Woman's Hour - Sex and choking, Online Abuse and work, Plastic pollution

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

Research by internationally-renowned sex expert Dr Debby Herbenick from 2020 found that 21% of women had been choked during sex, with this being nearly twice as prevalent among adults under 40. Why are more young people including this as part of their sex lives and what are both the short and long-term health consequences? Dr Debby and Medical Director of the Institute for Addressing Strangulation, Dr Catherine White, talk to Clare McDonnell.As talks reach a conclusion in Ottawa this week on a legally binding global treaty on plastic pollution, we speak to film director and campaigner Eleanor Church. Her documentary, X Trillion, comes out this week, and takes the viewer on an all-female expedition to the North Pacific gyre, where much of the world's plastic waste ends up.What sort of responsibilities do employers have towards women who are abused online because of their job? Dr Rebecca Whittington is the Online Safety Editor for Reach Plc, which publishes newspapers including The Mirror and The Express. She explains how she protects journalists from online harm. Presenter: Clare McDonnell Producer: Kirsty Starkey Studio Manager: Neva Missirian

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, this is Claire MacDonald and you're listening to the Woman's Hour podcast. Hello and welcome to Woman's Hour. Today we're going to be looking at the growing trend of choking during sex and how it's become more mainstream. Today here in the UK, the Institute for Addressing Strangulation is holding a conference with this very much on their agenda as they have major concerns about the longer term health

impacts this could be having on our brains. We're going to hear from Professor Catherine White shortly. She's medical director of the Institute and also the internationally renowned sex expert, Dr. Debbie Hebenick, who's done her own research into this growing trend stateside. Are you in a job that means you have to have a public online profile and does that ever leave you feeling vulnerable? Well if you're a female journalist being visible online is part and parcel of the job. Now a major publisher here in the UK has created the role of online safety editor, the first of its kind to try and better protect women who are being trolled for just doing their jobs.

Dr. Rebecca Whittington from Reach PLC will join me in the studio. Hers was the name they chanted. Thousands of women on the streets of Iran as they hit back against the repressive regime there. 16-year-old Nika Shakarami vanished from a protest back in 2022. Her body was found nine days later. Now, Nika's disappearance and death were shrouded in mystery, but her picture with her two-toned bobbed haircut and her bat-wing eyeliner,

just looking like your average 16-year-old girl, became synonymous with the fight by women in Iran for greater freedoms. Well, now an in-depth BBC Eye investigation has discovered a leaked document understood to have been written by Iran's security forces. And that shows Nika was sexually assaulted and killed by those same forces. We're going to hear from one of the reporters behind that investigation and ask how this revelation might actually change the women's liberation movement in Iran. We'll also bring you the latest in our series on hobbies.

And when have you got together with other women to do something out of your comfort zone? As delegates from 174 countries gather in Ottawa this week to try and reach an international agreement on plastic pollution. We're going to hear from the award-winning film director, Eleanor Church, who travelled with that all-female crew, many of whom have never met before, 3,000 miles to the North Pacific, where much of the world's plastic waste ends up. It's a new documentary. It's out now. Eleanor will join me in the studio to tell us all about it.

Don't forget, you can text the programme. The number you need is 84844. Text will be charged at your standard message rate. Or we're on social media at BBC Women's Hour, and you can email us through our website. Now, according to a study by internationally renowned sex expert, Dr. Debbie Hebbenick, 21% of American women have been choked during sex. For the last few years, she's been looking into this, why choking is becoming more mainstream amongst young people and what some of the longer term health impacts could be, including on our brains. This isn't the only topic of discussion in America. In fact, here in the UK, the Institute for Addressing Strangulation is holding a conference today with this subject on their agenda. Now, they've recently decided to issue guidelines to medical professionals

on how to identify and treat patients who've been choked. Well, ahead of today's conference, I've been speaking to Professor Catherine White, Medical Director of the Institute, and also Dr. Debbie Hebenick. I started off by asking Debbie how common this is amongst young people today. It is extremely common for young people and especially young women and sexual and gender minorities to report having been choked during sex. And in some of our research, we found, for example, that as many as 40% of young adult women have been choked during sex. About 35% of women in a U.S. nationally representative survey that we conducted were choked during their most recent sexual event, broadly defined, just the last time that they hooked up or had sex. And emerging data out of Australia and Germany and Italy are also showing that it's prevalent there as well. Why? Why has it become so common?

It's a very good question. Certainly when we started this research several years ago, our minds originally went to pornography where we knew that it was widely shown. It's also just widely represented in so many media. So online fan fiction, mainstream media, Jack Harlow's song Lovin' on Me, that was a huge hit in the United States, talks about choking as vanilla. It's in episodes of very popular mainstream media among adolescents and young adults like Euphoria and The Idol. It's really in memes. It's in TikTok videos and other social media videos. So what we actually found is when we asked young people where they learned about choking, they often couldn't point to just one source. And these very high rates that we see among young people in our college samples,

we often find that two thirds of women, around one third of men, or in almost half of trans and non-binary students report having been choked during sex. So very, very common. Largely, I think that they are just a product of their culture and what they're seeing here. And they're not getting it balanced with fact-based education about the risks to their health. Well, that's what we want to get into today. And I'm just interested, as you say, that which came first? Did people start doing this more and therefore it was reflected in dramas, in songs, as you've just described? Or is that what is driving

