Well, it's an interesting one and a subject of endless debates. I think one way of looking at her is that she's clearly a populist. There's no doubt about that. She's clearly a nationalist.

I think that she has toned down a lot of the reasons in the past that one would have to call her an extremist. She's on what I would call the hard right. I mean, she's absolutely out there on the sort of extreme ends of conservative nationalist politics. She, I mean, to give you some ideas, she identifies herself with someone like Viktor Orban in Hungary. She is someone who is outflanked on the extreme right in French politics by someone called Eric Zemmour, who has sort of come from nowhere. He used to be a TV pundit. And he's the one who sort of picked up the really extremist, toxic discourse that her father used to go in for and has left her in a position that a lot of French people think is more respectable on the respectable end of

nationalist politics. So as a nationalist, as a populist, she's obviously hoping for broad appeal. I mean, looking at her rallies, there are quite a lot of women there. It has to be said, nearly her rallies, to me anyway, seem like they're almost exclusively white, but not exclusively. Who is she appealing to? I think that the main appeal, the main sort of group of people that vote for her, and this is borne out in the polls, is blue collar workers, the low paid service sectors, employees, people who are, you know, finding it tough, worried about inflation, worried about the cost of petrol, who depend on their cars. And so the cost of petrol really matters. They probably live in

rural areas or semi rural areas and drive to work. It's people, it's not the big city vote. This is not people who are living in the centre of Paris or Lille or Bordeaux or any of the big cities in France. It's people that, you know, she calls them the left behind. And I think that that is where she has really focused her vote. And that's why she's made those sorts of issues the centre of her campaign this time. Now, you touched on her father. And of course, Marine Le Pen is from a very political family. Jean-Marie Le Pen, her father, with whom she has a very complicated relationship,

perhaps never really wanted to be president or never had a serious chance of being president. He was more of an irritant. She is very different, isn't she? I mean, she really would like this role if she can have it. I think that's right. I think if you try to sort of see the difference between her and her father, besides the sort of toxic discourse that he can go in for and she hasn't, he was all about protest. He was all about just being that irritant, as you said, against the establishment. Marine Le Pen wants power and she's made this clear. She has got her people involved in town hall politics, running town halls, running even Perpignan, which is a reasonably big sized town in the southwest of France, she is on a campaign to take over. And that is something that really does, I think, distinguish what she's all about from her father. She is serious. She is determined. She's looking a lot sharper in this campaign. I've seen her sort of really undergo a sort of

metamorphosis over the last 10 years, I would say. She used to be a little bit more anxious, sort of slightly nervous. There was a nervousness about her. This campaign, she's looking incredibly poised. It's disarming. She has this sense of confidence about her. I think she feels she's tapped into the mood and she feels that this mood is carrying her and could carry her right to the top. It's quite scary. And yet, whether she likes it or not, of course, her background has really shaped who she is today. I know you've written about one of her earliest memories, perhaps when her father was attacked in a bomb. Yes, there was a bomb attack right in the 1970s when her father was an absolute pariah.

He founded the National Front at that time. And the Le Pen family was sort of outcast from polite society. And there was a bomb attack on their flat in Paris. And she was eight at the time. And she was in her bedroom and was woken up by a blast that ripped off the side of the bedroom wall. And when I interviewed her a few years ago about this she it was clearly an absolutely formative memory for her that she understood at that point that there was something about her father and what they said what he stood for that was unacceptable and that people hated it

and she carried that around in her childhood it's quite interesting she talks a lot about the wounds of feeling that she didn't belong that she wasn't invited to other children's birthday parties, that she was somehow different. And to my mind, this is very much part of what forged her and turned her into the very determined character somehow to prove something about herself, maybe, that she is today. Now, we've talked about her kind of campaigning on the cost of living. And of course, we've just seen Viktor Orban being re-elected in Hungary. And yet, I wonder in France right now, we've seen Emmanuel Macron front and centre

in his negotiations with Putin. And she in the past has been relatively close to Putin. She's called him a great man of state. How is the Ukraine war playing there in terms of her popularity? And she's been surging in the polls even since Ukraine was invaded by Russia. It's really interesting. She has managed to shake this off in a quite unexpected way. It is something that she she she's very tightly linked in so many ways to her admiration at one point for Putin.

She took a loan from a Russian bank for her election campaign back in 2014. She put a photograph of her shaking the hand of Putin in one of her electoral brochures. So she has sort of promoted this relationship in the past. And yet somehow she's managed to shake this off. I think one reason is possibly because she was quite quick to understand that there was a mood in France to welcome refugees from Ukraine. And she didn't take a hard line on that. She did say, no, we should welcome them. And I think perhaps in some ways there was a sort of a sense, perhaps, that this was an atonement for her past admiration for Putin.

