Woman's Hour - Stealthing conviction, Jill Halfpenny, Henry VIII's Queens

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

Stealthing is the crime of removing a condom during sex without consent and is a form of rape. Clare McDonnell discusses why this is an under-reported crime with Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner for Local Policing, Helen Millichap, who leads the Met’s focus on violence against women and girls, and Gemma Lindfield, Barrister at Five St Andrew's Hill Chambers.Actor Jill Halfpenny has starred in popular TV series such as Byker Grove, Coronation Street, EastEnders and The Cuckoo. She won an Olivier Award for her role in the musical Legally Blonde and she won the second series of BBC 1's Strictly Come Dancing. But, two tragic events have framed Jill’s life story; when she was four years old her dad died suddenly of a heart attack. Then in 2017, in similarly tragic circumstances, her partner Matt died. Jill talks to Clare about confronting her grief head-on, something she examines in her new book, A Life Reimagined.Experts from across the world from a broad range of academic disciplines including psychology, medicine, policy studies, law and humanities are coming together with an aim to research an area which some say is underfunded and poorly understood. 4M Conference 2024 organiser, Professor Gemma Sharp, from the University of Exeter's School of Psychology, joins Clare to talk about her vision.The wives of Henry VIII are often reduced to the simplistic rhyme, ‘Divorced, Beheaded, Died. Divorced, Beheaded, Survived’. But a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Six Lives: The Stories of Henry VIII’s Queens, seeks to focus on the stories and identities of these six individual women – rather than their infamous husband – and their transformation into popular icons. Clare is joined by curator Charlotte Bolland.Presenter: Clare McDonnell Producer: Rebecca Myatt Studio manager: Bob Nettles

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, this is Claire Macdonald and you're listening to the Woman's Hour podcast. Good morning and welcome to Woman's Hour. Today we are talking about stealthing. That is when a condom is removed during sex without consent. Last week a man was jailed for four years and three months for this crime, but convictions are still extremely rare. This morning, we'll try to get to the bottom of why that is, with the Metropolitan Police's lead on violence against women and girls and also a barrister.

Actress Jill Halfpenny has actually faced devastating loss in her life. Her father, when she was just four years old and in 2017 her then partner. Both men died suddenly, both had heart attacks. Now in her new book A Life Reimagined, Jill revisits the trauma of these losses as a child in the 70s when no one even talked about her dad's death to the very different approach she took with her own son after her partner's death. Let me know this morning how you have processed your own grief. Did you, like Jill, bury it initially? How did that impact you later in life?

And how are you dealing with it now? I'd love to hear from you. You can text the programme. The number is 84844. Text will be charged at your standard message rate. On social media, we are at BBC Women's Hour and you can email us through the website. Also today, there's a major conference underway right now, a world first into how menstruation and menopause link with mental health. Experts from across the world from a broad range of academic disciplines are coming together in the West Country to find new answers in an area of research

which many say is underfunded and poorly understood. We'll hear from the woman who set the whole thing up. And a new exhibition. It's called Six Lives, the Stories of Henry VIII's Queens. Always thought of, of course, as a collective. Divorced, beheaded, died, you know the rest. This exhibition highlights the stories of the individual women rather than their infamous husband, featuring items that have never before been seen on public display and their transformation

over the centuries into popular icons. We're going to speak to the exhibition curator here on Women's Hour today. All that on the way. But let's start with stealthing. Last week, a man was jailed for four years and three months in a rare conviction for stealthing. That is the crime of taking a condom off during sex without consent. The victim had consented to sex on condition that a condom was used but the condom was then removed without the woman's consent. Now the Metropolitan Police who investigated the case referred this to this as a rare conviction because it is a crime that is underreported. The question is are the police doing enough to support women and get that conviction rate up? With me to discuss the implications of this particular conviction,

delighted to say Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner for Local Policing, Helen Millichap, who leads the Met's focus on violence against women and girls, is with me in the studio. Good morning. Good morning. Thanks so much for dropping by. And also joining me is Gemma Linfield-Barrister at 5 St Andrews Hill Chambers. Good morning Gemma.

Good morning. Let's start with a legal definition then Gemma this one to you. How is delving defined in law? Well the simple answer is that it's actually not. Let me explain. So as we know rape is a sexual is penetration and without consent and what the sexual offenses act has um is a section on conclusive presumptions about consent and it's within that section that we find um that if um the defendant intentionally deceives a complainant as the nature or purpose of the relevant act or induced the victim to consent to the act by impersonating someone, for example, then there can't be any consent. So there's not an offence of stealthing per se. But what we do know is, is that consent can be conditional. And if someone's deceived and their consent is based on that deception, then it's not consent.