the interest in this, do you think? The arc, at least here in the United States, really started to uptick sometime around 2008, 2009, where we did start to see some mentions or bleed out kind of into mainstream media. But again, these were just media mentions for so long without any balance of, you know, fact-based information. And I think at this point, the real challenge is that because sexual choking or strangulation is represented in so many mainstream media media that the message that teenagers are getting is just that it's a very common, normalized, expected mainstream part of sex. It's often not one that they question. It's one that they often just do to one another, which of course is very concerning when we think about safety, comfort, intimacy, sexual assault and consent issues, the fact that

people are just kind of springing this on other people who may not necessarily want it to happen to them, even if they've heard about it or accept it as mainstream. It still may not be a choice they want for themselves. Let's bring in Dr. Catherine White from the Institute for Addressing Strangulation, holding that conference today. Dr. White, are we seeing a similar uptake in the UK of people including this practice in their sex lives? And I guess the follow-up question is, is it safe? Okay, so I'll answer the second question first because that's easier to answer. No, it's not safe. So our position as an institute would be there is no safe way to strangle in terms of prevalence here in the uk we don't have uh the equivalent of debbie all the amazing work that she's done but there was a 2019 poll i think done by the bbc that showed

high rates of strangulation and it seems to be a generational issue so you know the younger I think they went from age 18 to 39 and in the younger cohort the 18 to 24 year olds it was far higher than in the older cohorts so it does seem to be very much a generational issue. And all the older generations, I think we're playing catch up in terms of having an awareness of what's actually going on, and trying to think about how to manage this, how to deal with it. It seems like an obvious question to ask, but what are the health effects of choking in this situation? Well, the most profound one would be death, which can easily happen. And of course, your brain, your carotid arteries, you know, the nerves in your neck, they don't know

whether this is consensual or non-consensual. So the fact that somebody thinks that they're doing it consensually doesn't have an impact in terms of the physical effects on the body. So you've got the most immediate one, which would be death. And then you've got loss of consciousness. You've got strokes, which could happen at the time, it could happen days, weeks, months afterwards. And then the emerging evidence, and again, Debbie is an expert on this, is surprise, surprise, depriving your brain of oxygen is not good for you, particularly if this is repeated. We don't know the long-term effects, but there are some things that we know already and it's not looking good. Well, let's bring Debbie back in at

that point, because as Dr. White said there, Debbie, you have been looking at the longer-term impacts on the brain from choking. So what does your research show? This research has been led by my close colleague, Dr. Kay Kawada, who's a neuroscientist at the Indiana University School of Public Health, where I work. And he normally studies concussion and subconcussive injuries among athletes. So what he did was a few years ago, we recruited women who had experiences of having been choked during sex at least four times in the past month, as well as women who had never been choked during sex. They came into his labs and his team conducted brain scans and also drew blood to look at blood biomarkers that would give some window into what might be

happening to the brain and how the brain may be responding. And they found these differences, multiple differences between the brains of women who have and have not been choked. I think one of the ones that interests me the most was in working memory, where during their time in the brain scanner, they gave them these different memory tasks to perform. And they ultimately found that these young, healthy, you know, college women, not surprisingly, were able to arrive at the correct answers in both groups. But that the women in the group who had the experiences of being choked or strangled during sex multiple

times in the past month, they found that they had to recruit more areas of their brain to arrive at those correct solutions, and also that it took them longer. So he's often described that as their brains being less efficient. And so again, not surprisingly, as Dr. White said, you know, when you deprive the brain of oxygen and blood flow and blood has not only oxygen in it, but glucose, which is like food for the brain. And when this happens, you know, many times, and we have found in our most recent research that of the people who have been choked in our college studies, one out of five of them have been choked more than 25 times in their sexual lives. So they're having potentially this cumulative effect on their brain that we need much more research to understand not only how it's happening, but also if there are ways that we can support them in improving some recovery.

So they're the physical outcomes. Did you ask them why they did it? I mean, I noticed that in one of the studies you quoted, two thirds of women and one third of men said they've been choked during sex. So the proportion for women is an awful lot higher. Are they willingly doing this? Are they feeling that they have no option? What's going on? So we have found that overwhelmingly people do describe these experiences as consensual. That word consensual needs to be interrogated because although some people, including women, do really say that they enjoy it, many people just seem to accept it as part of sex. They say that they're doing it because it seems like something exciting, adventurous

or kinky. Some people feel like it's something that they need to engage in or they'll be seen as kind of boring in bed or vanilla shamed as some people describe it. And some people are doing it for their partner's pleasure. So I think we also need more communication about it between partners, because I don't actually think that as many people particularly love it for themselves as much as they might think that they do. Some people do, and they may continue to do it on their own, even knowing the health risks. I have found that most people just don't know the health risks and that when I'm able to share the information with them and give them enough fact-based information that many of them say, I didn't know this. If I had

known this, I wouldn't have engaged in this. There are still lots of ways I want to explore in my sex life, but there are safer ways that I can do that. Let's bring Dr. Catherine White back in. Dr. White, you've issued these care guidelines on choking. Obviously, we've heard about the health risks there, but is this just a kind of acknowledgement that it is going on and if somebody walks into any kind of health practice presenting in a certain way is this more for the medics to help them rather than to advise against how is this going to work so the guidelines we've