But she has shrugged it off. It's quite extraordinary. And she's come out, you know, even stronger in the polls. And, you know, you mentioned that unlike her father, she has kind of moved away from that kind of anti-Semitic rhetoric. However, you know, she does take a very strong line on headscarves, doesn't she? Yes, I think, you know, what's important to remember,

and I've just been, I was looking this morning at the piece of election literature from Le Pen that came through the letterbox. You know, there she is smiling, photos of her with the little children, with the horses. She's a woman of state is the slogan she put on the front of this little brochure, which goes through every letterbox in France. But if you look at her programme, right up at the top, number one is immigration.

She not only wants to ban the headscarf in France, she wants to clamp down on immigration. She wants to reserve jobs and housing for French nationals. Now, I mean, you know, not even European Union nationals. She wants to make French preference part of French law. And she, in doing this or in proposing this, would be setting herself up for quite a clash. I mean, an absolute direct collision with European Union institutions

if she ever tried to actually put this in place. So I think one has to be, you know, look at her rebranding and her softened image with put a bit of context on that and really read what she's actually proposing and try and, you know, compare one against the other to understand who she really is. Sophie, we're almost out of time, but just do you think there is any chance that she could actually win? I'm very nervous, as we all are after Brexit, of predicting anything. She has a chance. It's not a high chance, but it's not a negligible chance. I would say it's around one in five. Sophie Pedder from The Economist, we will watch closely. Thank you very much indeed.

Now, just over a week ago, Women's Hour devoted a whole programme to the long-awaited and landmark Ockenden report into maternity services at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, in what has been described as the biggest maternity scandal in the NHS's history. Midwife Donna Ockenden talked about her key findings, concluding 201 babies and nine mothers may have survived if the Trust had provided better care for all those involved, including midwives. Well, those looking after women giving birth didn't learn from mistakes, and more broadly, she made clear that women across England were not being listened to. Well, towards the end of the interview, Emma asked Donna Ockenden how it felt as a midwife

to look at the world she'd worked in for so long and see so much wrong, even if finally seeing the publishing of the report meant it had been a good day. Absolutely. I mean, I've been in and around maternity services in various roles, clinical midwife, head of midwifery, divisional director,

clinical director. I've done all kinds of roles. services in various roles, clinical midwife, head of midwifery, divisional director, clinical director. I've done all kinds of roles. And my focus every single day of my career, regardless of my role, has been to provide safe care for women. I think that it's important to say that the vast majority of my amazing colleagues across the NHS in my team, all of them go in every day to do that. But this is an example where that system failed and it failed hugely and it's left lifelong consequences for a whole community across generations. Well, there was a huge response to the programme from our listeners,

including a significant number of midwives who felt that their voices were not being heard. Well, I'm joined by two now who wrote in. Sarah, a practising midwife for less than five years, and Ruth, a student midwife. And just to say that we're not using their real names today. Sarah, if I could begin with you, there has been a huge amount of publicity surrounding this report. So I just wonder what it feels like to be a midwife right now. It's challenging, to say the least. The report's compounded and just reaffirmed everything we know about the service. We live, we breathe it every single day.

It's obviously a challenging job because of the unpredictable and emotional nature of it anyway. Certainly the last 12 months with the pressures of Covid and large numbers of midwives leaving, it's palpable the changes in the service and the pressures feel like they're increasing daily. I think the report, one of the worst things about the report is that it's hugely distressing to read the experiences of those families, those women and birthing people. However, this isn't the first report we've had like this. More can be. A report followed saying exactly the same thing. I know there's a few more due out this year. And us on the front line, we are screaming out and crying out for change. And what it's been feeling like to us is that nobody's actually responding to that and it's not getting any better. And safety really is the minimum. Safety is the bare minimum level of care we should be aiming for in this country.

We should be respecting people's bodily autonomy, offering them proper, nuanced information to enable them to make choices and have proper informed consent, good relationships with people. And that's just not happening. It's about so much more than safety. Sarah, why isn't it happening? It's so complex. I mean, obviously, staffing is an issue. We've been understaffed for a number of years. And I think last year, there were fewer midwives in the profession. I think there was a loss of 343 or something of the total number so the pressures increase obviously some the complexity of pregnancies is increasing we're also intervening more for example with the increase in induction rates so that means that women can be in hospital for for longer whilst we're waiting for that process to work so we're full all the time

where do you then take people when they're arriving in spontaneous labor it is such a complex problem as i think the occondon report bore testimony to the problem is so complex it's not just about the headlines that were screaming about out about pursuing normal birth there's there's cultural problems there interdisciplinary conflict staffing issues governance, governance, accountability. It's massive. OK, well, let's try and break some of those down. Ruth, Donna Ockenden said that women's voices weren't being heard. Now, she was talking about pregnant women. But what about you as midwives? Do you feel that you're being listened to? So as a student midwife,wife obviously i'm fairly new to this

um i'm in my second year and i feel that this isn't a new thing midwives have been talking about this for ages whereas when going into joining the course joining the profession fashion um this was something i was very aware about that there's the understaffing that midwives are doing the best they possibly can but because there's not enough of them that they can't cater for what women actually need because they can't be there 24 7 and so I think that we are getting the backlash for something that we don't necessarily have control over we We can't employ more midwives ourselves. That's not up to us.