Yes, because that's what may cause confusion to a lot of people listening to this. If you are in bed with someone and you have consented to sex, how then do you uphold a conviction for this particular issue we're talking about today? Yes, this is a very specific act and deception. It's someone saying to their partner, don't worry, I'll wear a condom, but having no intention of doing that and removing it. And that plainly, if someone consents to a sexual act on the basis that they want to be protected

and the other person denies that, then that that can't be good consent around all of that evidentially it is it is quite often one word against another I notice in in the recent case there were text messages in which the defendant effectively admitted to what he did so looking at these offences in terms of proving them it can be difficult each case is on its own facts in this one he'd admitted in some text messages alongside there being forensic evidence that no condom was used. Yes so just just to this one up as well, does the law, as you've defined it, thanks for clearing that up, does the law make stealthing rape, making stealthing rape apply across the whole of the UK?

Yes. And in fact, last year, Scotland had its first conviction in respect of conduct that amounts to stealthing, where someone, he was dating, he said that he would use protection and he didn't. And it was one of 18 offences against women. So that, again, is quite interesting on its facts because it shows that this was a repeated sex offender and that there was a wealth of evidence about his his behavior and of course if someone is engaging in acts of deception in sex then it is likely it's not it's not going to

be a one-off let's get more detail on the case now from deputy assistant commissioner for local policing at the met helen millichap helen what was involved in the police investigation we've had you know the details laid out there by Gemma, but there's a lot of nuance here, isn't there? There is, and I hope it's OK that I start by saying how brave and courageous this victim was and that none of this is possible without somebody having the confidence to report and to support an investigation and then a subsequent prosecution.

So thank you to her and also to the team because this is hard yards sometimes making sure that you can get every possible evidential robust basis for a likely conviction in place. So thank you to the team. So also I think it's worth saying that although stealthing isn't, as our colleague has said, part of the law's language,

I think sometimes using more colloquial language does help people realise and identify with a scenario that they might not otherwise have thought was a crime against them. And one of the things we're trying to do here is encourage more people to recognise where something may have happened to them, that they may feel reluctant to report because they don't A, know it's a crime, or B, feel they'll be believed, or it relates to the complexity of moments in a sequence of events that started with a level of consensual activity and ended with very definite withdrawal of consent,

or where consent can no longer be assumed. Because this investigation, according to your own force, was very much suspect-led. What do you mean by that? So suspect-led, I know is a kind of a slightly odd phrase, isn't it? Because of course it would be. But Operation Soteria is a nationwide policing and also CPS and other relevant partnership approach to really turn on its head some of the previous ways we've got rape investigations wrong in the past. And we are not defensive about some of the ways we have got this wrong.

Being suspect focused means being laser like in terms of the behaviour of an offender, exactly what the offender is doing, as opposed to being overly, as we potentially have been in the past, concerned with the credibility of a victim coming forward is a sense that their own behaviour will be under the microscope and scrutinised, especially where consent has been doing and not what the victim has or hasn't been doing or the choices that they have made. And in this particular offender's case it was as we've just been hearing examining previous behaviour and also the text messages as well that he sent to the victim and then deleted. Absolutely and that was a critical part of this case. But we also know that some victims might not have evidence on their phones that does tend to prove or provide a good basis for the prosecution. And we wouldn't want them to think

that it's not worth reporting either. So that's the first thing to say. We know, as our colleague the barrister has said, that sometimes when a case does rely on the testimony of the victim without much else in terms of evidence is often a reason why they might not come forward. What we want to say to victims is come forward,

we will work with you to establish what are the evidential opportunities in terms of the suspect's behaviour and anything else that might help us get to a realistic prospect potentially of prosecuting the case. And we know in this case the deleted text messages were relevant. We know that also that means for victims they have to probably worry about whether or not what's on their phones is going to be looked at by the police or a prosecuting agency.

And what I wanted to try and make sure people don't worry about is that we are going to be randomly trawling victims' phones. What we will be doing is where there is evidence that is going to be useful and we have the consent of the victim to look at those things, that we do so, but with a very narrow gauge. And I think that's in the past what's been worrying a lot of people. OK, it's interesting the trauma to go through to sort of have to convince people all over again that that you know you've had a crime committed against you i think that this is not um a one issue problem and culturally we we talk about sexual offenses in a difficult way um we look at cases like this and undoubtedly you you know, people down the pub will say, oh, my goodness, you know, I had a scenario where the condom fell off. Am I now going to be guilty of, you know, stealthing?