done are clinical management guidelines so that they're aimed at clinicians somebody presents and says that they've been strangled, how do you need to manage them? In terms of, I suppose, partly is given some background information. So a lot of the professionals won't know too much about strangulation. So we're trying to educate them. We're trying to get across the message of the increasing prevalence, because actually most clinicians will be seeing people who've been strangled they just don't realize that they're seeing people who've been strangled and then what do you need to do with that person in terms of who needs to have a scan who doesn't need to

have you know so imaging and to look for any signs of damage. And then also, because we've been talking this morning, haven't we, mainly about so-called consensual strangulation. But of course, we see it a lot in the non-consensual, so in domestic violence, in sexual violence, physical assaults, also self-harm, people strangling themselves with an intent to damage themselves, hurt themselves. So signposting along those lines about encouraging clinicians to think more and thinks, well, that's me. And having listened to all of this, I don't know whether I should continue or whether there is a safe way to

continue doing this. Is there a safe way to continue? I mean, I agree with Dr. White that I think that this is a behavior that people should avoid. It is not. I think one of the challenges is that many young people look around and they say, people tell us that we could die or we could have these horrible health things, but I don't know anyone who's died. And it's true. The death rate for consensual sexual choking does seem to be very low, right? Compared to other forms of strangulation, it's very low, but it can happen. And one of the big challenges is that there is no way to predict who it's going to happen to. And so for any range of issues with somebody's health history or just luck of the draw, but then there's all

these other issues in between, right, that we've been talking about, the cumulative health risks that are much, much, much more prevalent. And that I think with the young people I talk with, they really respond to that and say, I don't really want, you know, all of these risks, whether it's my brain health or we've had people who have had voice changes. That may not seem like a big deal to some people. Well, tell that to the voice major who participated in one of our studies. Right. She was in school as a voice major and her voice changed as a result of being choked or strangled during sex. What we need then are something that we as sex researchers and educators have always done, and many clinicians have always done, which is that many people feel like information is enough

and they can go back to their partner and say, I learned something new. I don't want to do this anymore. So, you know, reminding people that they get to be the creators of their own sexual lives, that they can say things like, I know we've been doing this. Maybe I've liked it. Maybe I haven't. But I don't want to do this anymore. But once you do and you get a positive response, hopefully from your partner, and they care about you and they don't want you to get hurt, then you also learn that you can do it.

And if they come back to you and they still do the thing that you've told them that you don't want to do, that's a big red flag in a relationship. That is Dr. Debbie Hebenick from the Indiana University of Public Health in America. You also heard the voice there of Dr. Catherine White, who is director of the Institute for Addressing Strangulation. There's a big conference going on about that in London today. Lots of you getting in touch,

lots of men getting in touch with the programme on this one, this texter. When I got divorced and had a bit of a Tinder binge, I met many women who actually asked me to choke them. I've never even considered it before

as I'm not that way inclined, but as part of a trusting relationship, I experimented a little and the positive reactions I got were clearly evident but it's very strange. Joanne, thank you for getting in touch, Joanne says this, choking is a male sexual fetishism. This is regression for women. An anonymous texter, I'm male and I wanted to point out that it's not always perpetrated by the male. I had a girlfriend who asked me to choke her. This was in an era before internet porn, so not influenced by external factors. As it was,

I refused. I'm not comfortable with it, but there can be no doubt that that is what she wanted. And finally, Joseph, thanks for getting in touch, Joseph. As a young man under 30, I've been surprised at how many women have recently asked me to choke them or to be otherwise aggressive towards them during sex, which I've not always enjoyed. I wonder whether this is due to the rise in pornography watching in young women you described last month. Thank you for testing us, Joseph. Please do get in touch on that topic or anything else you hear on Woman's Hour this morning. This is the number you need.

It is 84844. Now let's talk about another very important issue. Earlier this month, Anita Rani talked to actor Susan Wakoma here on Woman's Hour about an open letter she organised in support of her fellow actor Francesca Emiwuda-Rivers. Francesca was subjected to racist and misogynistic abuse online after being cast in the high-profile production of Romeo and Juliet. Susan Wakoma discussed the online abuse she experienced herself after being asked by employers to post on social media about her roles on TV. I have this fear whenever I see any black performer when they're announced in anything that's big of this happening and I think the first time that I witnessed it online was when

Leslie Jones who was on SNL was announced as part of the cast of Ghostbusters. Everybody had like an issue with it because it's all women whatever um but I saw in real time because I used to ask when I used to be on Twitter I saw it in real time the abuse that she got and it's disproportionate it makes no sense and it was predominantly targeted at her and it was racial and it was sexist and and ever since then I think for me and a lot of performers it's logged in our heads of yeah we want to back you when you get these announcements but we're so scared and if we have to do the extra work of being careful and watchful and mindful we need our employers to do that we need our agents to do that. Susan Wacoma so what sort of duty of care do employers have towards women who are abused

online simply because of the job that they do. Well, Dr. Rebecca Whittington is the online safety editor for Reach PLC, which publishes more than 120 newspapers and websites, including the Mirror newspaper and the Express. Her job, which is the first role of its kind, involves protecting journalists from online harm and supporting those who are trolled just for doing their jobs. Delighted to say Dr Whittington joins me in the Woman's Hour studio. Hello. Hi there. Thanks for having me. It's good to have you in the programme because it's such an important issue this.