So I think that we are in a position where we are doing what we can, but there's only a finite amount of us. Ruth, I wonder how those staff shortages are impacting you as a student. I mean, in terms of training, if there aren't enough, are there not enough experienced midwives to train you? Do you think that it's actually impacting on the way you're learning? Yeah, I'd say so. So we're finding that we are losing really experienced midwives

that they aren't being retained. So coming in as a student, there have been times where I've been on shift working with a band five which they've been brilliant they've been really great at communicating with me telling me things teaching me but they don't have that 20 30 years of experience to pass on to me so I feel that we are going to be losing out on that as students that we're not having that handing down of information and learning that you'd get from working with people

who have been in the profession for 20, 30 years. Sarah, why are so many midwives leaving? Is there an easy fix to this? I think it's partly the demographics. So you've got many midwives who obviously joined the NHS on old contracts. So they were entitled to retire at 55 and after Covid and the increased pressures that put on us some people have then

brought forward their retirement so I think you've got a vast number of older midwives leaving and then it becomes a vicious cycle as more leave the job gets more pressurized and people you you get enormous burnout in the profession and more leave. And then I know there's been a lot of talk by the government about how they're increasing numbers of midwives being trained. But it's almost, I think the problem is more about attrition at the moment than those new midwives starting because there are people queuing to get on the degree programme to be a midwife. Recruiting new midwives is not the problem. Sarah, I know you mentioned just earlier on in our conversation the idea that the media talk a lot about a push towards normal births by midwives, specifically a reluctance to perform caesarean

sections that could save lives. I know you say that that's quite simplistic. Could you just clarify that a little bit more for us? Yeah, I think as midwives, that's quite simplistic. Could you just clarify that a little bit more for us? Yeah, I think as midwives, that's probably one of the things we preempted with the headlines following the Ockenden reports, because it happens in response to other reports. There's often a focus on the drive towards normal birth. I think it's partly because the issues are so complex. That's something that can be boiled down quite simplistically. But if you actually look at Ockenden, it's not about the pursuit of normal birth it clearly in Shrewsbury and Telford there was a drive to reduce their c-section rate you can see that from their figures and also the women's accounts but it's not a picture of what we would say normal births as in physiological births where we're not inducing women or pumping them full of hormones.

A vaginal birth and a normal birth are two very different things. And actually Ockenden's full of incidences where it's not a push for normal birth. It's using hormones to bring on labour, not giving women and people accurate information about the dangers and the downsides of that process in the first place. And then obviously not managing those situations it sounds like you think that women are induced into labor far too often is is that what you're saying um not um on the i would say on the whole yes inductions and other

interventions are absolutely vital for saving lives they have an important and crucial part of our midwifery care. However, not all interventions are equal. So everybody's scenario is individual. And we don't always give people the time that they need to sit and go through what's the absolute risk of the situation you're in? And how do we balance that out against the risks of the interventions that we're proposing and having those conversations. And there's lots and lots of research that shows that women and birthing people feel pushed into making decisions or actually it's not presented to them as a choice at all.

It's just a pathway, a standardised pathway that they're on and that's what's going to happen. And they don't even realise they have a choice. Ruth, when you wrote in your original email to Women's Hour, you said that you were saddened by what Maria Caulfield the Minister for Primary Care and Patient Safety had said just remind us of what that was and and your and your feelings about it. So I was just oh Ruth I think she seemed to be implying that it was um oh hello i felt something that she seemed to be implying

that it was um an historical um a report that this ockenden report was looking at things that had happened ages ago when actually it's still happening now um that she seemed to think that chuck in a bit of money as it would solve this situation, while at the same time, clearly the maths isn't there, that the numbers she was saying the government's given isn't going to meet what the NHS midwifery teams are saying that they need. And that she seemed to think that as long as we've got students training, we'll be fine. But it's not that. It is looking at the workforce they've got already and what they are doing to support them what they're doing to help midwives stay in the profession rather than just going well we've got

students coming through it'll be fine it needs to be this idea of well what are we doing for the people we've already got as sarah was saying it's there's lots of people wanting to train, which is great, but why are we losing so many at the other end? Sarah, I want to... Sorry, go ahead. At the moment, for roughly every 30 students who train, that equates to one new midwife in the NHS because of retention of midwives who are already qualified. One out of 30 people who begin training, that's quite a shocking statistic.