And it's all it always seems to lead back to hope that a police officer is going to take you seriously. as I outlined you know it's not a straightforward answer to what is the offence it's not like you can say this someone stole my bike you know this is complicated and nuanced and so it's it's initially hoping that that the police will take it seriously in the Crown Prosecution Service obviously we've got Operation Cetaria now which is about the the police and the crown prosecution services shifting um previous cultural norms and practices to make it more um supportive of victims and as my colleague says you know perpetrator focused um it's incredibly daunting when one also looks at how long it takes for these cases to come to trial and we all know know that. We see it in the news. I want to put that back to Deputy Assistant Commissioner Helen Mellichap.

I mean, and this is the point, isn't it? And you know you've addressed it. You say you've got this Operation Sataria now to actually try and address that. But we know there was a YouGov survey in England and Wales recently, 39% of women said they had not much or no trust in police to handle the issue of violence against women and girls. And that has to factor in, doesn't it, to the low conviction, the low reporting and the low conviction rate. And first of all, we totally recognise that we have a mountain to shift here, but we are shifting it and we have got some more positive results recently in terms of the number of rape charges we're securing, the timeliness of the casework, the size of the teams and the training that we are giving the

teams through Operation Soteria. There is a lot more specialised and specific training. And this case provides us with a unique insight into some of the ways we want to make sure our officers, whether they be rape investigation specialists, or whether they be the 999 responder, who might be the first person that a victim experiencing a crime like this sees, that we are both sort of culturally competent in terms of the language we use, the seriousness with which we take it, and a complete absence of victim-blaming assumptions or language right across the policing spectrum. I know some of the delays in the criminal justice system are factors beyond policing's control, but we are working really

hard with colleagues in the CPS, with courts, to try and make sure that we are getting faster and quicker because victims, quite frankly, do have to wait too long and we know how traumatic and stressful that can be. There's lots going on to make sure that the team around an individual victim as they go through a very traumatic process like this has all the right component parts, so advocacy, independent sexual advisors, all of the bits that are over and above what a policing investigator

can provide and quite rightly sit outside policing to try and make sure that a victim survivor feels informed, safe and protected as they go through a really difficult. We know all the stories and the very serious accusations of course that came to light after the murder of Sarah Everard. We had the Casey report into the Metropolitan Police, but your own chief commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, said he didn't agree that the force was institutionally sexist and misogynistic. Isn't that part of the problem? Because these are the very people that women listening to this will go to with their complaints. And if that problem isn't recognised, how can women listening to this have faith and

trust that your organisation is truly changing? You have to admit you've got a problem, haven't you, before you can solve it? And I think we have admitted we've got a problem. I think some of the language that people are choosing to use or not use is distracting us from the real thing, which is we accept that diagnosis. We do have... He didn't really accept it, it was institutionally sexist. He didn't choose to use those words. Do you think it is? I think we have deep-rooted issues which are evidenced by all of this data and statistics you've just quite rightly laid out here, which means we do need a wholesale shift in our approach to dealing with violence against women and girls. And I include in that spectrum of responsibilities, internal sexism, internal internal misogyny the ways that we're rooting out internal predators that is the right word for that as well

as how we give confidence in the widest possible sense to women and girls out there in London and that is to do with women and girls who are and it's unfortunate that anyone is a victim of this type of crime is coming forward as a victim but also people that may not feel safe going about their normal lives, whether that's studying, living, working in London or going to and from school. So we are doing lots of work wider than the investigation of individual cases to try and make sure that we are looking after the interests and protecting women and girls wherever they go in London.

There's lots of things I could talk about, about the ways we're patrolling overtly and covertly in public spaces, in the nighttime economy, trying to make sure that, again, suspect focus, our officers are looking for predatory behaviour, first and foremost, of people who might be intent on committing predatory offences, not interested in the behaviour of women and girls as they go out quite rightly trying to enjoy London and their lives. Really good to hear that. Gemma Linfield, final word to you for women listening to this who are, you know, have got a knot in the pit of their stomach thinking, do you know what? That's me. That happened to me. What should they do? Well, I think there's probably a number of women, and that's the sad thing,

thinking that they should report the matter to the police at every stage of the way they can consider whether that is the right thing for them to do but I do really believe that that these cases have to be reported this behavior has to stop in operations deteriorates findings it says that rape myths and stereotypes continue to inform decision making about victims cases at every stage of the justice process. Let the victims of these crimes come forward and let us hear them and hopefully we can start to live in a society where women don't have to worry when they have a healthy sexual you know relationship or engage in a sexual act as to whether someone will remove the condom and expose them to risk and that's what i would say thank you so much both of you uh for talking through such an important topic we really