I mean, let's start with the fact that we understand that your job, online safety editor, is the first role of its kind. Why is it so important to create such roles? Well, I mean, journalism, unfortunately, has seen a rise in online abuse of its journalists generally. In probably the last decade, since we started using social media so much more for journalism, journalists are working on the front line, I guess, of technological platforms.

Obviously, the majority of journalism now you will see print products but obviously there's a lot on online as well and that production is you know it happens every hour every minute of the day there's new content going up there's new content going on to social so the pandemic really exacerbated this problem and I think reach at that point realized that it couldn't continue to sustain the support it was providing in-house currently. And it needed actually to bring somebody in to actually look specifically at this issue. Because prior to that, I think social media editors, editors, you know, frontline staff were kind of trying to support colleagues when this happened. And it was happening all the time. And you were sort of ahead of the curve on this weren't you because your PhD from the University of Leeds analysed digital

impacts on news production and brand and journalistic identity that was looking at local newspapers but you saw this one coming this shift to online did you did you I guess back then did you think that women would be impacted in this way? No no I don't think I did actually at all and the online abuse the the kind of fear that journalists had potentially of putting themselves into online spaces was something that I picked up during that PhD research but it wasn't it wasn't the kind of crux of it all and actually that became so much more kind of pushed to the fore after my PhD and I became really aware of that and obviously at that point I was also training student journalists who were going out into this world of work where they needed to be visible, they needed to be

putting their achievements out there, they needed to be saying to you know potential employers this is my portfolio, this is what I can do and the best way that you can do that is obviously in social online spaces um so it is um something that i guess i saw more of from the student side of things and then obviously coming into reach um you know in the time that i've been at reach um we've had um i would say 250 reports over the last two years um of online. And that's official reports. Actually, a lot of the anecdotal things that I see, you know, don't go into the official reporting system necessarily. You also did your own research, didn't you,

with women in journalism, which had some quite depressing findings. Yes, that's right. So that was last year we published the research. It was a joint piece of research between REACH and women in journalism. And I think 400 women or so took part in that research from across journalism industry it wasn't just our organization 75 of those women said that they'd experienced some kind of online violence during the course of their work a fifth said that they'd considered leaving industry. Many of those women were also saying that they were changing the way that they put their work out online. And obviously that minimises the opportunities for women.

And we do see intersectional abuse is quite considerable. So if you're a woman, you are going to face potentially misogynistic abuse. If you are a black woman, you are going to face racist and misogynistic abuse and so it really does cause a problem for our industry if we don't address it because it potentially reduces the diversity within those frauds leading roles and when actually as an industry we need to be more diverse. Yeah what's does it depend on the kind of story you're working on as well as to whether the abuse ramps up? Yes, it can do. So, I mean, obviously, we're coming into a political year this year.

Politics and political subjects, I guess, are probably leading the way in terms of a lot of the things I'm seeing coming in at the moment. In the past, health and science has been a particular focus, a trigger point, but we do see it happening across the board. So I would say journalists covering celebrity or showbiz might well also receive online abuse. And actually, I have people getting in touch who there was a journalist who got in touch who'd done a feature about gardening that somebody had been very abusive towards this journalist on email afterwards so it can be anything and sometimes it can be quite unpredictable and but there are definitely trigger points um for the kinds of abuse that we get and actually as part of the role i do a lot of the work i do is around protection and identifying where those um trigger points might be and actually arming the journalists with the tools that they need to protect themselves from that because we can't control the behaviours of people online but what we can do is control our own privacy, control our own presence,

decide what it is that we're happy to share and what we want to keep back. So how do you do that then? How do you go to a journalist and say okay I mean I know exactly what you're talking about sadly but people can come at you and you hope that the social media platforms will have their own rigorous takedowns. That doesn't always happen. So how can you and this is very useful information for people in all kinds of public facing jobs listening to this. But how can you protect yourself? I mean, at the moment, I've been running a series of digital hygiene workshops. And actually, it's not just journalists from our businesses are taking part in those.

There's people from across the business that have taken part in those because they are also online users. So, you know, actually, it's things like making sure you have multi-factor authentication on your you're working for a reputable brand, hackers will want to get into that to actually potentially misuse your personal information or try and sell people things using your profile. But also, multi-factor authentication can prevent against things like impersonation, because if you actually then put all of your personal information behind that closed wall, it means it's much less available for people to then take that information, set up a profile pretending to be you and then actually starting to misuse that profile to either smear your reputation or try to achieve some political gain which unfortunately we have seen arising as well and do you test out people's security how easy it is to to get to an individual you do that on

yourself yes you can so it's called doxing yourself. And yes, there's lots of guides online. So, you know, do look into that and see how to do that. But essentially, if you open a private browser and type in your name is a good starting point, because then you can see what information is available about you from the public view rather than the, you you know being logged into all of your different platforms linkedin gives a huge amount away about us you know for example it tells people where we went to university where we went to school and then you can use that to jigsaw identify potentially where somebody might be living now so if you then google your address look on 192 and other sites like that um your local authority, I would recommend if you are in the public light,

remove yourself from the open register so that that address isn't made public and it doesn't become published on services like 192. And just doing that kind of basic digging around is a really good idea. And I recommend to staff across the business that they do that once a year at least. But if you're working in a high profile job or you're you've got something coming up where you think actually this could be a trigger point for somebody having a go at me in that case do that quick doxing you know of yourself just to check that there isn't any kind of weak spots that have opened up because

obviously online situations change so LinkedIn used to keep everything behind a closed wall now it's much more open you know that's changed People might not necessarily notice that in the terms and conditions box that they tick, you know. So it's just kind of keeping an eye on those things as well. We talked about the, well, mentioned it, the online safety bill that came in last year. It puts an onus on big tech companies to take more responsibility for preventing online harm rather than focusing on employers. But clearly Reach PLC has said, no, well, we need to protect our journalists in this sense. So what are the obligation, the legal obligations, if you're an employer to protect employees from this kind of harm?