Sarah, I wanted to just touch on a new story today that many of our listeners will have seen, that tens of thousands of women in the UK may be experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder after a miscarriage. Now, I know that miscarriage affects women in very different ways. But from your experience, does it ring true that psychological support could actually stop those symptoms developing? Yeah, certainly. So with miscarriages, depending on when that happens in the pregnancy, sometimes women fall in between two services. So depending on when it happens, they might not even be with midwives at that time they might be with an early pregnancy unit and i don't know they have different

pathways of care when we're looking after um women and people having those miscarriages that we're trying to be as compassionate as possible during that care but once they've left our unit then we're not involved with their follow-up and I think that's where the continuity of carer model of care which we were rolling out but Donna Ockenden's actually suggested is paused until it can be staffed properly that's where it can have such an enormous impact on women who've suffered losses because they've got a named midwife and they can access them all the time to ensure they're getting that continued support afterwards and they're not just all the time to ensure they're getting that continued support afterwards and they're not just lost and left to cope by themselves.

Sarah and Ruth, not your real names, but thank you both very much indeed for joining us today. Now, have you seen Inventing Anna, the TV series about the woman who conned New York society into believing that she was a multimillionaire-ess. Or maybe the dropout about Silicon Valley entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes, who was recently convicted of fraud. We're going to be exploring the popularity of TV shows, films and podcasts about the female con artists on the programme soon, and we'd like to hear from you. Why do you enjoy them, and what do you think about their depiction?

Do let us know your thoughts. You can text WomansR on 84844 and on social media it's at BBC WomansR and of course you can email us through our website. I just want to say that we've got a big response to the idea about

informal fostering. Lots of tweets in on this. Baroness Berridge has actually tweeted in to say that it's great to hear informal fostering is being covered today as it's a beneficiary of this that it needs a greater profile. If it can take a village to raise a child, it makes sense that a village can end up raising a young person. And we've had plenty on that,

so we'll be talking about that in just a few minutes' time. Now, the new season of the popular Netflix series, Top Boy, dropped a couple of weeks ago and apologies if you do watch it and you haven't actually caught up on it by now because there might be a few spoilers in the next couple of minutes. The original show Top Boy Summer House was made by Channel 4 in 2011 and rebooted by Netflix in 2019. Like the original Top Boy shines a light on the reality of life for those involved in London drug gangs and the people who live around them.

The new season covers a range of social issues like deportation, homophobia and child neglect. But one of the biggest storylines that took centre stage was the character Lauren's experience of domestic violence at the hands of her boyfriend Curtis and his sister. Here's a clip from the show. Curtis, please, can I just have some privacy? I'm only going in there to try some things on.

Please. No, no, she's right. She needs her privacy. Thank you. I'll go with her. Wow. Well, I'm joined in the studio today by actor Saffron Hocking, who plays Lauren. That little clip was chilling enough. And of course, if you watch the whole thing, it builds up and is quite terrifying.

I wonder if you can tell us just a little bit about your character, Lauren, for those who haven't watched the show and what she's going through. Okay, hello. My character, Lauren, was in the last season as well. And it was kind of left on a cliffhanger of whether she would return, because she basically snitched and gave some information that she shouldn't have done. So we are now fast forwarded and she's in Liverpool and she's sort of by herself in a town she doesn't know. She doesn't know anyone there, but she has wound up in a situation where she's in a relationship with a guy called Curtis

and he is incredibly controlling, as is his sister. And you kind of are taken on a journey throughout the series of a range of coercive control, not allowing her to have a phone, manipulation, gaslighting. And, yeah, so that's basically what it is. No, it doesn't appear anyway in the series that there is any physical abuse. It's coercive control, it's emotional abuse. Yes.

And, as you say, you're very isolated away from people that you care about and have them pregnant. I wonder how much you knew about coercive control before you took this role and indeed, how did you prepare for it? I think for me, when you hear the word domestic abuse, you automatically think that that has connotations of violence so I feel like what Top Boy has done is given domestic abuse which is not physical a language to be able to call it that because there's I think every woman has experienced some form of manipulation or control or whether from whatever range it can be, but you're not able to put a language to that and call that actual abuse. So for me, in order to prepare for that, I contacted

a charity called Refuge, who were incredible. They gave me so much guidance and they educated me about all the different elements of domestic abuse and what that entails. And I wonder if you feel like this has helped the audience. I mean, soaps have looked at domestic abuse before and indeed coercive control, but your audience, although it's broad, will also appeal to a younger demographic, to younger viewers. Do you think, have you found that they actually, that people have got in touch with you and said, look, I think I understand a bit more about this now, having seen the storyline? Yeah, I definitely, that's been the most heartwarming experience. And the most, the best takeaway from all of this is the messages I've received from multiple women, and also men as well, but women who are survivors of domestic abuse who can relate to it and are so pleased that actually

what they've been through has been depicted on such a popular TV show. Now, this season is very women-heavy, and it highlights the power of strong women and actually female relationships because we can see in this series your sister, Jack, who's a gang member and she struggles to protect you. And we also see the roles of women in gangs. I mean, she's actively involved in the violence. In fact, she's one of the most violent characters in the gang. I wonder if that's typical. I wouldn't know whether it's typical or not. But I think that, again, to pitch a woman at the forefront of that when usually it's always men that are depicted as the problematic gang leaders. I think that's quite an interesting one because it also shows, it humanises her as well. Like, you know, as you said, yes, she can be one of the most violent ones,

but she's also one of the characters with the biggest emotional depth and empathy. It's interesting because it's a very gritty drama. In no way does it glamorise the role of gangs. And yet that must be a danger going into a programme like this that it could actually be seen to sort of make them look as if there's something romantic about them. It doesn't do that, does it? No, not at all.

And that was my biggest fear sort of going into this storyline. In particular, I never for one second wanted to glamorise or use the subject of domestic abuse as entertainment purposes. If anything, I wanted it to be something that is educational for people. And I think that that's what Top Boy does so well. It's never for entertainment purposes or glamorising it. It's gritty and it's real and it's raw and people can relate to it. Now, I appreciate that this is a massive spoiler if you're not up to date with the latest episode

or the latest season, but it's very important to this discussion that in the final episode, Lauren snaps and she kills Curtis, her abuser. Yes. How on earth did you prepare to film that scene? We had a fight choreographer, which sort of we did the steps through with him

weeks and weeks in advance. We also had the director there with us at all times. So it was never a thing where we felt that we were just winging it. Emotionally to prepare for it that was another story I guess I was very aware and conscious that the message that I was sending across was not that if you are being abused by someone to kill them but I think it's more the subliminal message of what that stands for that even if you feel like your life is in danger, you can still come out on top and be the winner,

which I think that's what was put across. Now, Lauren is hardly a role model as a character. And yet I wonder if you think that her portrayal and the portrayal of women, particularly in this series, can actually be helpful to young women growing up and trying to navigate the world, particularly those who might be living in similar communities to the ones that you portray. Yeah, absolutely. I think that the way she has dealt with the adversity she's faced that is something to look upon and think wow good for her because

she's protected the life of her unborn child she's stood up for her sister and, you know, her family basically at home by doing a terrible thing at the end. But that's the best thing she thought she could do at that time. Are there any, have you any clues as to what might happen next for Lauren? I don't, I don't. We have no idea. Okay, well, Saffron, thank you very much indeed for joining us. Thank you so much. Thank you. Now, it's been just over two weeks since the Taliban went back on their promise to allow girls in Afghanistan to return to education. Schools were set to open nationwide after

months of restrictions since the Taliban seized power in August. But at the last minute, the education ministry abruptly announced girls' secondary schools would stay shut, reminiscent of what happened the last time the Taliban were in control of the country in the 1990s. Some girls were in tears as parents and students reacted with anger and disappointment to the last-minute move. When Sarah Wahidi saw this news, she knew that she wanted to help. She's from Afghanistan. She's a tech entrepreneur now living in America and currently studying human rights and data science at Columbia University. And back in 2020, she created an app which delivers real time security, power and traffic alerts to Kabul residents. Now she's turning her attention to helping Afghan girls access education

through their phones. Sarah, hello. Good morning, Andrea. Thank you so much for having me. Oh, it's a pleasure to talk to you, Sarah. First of all, can you just give me your reaction when that news broke that the older girls weren't going to be allowed back to school? You know, I was always very, very nervous about this date. From the beginning, I have always been a very staunch, you know, I've had a staunch position about the Taliban. I always knew that they would renege on this promise, just because they have from the very beginning. I mean, this is just the 90s all over again so i was very very pessimistic about it and the day that the news

broke out i mean it was just a flood of emotions uh girls that i know that are in afghanistan uh just just sobbing just in tears devastated and and still are And it's just been a shock for everyone that there is no solution at hand and there is no direct understanding as to why the Taliban has reneged on this. There's always a new excuse. And in hindsight, I mean, there's no sustainable solution. So they're very compulsive in their decision-making. So a sustainable solution needs to be designed as soon as possible for these girls who've already missed so much school, not only because of the war, but also because of COVID. Indeed. And we know that they're rather impervious to international pressure.