And are companies doing enough? Should bigger companies like the one you work for be putting in roles like yours? I think where there's a company if a company has become aware that this is becoming an issue for staff members and I think it's definitely something that they need to think about in terms of legal obligations I'm not an expert in that and I can't really talk about it but what I can say is that if you want to keep your staff if you want to protect your staff their psychological safety doing something like bringing somebody in like me to actually work on these issues if it is an issue for your staff, if you want to protect your staff, their psychological safety, doing something like bringing somebody in like me to actually work on these issues, if it is an issue for your staff members, I think is really important. And I think actions actually speak so much louder than words

in some ways, you know, actually, you know, having somebody who can take that active role, who can ask, are you okay? And I know from talking to journalists, you know, not just journalists at Reach, but journalists more widely, that when somebody has come to say to them, are you OK? And I know from talking to journalists, you know, not just journalists at REACH, but journalists more widely, that when somebody's come to say to them, are you OK? That has made a big difference to them. You know, actually having that somebody to talk to, having somebody that they can share

their experiences with. And actually, you know, I know from my job that this is something that actually, you know, a lot of journalists will have experienced this. So they can share that support and advice. And I think that's really important. Not all organisations will have the opportunity to have somebody like me.

But actually, you know, women in journalism, like I've mentioned, has loads of resources. It's got a policy that can be downloaded by smaller journalistic sites and freelance journalists. You know, there's lots of places that are looking at this. So if you don't have the opportunity within your organisation, actually then looking elsewhere, there's loads of resources online that are freely available. Brilliant. Fantastic advice. Thank you so much for coming in. Much appreciated.

That is Dr Rebecca Whittington, online safety editor for Reach PLC. As ever, if you've experienced something like this, do share your stories with me. You can text 84844. Now, let's talk about Iran, because a teenager found dead during Iran's high-profile anti-government protests was sexually assaulted and killed by undercover agents working for Iran's security forces. That is according to a leaked document obtained by a World Service investigation.

Nika Shakerami was 16 when she disappeared in September 2022 after telling a friend that police were chasing her. Her family found her body nine days later. The authorities denied any involvement in her death, claiming she took her own life. Earlier, I spoke to BBC Global religion correspondent Reha Kansara just before I came on air and I asked her to remind us who Nika Shakarami was. Well, you might not have heard of Nika, but many of us have seen the videos of her online in the aftermath of the Women Life Freedom Movement, which happened in 2022. You may remember her. She was dressed all in black with short jet black hair, dark makeup, but very vibrant, just like any other teenage girl full of energy,

singing. These are the videos that consume social media, her singing with friends. But it's really important to understand what was happening in Iran just before she was killed. There's been decades of suppression in Iran that's led to real anger against its supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini. And this really hit a boiling point after the death of Massa Amini, who was detained by the morality police for not fully covering her hair in public in September 2022. And Nika was one of the, you can say, one of the faces of the movement in the aftermath of her death. As I've said, you know, Massa's death really was a turning point and it shocked the people of Iran. So like many young people there, Nika had become recently politically aware and she spoke of what she called the injustices around her,

joining many demonstrations, speaking out against the government. And her unabashed courage really struck a chord with many people in the country and it really got her recognised. So her death was always shrouded in confusion, secrecy. The authorities said she killed herself. And now the BBC Eye investigation team has come across this classified document. So tell us a bit more about that. Well, this classified document has come through us.

We can't give many details about how it's come to us, but it's come through to us by someone who supplied it to our BBC investigations team. They have risked their lives to do this. It's what on the face of it looks like a classified IRGC report. IRGC is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran. It's a security force that upholds the laws and rules of Ayatollah Khomeini. And it undermines the government's public narrative of what happened to Nika. Obviously, they say that she committed suicide. But even a month after her funeral, State TV broadcast an official investigation concluding that Nika had killed herself. They even showed CCTV footage of Nika entering an apartment block to do so,

but her mother says it's not her, she doesn't believe it's her, and our evidence shows that Nika was beaten to death whilst resisting sexual assault by agents from the IRGC who arrested her. Now, we know there's many fake documents circulating online that purport to be from the IRGC who arrested her. Now, we know there's many fake documents circulating online that purport to be from the IRGC. How do we know that this one is genuine? So there are many giveaways when we talk about fake documents, and these are things like errors in language or format,

even headings or outdated info like old slogans or historic logos. But there are two key factors that have helped us determine that this is a genuine document. And one is that we've showed it to several experts, all of whom say that it is genuine, it looks genuine. There were a few inconsistencies, but it's nothing that deterred our experts from believing it to be genuine. One of these experts was a former Iranian intelligence officer