You, however, have actually managed to come up with something practical that you feel can help girls. It's an SMS-based tech system. Just tell me a bit about it. Right. So this is something that caught my eye a year ago or so when I was thinking about ways to expand technology in Afghanistan, even when the government was still in power. And I saw this interesting example from Kenya, Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, which is from a nonprofit called Enaise Education, where they provide simple mobile technology and they've built an educational ecosystem, a very robust one, where during COVID they provided offline education for over 10 million students in these African countries. And it stuck with me. And when I heard this news, I came back to it. And I've been having a few meetings with different nonprofits spearheading this sector. There's also the Philippines, they have the great NGO called smart textbook, where they've actually condensed textbooks into SMS cards, SIM cards, and then those can be purchased. And school attendance in rural areas in the Philippines went up to 95%. Test performance hit 90%. So there's amazing case

studies of the use of offline SMS. So it's something that is very exciting. There's obviously a lot of pushback. I think that anything involving a phone these days, especially in countries like Afghanistan, which are so volatile, is something where people have questions. But I've always believed that sometimes you have to move one step back to move forward. And if that means we're going back to the early 2000s of using SMS, well, that just needs to be the case. So this is SMS text messages. Just to make it clear, this isn't people using smartphones and accessing the Internet because just not enough people in Afghanistan, not enough girls are going to have access to that kind of technology. Exactly. These are SMS texts.

You only need a GSM network. They're very, very basic. You can use a very basic Nokia mobile phone with no smartphone, just a mobile network. So these are the kind of phones that a lot of people in the UK would have remembered having in the kind of 2000s. Yes. They're called bricks, which is a little bit unfair, perhaps. But what kind of access would girls have to those at the moment across afghanistan i mean have you got the numbers yes i do and and in 2018 you know again uh really

exciting is we have about 16 million registered mobile phones those are just the brick phones that you're talking about the basics some of those phones some families may have two. So even in the worst case scenario, I mean, we're just looking at about, I would say, 13 million individual households which have a phone. You can also think about how collective African society is. So, you know, two or three girls could study together who are neighbors. So there's a lot of potential. And I've mentioned this before to many people who've said, well, it's not going to get to every girl. Still, in 2018, if there was about 16 to 18 million phones registered, by 2021, when the Afghan economy was very strong, we're looking at about 20 at this point. So just that access, we're looking at about two thirds of the population. So it's not like 10 percent. It's huge.

So, you know, it's not a small number. You know, it's a huge number that we're talking about here. Sarah, you know, we we dealt with all the issues of kids being educated online during the pandemic. Do you think that people that girls in Afghanistan have the desire to be educated to such an extent that they are willing to look at SMS messages and try and learn that way? Oh, of course. And, you know, what frustrates me about the conversations right now is one is for my own community, which is they must be in the classes. I understand that. And I will fight to the very end of getting girls physically in class because that is their fundamental right. But we also need to think of innovative solutions. And girls, especially if you that I've talked to, if you see my Twitter inbox, it's just flooding with

young girls being like, I'm here, I will do what you need. If you want us to volunteer, we will do so. That is what girls want. They just want to be able to study any way. Of course, being in class is what they love. They want to be with their friends. They want to be back in class. But I also understand that there still needs to be a way to get the curriculum to them so they can be prepared when schools do return to class. So they want to be involved. They want their education. They're looking for any way to be involved. And hopefully, I hope that also with our conversation today that we can get the funding, we can get support. Obviously, this is not going to be a moneymaker

and this is going to be just about people who are very passionate about these young girls and helping them get their education. So it's going to be a community-oriented effort. Otherwise, it just won't work. Could it be dangerous? Is there a danger, Sarah, that the Taliban could decide

that they're going to pull networks or indeed punish girls for accessing this? My concern would have been greater if it was online, if it was an app, if it would have. I mean, I have an app right now and that one provides, as you said, alerts. And I'm always worried that they're going to cut the Internet. Well, with GSM networks, it's very difficult. I mean, especially in rural areas, just to cut a GSM network would be, it would take a lot. The only way is to cut, you know, electricity lines.

But I think that to cut 30, I mean, the population of Afghanistan is 39 million. So to cut that amount of, you know, electricity and mobile networks is just, it would just be a horrible decision on their part. I don't think they would just do it for girls' education. So I don't see it as an immediate concern. Sarah, tell me a little bit about yourself, because I know that you're now in New York, but you grew up in Afghanistan? Yes, I was in Afghanistan up until six, and then moved to Canada and stayed there until I finished about a year of university and then moved back to Afghanistan. And I know that you have been highlighted as one of Time magazine's 2021 Next Generation Leaders.