who we had cross-checked the document reference number with the IRGC's archive and that archivist confirmed the reference number exists in the IRGC's archive and that it is a report about the anti-government protests in 2022. Now, of course, we can't always be 100% certain but this has offered us further corroboration that the report is genuine and two is using open source investigation that is using what we have online to investigate what really happened to geolocate the details we have on her last movement. So in the document, there were details of, you know, what were her last movements. And we cross-checked this with what we were seeing on social media,

all the footage and UGC that was coming out. And bar minor discrepancies, it checked out. So all of these new revelations are contained in a BBC Eye documentary. I understand you have sent that documentary to the Iranian authorities. What's been their response? Yes, so we sent the contents of the investigation to the Iranian government and they haven't responded. And this comes as no surprise, not just to the BBC, but to ordinary Iranians as well. Most of the people that we've spoken to on the ground never believed the government when they said she killed herself.

So, you know, let's see. Let's see what happens next. And as far as the movement goes, Iran's Women, Life, Freedom movement, what do you think this new information will do to that? What is the state of that movement at the moment? Well, about a couple of weeks ago, Nika's sister, Ada Shakirami, was arrested and then released a few days later.

And this is amidst the backdrop of another brutal crackdown by the morality police. But it's really important to highlight that this Women life freedom movement shows no signs of going away. It had gone underground for a bit, it seems to be resurfacing ever so slightly again. But this movement is far bigger than just a crackdown on women's rights, or in a more, I guess, specific way on what happened to Massa. Massa Amini's death was the turning point for many Iranians who believe that their freedoms are being suppressed in the

country. That is the BBC Global Religion correspondent Reha Kansara. You can watch the full investigation, Nika's Last Breath, on BBC iPlayer if you're in the UK or on the BBC World Service YouTube page internationally. There are also reports of Iranian authorities targeting women for not wearing their hijabs properly. They've been back in the news. I'm joined by a women's affairs journalist for the BBC World Service, Farhanak Amidi. Farhanak, welcome. Thank you, Claire. First of all, your response to this investigation, are the family surprised at this new evidence that's come to light? I think this

is just a confirmation of what the family have always been saying. They never really believed what the authorities were saying that Nika killed herself because they always said she was very hopeful and she was out on the street protesting for a better future. Someone who does that is not just going to go and kill herself straight away on the first day that she goes out on the streets. So it's just a confirmation of the narrative of the family as well. Let's move on to then talking about the reports today of women joining Iran's Ambassadors of Kindness, which is a rather ironic title, isn't it? One of the regime's enforcement groups.

Who are they? Well, you know, having female morality police officers is nothing new. They always existed. There was a spike in their presence in the 90s. And then what we are seeing today is that they are using more women in the force. And that is basically parallel to the unprecedented violence and harassment that we are seeing on the streets of Iran at the moment.

Because in the past two years, what we have been seeing is everyday acts of defiance by Iranian women. So this whole movement, when it started two years ago, I mean, it's been going on for 45 years, to be honest. Women have protested mandatory hijab from the very first day that it was enforced. The largest ever protest against the Islamic revolution happened on the 8th of March, exactly after the revolution's victory and by women. So 100,000 women actually took to the streets protesting mandatory hijab back then. So it has been going on for 45 years, but it just really intensified after Mahsa Amini's death two years ago. And ever since, women haven't stopped protesting. So you're seeing that the appearance of the streets of Iran have changed because women refuse to wear the mandatory hijab.

So now with these ambassadors of kindness, quote unquote, we are seeing that the authorities are trying to legitimize the violence that they are perpetrating on women. Because what we are seeing is that this new morality police, the gear, the way they dress is way more intimidating and aggressive than it used to be before. So they're bringing the women in to kind of soften it, I guess, in that sense. Just final question, of course, 22-year-old Massa Amini died in custody in 2022 after being arrested for not wearing the hijab and the huge process that followed. Now that we have this new information out about Nika's death, do you think a similar reaction may follow?

Will people see this in Iran? Of course they will see it. They have already seen it. It's gone viral on social media and people are reacting to it and saying that they always believed that this has happened to Nika. Will the reaction be exactly the same as what happened to Mahsa Amini? I don't think so, because we are in a different stage and phase of the protests and basically fight in Iran. So it might not be the same as what happened during Mahsa Amini's uprising, but

definitely I think also the regime and authorities are ready and they are showing their muscle power on the streets, telling people that we know that you might be ready to get on the streets. Okay, good to have you in the studio. Thank you so much for joining us. BBC

World Service, Farhanak Amidi and just a reminder you can watch Nika's Last Breath BBC iPlayer now if you're in the UK or on the BBC World Service YouTube page internationally thank you all for getting all of your texts coming into the programme on all kinds of subjects today on protecting women in frontline roles from getting online abuse specifically journalists but any kind of frontline role. This texter says, it's not just women in journalism that need support.