You were working in Afghanistan for President Ghani. Yes. Yes, I was. Yeah. And I was, I mean, it was a desk job. I was working specifically on social development policy and projects. And it was an amazing experience. And I do get the brunt of anger these days, even though I had a very small position. I think I've talked to the president once. But, you know, for me, I think people don't understand. I mean, for us, especially working for the president, it's devastating. I mean, we believed in this government and we gave our all into the civil service and to be left like this is for us most painful because me a lot about, you know, civic technology and using technology for solutions. And why am I doing this? And why not focus on, you know, immediate solutions?

Because I'm trying to build a status quo. I'm trying to build a behavior within my community of, you know, there are things that you can fight for. There are things that I can introduce to our society that when another government comes, you'll know what to fight for. I mean, emergency access of information, information that you don't have to second guess, like in the UK,

that you have your emergency services, that doesn't depend on which government is in power. It's just something that is a fundamental right of UK citizens. So Africans don't have that. But if I just introduce the idea, they'll say, oh, okay, so there's something called

emergency reliable information i want that for my next government so whatever i do it's not about you know everyone needs to have this app or everyone needs to have this this tech solution it's it needs to be a talking point and that's my my passion is just introducing things that the world has and afghanistan should have as well. And I think that this is a very long term mission that I have, but it's one worth fighting. I've seen already that, you know, I've been reaping the benefits of the security app and how it's changing people's minds and how they converse about what the government should do for them. So just even that planting that little seed of expectation for me is everything.

Sarah Wahidi, very, very best of luck with this latest project. And we hope that I hope that it gets up and running and that you'll come back. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you. Now, Hope and Glory is the debut novel from Jandela Benson. It explores the idea of private fostering. It's a practice which was often referred to as farming. Now to our ears today that term sounds shocking and really disturbing but it was common particularly among British West African communities from the 1950s until much more recently. It's perfectly legal to put a child or it was into the care of others without informing local authorities.

And often children were fostered by white couples who lived far away from the family. Most farm children did return to their families, but until recently their accounts were largely unrecorded. Well, Jandela joins me on the line now. Jandela, welcome. The key storyline in this book is about Glory, the book's protagonist and she discovers she's got a twin sister called hope and she learns that her sister had been privately fostered when they were children growing up in the 1990s tell me what made you want to write a book about private fostering i think that private fostering covers a lot of issues that a lot of families will relate to. It speaks to the immigrant experience in terms and like working and trying to educate yourself and

coming from a working class background and essentially trying to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you've got children like what do you do so I feel like it covered a lot of different angles and also it's a part of British history because it is British history that we just don't speak about enough we are starting to see more stories. There's The Last Tree. There's memoirs by people about their experiences. But we need to talk about it more. I wonder why people didn't talk about it. Do you think that there was a degree of shame about it? I mean, you know, I suppose that for a lot of parents and indeed, you know, you can see this in your in your book. And the issue was that there wasn't this kind of support network, perhaps of grandparents and relations that would have looked after young kids in another home and allowed parents to go out to work. So they did have specific issues and concerns, didn't they?

A lot of the a lot of the immigrants who came in the 1950s and beyond to work in London and other cities in England. Yeah, I think shame is definitely a part of it on some level, but I also think there's an element of kind of just keep calm and carry on survival. We did what we had to do then, let's move on. And that feeling of always having to kind of move forward and keep going I think that's a very real thing but I think that it's also not

spoken about for some people because some people have really hard real experiences of private fostering it's been really hard for them and it's something that they're still coming to deal with and I know people who have tensions with their parents over this decision that their parents made, while others are absolutely fine. So I think there's a lot of different elements as to why people don't talk about it enough. And also because it went essentially under the radar, there wasn't necessarily a database of how many children from West African backgrounds were fostered. So there's a lot of, I guess, right now, people speaking about their experiences

and that information is now becoming public and we're starting to hear these stories. I can tell you that we've had a huge response actually on Twitter to this because I asked earlier on about whether or not other people had experiences of informal fostering. I mean, I think it's also something

that happened outside the black community. I know I'm from Ireland and a great uncle of mine was sent over to relations in Wales at some point to be looked after. And I think often the reasons then was that maybe people had too many children, too close together for a mum to cope with all those kids. Sometimes it was about money as well. And I think that, you know, you highlight a lot of the choices that parents are making. And I suppose you also bring up the fact that, you know, we're still grappling with this issue of childcare. It's not something that we've got over and fixed as such, is it? Exactly. I mean, I've got two young children myself and kind of writing this story, I was

putting myself in the position of a parent. And it's very easy to kind of be like, you know, how can you do that? How can you send your kids to like strangers, but being a working mom, it is so hard. Like we don't have a lot of childcare choices. Childcare is still expensive, even though the childcare workers aren't necessarily paid the most. So it's a problem which is ongoing. And so many moms from so many different communities are trying to essentially patch together ways that we can bring up our children in safe environments. But, yeah, it's something that is still ongoing. And I think that's why it's still an important story to talk about, because we're not that far removed from then. It's just right now it's not legal to privately foster in this way. So people who might have made that choice now are making other choices, which include not working because they just can't afford to.

Now, in your book, Glory finds out more about both her parents and those choices that they've made. I wonder if you think that it's very common for second-generation immigrants to know about the sacrifices their parents made, but not necessarily know the full story? Yes, I definitely think it is something I think that we can idolise as a second generation kind of child myself, we can idolise our parents and we can be like, you know, they did this amazing thing, they sacrificed so much. And then we get to an age where we then start essentially

criticising them, whether out loud or kind of in our heads. And then we get to an age where we then start essentially criticizing them, whether out loud or kind of in our heads. And we start thinking, actually, I wouldn't do that, or actually, I wouldn't do that. And it's kind of a very, like, polarized view of our parents. And as I was writing Hope and Glory, I was on a journey of empathy for myself and for Glory to try and understand that generation of our communities more and yeah like what really went into the decisions that they made because I don't think many would say oh we did everything perfectly but they made the best of what they had and it's important especially if you're a parent yourself now because you have to realize like you're not going to do everything that your child's going to

agree with but you have to just understand that you're human your parents are human and hopefully if we can look at our parents in a more holistic light like we can find more places of connection you also in the book touch on mental health in the older black community glory's mom celeste has a belief for various reasons that the family has been cursed. Yeah. But there's kind of a split in how she manages her mental health because she's quite happy to talk to holy men to provide her with healing rituals, but yet very reluctant to have the emergency services get involved when she has a breakdown. Yeah, I think that really speaks to where older communities put their trust, because I think as we are beginning to talk

more about mental health we can fall into this idea that you know our parents don't have the language or they don't talk about it enough but they do have a language it might not just be the language that we speak so with Celeste it is very much kind of about religion and faith and kind of the church that is where she goes when she's struggling with her mental health and she might not use words like depression or anxiety or breakdown but that is her outlet and um i think it's important to acknowledge that's that hopefully again we can have these conversations with our elders with our parents in a way that is helpful because um it's a bit patronizing to say oh they don't understand or they don't get it. They know what they've been through.

They know what they're going through. It's just the way that they talk about it and deal with it is different to how we would. But we can learn from them and hopefully they'll also learn from us. And some of it is simply just using different words, isn't it? It's just a different language. Exactly. Literally different words. Yeah, I was interested in Victor, the younger brother in your book, because he has a powerful impact on all the other character storylines. And of course, he's not physically

present because he's in prison. Why did you choose to do that? I've had experience of having someone very close to me who was in prison. And it was funny because when that happened, all of a sudden I had people reaching out to me and saying oh you know I know what you're going through I had no idea that I had friends who had brothers or husbands or other family members in prison until I went through my experience and I think it just speaks to the fact that so many of us are going through that experience of having a loved one who's imprisoned and that prison experience doesn't just stay with it it's not just kind of affecting that one person like they have community they have siblings they having a loved one who's imprisoned. And that prison experience doesn't just stay with it. It's not just kind of affecting that one person.

Like they have community, they have siblings, they have children, they have parents. And incarceration affects entire communities. And for a lot of us, we go through it in silence because of the shame, the stigma. We don't want to talk about it. So it was important to include that. Jandela Benson, the book is Hope and Glory. Thank you very much indeed for joining us today.

Thank you for having me. Now, we have had a lot of texts and emails about this, and a lot of people have been saying that they lived very happily with their English grandparents, with their mother's parents. One says, well, they qualified as a teacher and could afford to buy our family house. Our grandparents were simply wonderful. Another says that my brother and I went to live with our grandparents in the country in the early 70s. We went to school there. I don't know exactly why. And quite a few people saying that they had good experiences. Those are the ones that we've heard about today anyway, when they went to live with relatives or grandparents very often in the countryside while their parents were working or studying in the cities. Now you can hear

Weekend Woman's Hour with me at 4pm tomorrow on Radio 4 and Emma will be back on Monday at 10am. For now, goodbye. That's all for today's Woman's hour join us again next time i thought it was going to be like we have such a great friendship that we can talk about things that i can't talk about with anyone else even my wife i i can talk to you about things that i can't talk to my wife about because when i try to talk to my wife about work she just rolls her eyes i thought you're gonna say like we're, like, we're like astronauts, we're the only ones who've been to the moon, and no one else has seen what we've seen. I'm Louis Theroux, and if, like me,

you enjoyed listening to John Ronson's Things Fell Apart podcast, you might also like this conversation where I ask him all about how he made it. Funny, so you're conflict-averse, I'm conflict-averse, yet we spend our lives putting ourselves in very conflict-heavy situations. Why is that, Louis? That's How Things Fell Apart with John Ronson and Louis Theroux on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. Morning, 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.