My son is in his first journalism role. He wrote a story which attracted massive personal abuse and criticism, and it has really impacted his mental and physical health. Thank you so much for your text. Again, just a quick reminder, 84844, if you'd like to get in touch with us here at BBC Woman's Hour. Now time for another story from you, our listeners, about hobbies that you've taken up again after a bit of a break. Today it's the turn of two women who spoke to our reporter Sarah Swadling about something that they used to do at school and a bit with the grandchildren,

but hadn't done properly for around 50 years. And that is art. I'm Jo. And I'm Fiona. I'm trying to do a leopard at the moment, based on a photograph. I keep thinking, why did I start a leopard with all those spots and things? But it's getting there slowly um i like yeah i i'm really quite surprised and i keep saying it looks fine when i haven't got my glasses on but when i i put my glasses on oh no i keep saying this you know building errors and what have you

but um yes from a distance or without glasses, I'm quite pleased. I think it looks amazing, really. I had to go at some lilies and yeah, I think there's depth and there's perspective and shows the background and persevered when it wasn't quite working. And so I felt that I got there in the end. It was lovely. Did you enjoy art very much as a child?

Was it something that you enjoyed in school? Yes, I did enjoy it. And I did art O-level because I enjoyed it. But I literally have not touched a paintbrush since, apart from with the children, perhaps occasionally. And so it's completely new. It's 55 years since I've picked up a paintbrush again. So how did it come about that you started to paint again or do art again?

Well, it was all thanks to Jo, my friend here. She joined an art club. When she said she was doing it, I said, oh, I'd love to do that. I really want to do that. Because my son had given me some paints and canvases and things when I retired from the NHS and I hadn't used them so I just I don't know I needed the stimulus really to get started again. Jo tell me a little bit about your involvement with the art class. I didn't have any really positive experience of art at school

and so I had a view that I wanted to be creative and artistic but didn't really know how and didn't have the tools and just didn't build any confidence and then a friend came up to me and said oh there's an art lounge happening you would be very welcome to if it's for beginners or people returning to art so I just thought I'll go for it because I just had my daughter's wedding and there was a bit of space in my diary because life had been very busy and I thought I thought I put something in to look forward to after the wedding really and I knew it would be with people who would be quite relaxed in their approach as well. Often people do have quite negative experiences of it at school and being perhaps told they're not creative.

Yeah, exactly. And just feeling that it was for the experts and they're very artistic and I was very much not in that stream. So my confidence wasn't developed at school really and so I'm definitely a bystander. What is it about the art sessions that you go to now that is so different to school that is more liberating? They give us a little sort of maybe exercise just for the first 20 minutes or so half an hour and then it's entirely up to you what you want to paint, what you want to draw.

And they come along and give you hints and help you and are really encouraging. So that's a big thing. It's just for your own enjoyment, your own pleasure. I came back from the first one totally exhilarated. It was wonderful. And I would say, having gone in initially thinking oh what am I going to produce at the end of it I let go of all of that and thought no Jo it's all about

the process so just enjoy the playing and the process and and the opportunity it felt really fresh doing something completely new I got exhilarated from that point of view just just the newness of it and yes I would have a few little disasters along the way but I just saw it all as quite a lot of fun and and again as for anything it's just all that encouragement along the way and others around similarly having days when they thought it wasn't quite working and then it would all come together but it came about because the art teachers tend to say um well we we all work through a few walls of um knowing whether it's right or not quite what we wanted and we keep we push through and and keep working at it and then you know that's that's how art is

as adults we get so few opportunities in life to play creatively, don't we? Yeah, exactly. And I'd worked with early years from all my career and I'd watched young children just playing in Mud Kitchen or whatever it was and just thought, actually, it's good for adults too to just feel free to have a go. And the other thing that's happened is around us, people are all doing completely different things. And so somebody exploring more abstract art ideas and somebody else is having to go more printing and that's somebody else having to go

for portrait and and so we all look over one another's shoulder and just sort of have a little nose and and and encourage one another because we're honestly really impressed just to see what everybody else is doing alongside us and we pick each other up if somebody is sort of feeling a little bit deflated and not getting where they want to get to and that's another aspect it feels very very much like a small community and so you there's a sense of belonging in there which is lovely I think also one of the things I've found is that I can accept my own limitations better I keep telling myself look this is the first painting you've done for 55 years or whatever. And I think that helps. So I don't get quite so frustrated as I used to, which means you don't give up or rubbish it or whatever. You carry on. And it's just fun

being able to create something. Jo and Fiona speaking to our reporter Sarah Swaddling there. And if you'd like to share your story about something that you've taken up again after a few decades, please do get in touch. You can do that in the usual ways. Details on our website. We would love to hear from you. Daisy in Penzance has been in touch. Morning, Daisy.

She says, I was scared of deep water, dark water, waves, seaweed and the cold. So I joined a group of synchro swimmers because I love the showing off and the outfits. But they swim in the sea. A couple of years on, I find myself in the freezing dark sea. And I love it because of the strength and support I found from my brilliant female troupe. Daisy, synchro swimming in the sea sounds like an extreme sport to me, but thank you so much for getting in touch with the programme. Now, delegates from 174 countries

have been in Ottawa this week for the latest round of talks that have the aim of reaching a legally binding international agreement on plastic pollution. Since the 1950s, more than 9 billion tonnes of plastic has been produced, of which

7 billion tonnes have become waste, filling up landfills, polluting lakes, rivers, the soil and the ocean. Humanity now produces 430 million tonnes of plastic each year, two thirds of which is contained in very short-lived products. Some of that plastic gets into the food chain where it has the potential to harm human health. Well, one woman who cares a lot about this, enough to travel 3,000 miles to investigate the effect of plastic pollution in our seas, is the film director Eleanor Church. Her documentary called X Trillion comes out this week and takes the viewer on an all-female expedition to the North Pacific where much of the world's plastic waste ends up. Delighted to say Eleanor joins me in the studio. Hello.

Hi there. Great to have you here. It's a brilliant documentary. We'll talk about it in a sec. Let's talk about the title, though. Why X Trillion? Well, we spent a long time deciding what to call the film. X Trillion really is because we don't know exactly how many pieces of microplastic are in the ocean and um we started off thinking about how many million trillions of stars there are in the sky and often that's compared to how many trillions of pieces of microplastics there are in the ocean around us um on the boat um but there isn't an exact number so we went for x

yeah and it's very, very powerful. I mean, the exhibition was to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. And so we're very used to images of these vast floating rubbish dumps, but that isn't actually what we see in the documentary, is it? So can you explain why? Yes, exactly. So the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is thought to be three times the size of France. So it's a vast area. But as you say, it's not what people imagine it to be three times the size of France, so it's a vast area.

But as you say, it's not what people imagine it to be. And actually, we were sailing through this. It's called the North Pacific Gyre and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. We were sailing through this for days and days and days, and actually, it just looked like normal sea. And sometimes we'd see a chair float past or a toothbrush or

something like that a recognizable object but most of the time it actually just looked like beautiful blue sea but then when we put the trawl through the water and pulled it up we saw that actually there were many many many pieces of tiny fragments of plastic that are so small and they've broken down but through the sun and the waves um making the plastic smaller and smaller and smaller because it's traveled such a long way um and ultimately plastic never disappears it just breaks down and down and down and that's really what the big issue is and it's becoming plastic sand in effect yeah or i think people yeah exactly and people call it a plastic soup um and we were able to see some of it just with the naked eye

as tiny fragments but some of it you have to look at under the microscope and actually amazingly one of the things I found extraordinary was at one point we in one of the tools we found some microbeads the things that you use and facial facial washes so tiny tiny tiny pieces floating in this area that's one of the most remote places on the planet. So we were closer to humans on a space station than we were to people on land. You know, we didn't see a boat for three weeks.

We were at sea for three weeks. But yeah, these bits of plastic were there. Why do they gather there? What's going on? Well, luckily we had a geography teacher on board. Andy? One of the things about the expedition was that we all came from different professions. And so one of the people was the geography teacher and she was going to explain that it's the ocean currents that we have. We have one ocean, it's all interconnected, but we have all these currents that are pushing things around and act like whirlpools.

And there are five main gyres in the world and then smaller ones dotted around and so it's a bit like when you pull the plug out of the bath they go around and accumulate in this place and yeah it's the densest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world and that's where it is. Okay so you were on this boat with with women many of whom hadn't met before that must have been interesting you had scientists you know you're the director making a film of all of this there were vloggers all kinds of women how did it work out? Yeah so it was so the expedition was organized by X Expedition and Emily Penn the co-founder, has been on this mission for years to take women to sea to see what the real issue with ocean plastics are and taking people from all different professions. So like you said, we had scientists on board, we had a geography teacher,

we had an engineer, we had packaging designer, we had recycling expert. That was me. And the idea is to see the issue of ocean plastics firsthand and what it really is um and to look at where the solutions are to it and the fact that there isn't one one um profession or one answer to this that it comes from all walks of life and all different professions and yeah we hadn't met before getting on the boat um i arrived the day before having left my family behind and I couldn't really spare the time to go and um get there any earlier and um we were all there because we really really wanted to do this

and we're all really passionate and there with our um own idea of what we were going to do. But actually, some people were saying before we left, you know, oh, it's going to be so intense. You're on this essentially quite small boat, and there's no way of getting off or going for a walk around the block when you need a breather. But Emily did a really good job of setting the tone when we got on. And she was saying, you know, it's going to be really hard at times, but you just need to look out for each other and see if you're okay and be kind to each other and it goes a long way and it did and I think we're bonded to each other for the rest of our lives because it was an extraordinary experience. That is great to hear also you did we've got about 30 seconds but you got a lot of flack didn't you for leaving your young children for a month to go away and you don't think you

would have got that kind of comment had you been been a man? Well, I think lots of people were supportive, but yeah, there were the comments of, you know, what sort of person does this? Which my husband probably wouldn't have got, but all the more reason to do a very good job, the best I could do with it. You certainly did. It's a fascinating watch.

Thank you so much for joining us, Eleanor Church there. The documentary is called X Trillion Screening at the Curzon in Soho in London tomorrow and screenings planned around the country as well. Thanks so much for joining us. Just a quick moment,

just time to tell you tomorrow on Woman's Hour, we'll find out what it's really like to be a co-parent. How do you share the parental load once you've separated from your partner? Love to hear from you and your experiences

in the usual way. Back tomorrow at 10. That's all from today's Woman's Hour. Join us again next time. I'm Helen Lewis, and I have a question. What links family WhatsApp dramas? I flounced off after someone made a particularly ignorant comment. Russian state propaganda.

It's a very good platform for spreading all this pro-Putin position. And a woman who married an AI. 100% I would never go back to humans ever, ever again. No idea? Well, they're all examples of how instant messaging has changed the world. Find out more by joining me for my new BBC Radio 4 series, Helen Lewis Has Left the Chat. Subscribe to Helen Lewis Has Left the Chat on BBC Sounds. covered. There was somebody out there who's faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.