appreciate you giving us uh your time here on woman's hour the metropolitan police deputy assistant commissioner for local policing helen Millichap and Gemma Linfield barrister at five St Andrews Hill chambers and as ever if you want to comment on this if you have experience do get in touch with the programme the text number is 84844 and obviously this is an issue that's come up in many manifestos in the general election. We'll cover some of that a little bit later on in the programme to give you an idea of different political parties' stance on this particular issue. Now, actor Jill Halfpenny is best known for her roles on television in iconic series such as Biker Grove, Coronation Street, EastEnders, and most recently The Cuckoo, and on stage where she won an Olivier Award

for her role in the musical Legally Blonde. She also won the second series of Strictly Come Dancing. But when Jill was just four years old, her dad died suddenly of a heart attack. Then in 2017, in similarly tragic circumstances, her partner Matt died. These two tragic events have framed Jill's life story and in her new book A Life Reimagined My Journey of Hope in the Midst of Loss she explains how as an adult she decided to confront her grief head-on which she was unable

to do as a child. Delighted to say Jill joins me in the studio now. Welcome. Thank you. It's an incredible read. It really is. Essential reading, I think, for people who are processing their grief. Also, importantly, for people around them trying to help. So why did you decide to write it now? Well, I think that grief has been with me as you've just mentioned for most of my life and in the past seven years I feel like I've learnt some ways in which to deal with it and to process it and I really wanted to share what I'd learnt because I thought if I could just help anyone

then that would be useful but to do that I had to give it context. So the book is really about, you know, my, you know, what happened to me, what I did, and where I am now. And I just really wanted to share how grief had sort of threatened to overtake my life and kind of robbed me of really being able to hold on to any sort of joy. Well, let's go back to the beginning beginning for people who don't know your story you grew up in Gateshead in the northeast your parents your two sisters and then at just four years old your dad died very suddenly what do you remember about that day? I don't actually remember a lot about that day I was told about it

by my my sisters and my mom but basically my dad went out to play a game of football um a friendly match and um he had a heart attack on the pitch and he died so as far as I was aware my dad left the house and never came back and you know it was 1979 we're in the northeast of England we We're not in therapy. We're not talking about our feelings. And I just went to school in the September. And know, the sort of suppressed, unprocessed feelings became a driver for me to do things, to get out of my own head. So in some ways it drove my ambition for a long time because I just wanted to run away from any uncomfortable feelings I had.

And it made you very successful. Yeah. I think, you know, trauma as a driver works for a certain amount of time and then unfortunately it catches up with you and it made you very successful yeah I think you know that you know trauma as a driver works for a certain amount of time and then unfortunately it catches up with you and it says hey like you're running on the wrong engine here like you really need to work out what is good for you and what isn't and you need to really start processing things because that's not going because the the frightening aspect is if I process this pain, if I really turn towards my feelings, will I lose part of myself? And no, you won't for anybody listening.

You absolutely don't. What you do is you can just live alongside your pain and your grief in a way that's far more comfortable. That's what I've found anyway. To go back to your mother for a second. As you say, it was the 1970s. People weren't talking about mental health openly, processing their feelings. Children were certainly not front and centre. They had to sort of look to the adults and take their lead. What do you think about what your mum was going through now, looking back, and how she handled it? I think she must

have been terrified, absolutely terrified. And she must have just thought, I have to get out of bed every day. I have to give my children breakfast and I have to send them to school. And somehow I have to do that every single day from now until they're adults. And I think what happens is as a child, you don't have the vocabulary and you don't have the words to be able to say, are you all right? Because you don't look all right. You know, I don't I the the words to be able to say are you all right because you don't look all right you know I don't I feel a bit anxious inside my you know we don't have this kind of word so I think what happens is you know I grew up with a mum who was obviously in a huge amount of pain and was really scared and was grieving but she because she wasn't telling me

that that that was how she was feeling it what happened was I became quite an anxious child because what I was seeing and what I was feeling were in contradiction with each other. And there was one moment in the book, which is very cut through, really, that only once did she, you recall her letting her emotions out when you heard her in this guttural cry and you just didn't know what it was. You ran in to see what was going on. Yeah, I was playing out in the street and I ran into the house and I heard what I thought was my mum laughing really, really hard. I thought, how strange. It sounded quite scary, though, the laugh. And I came in and I peeked around the corner and she wasn't

laughing she was she was crying but she was wailing crying and she was hugging my then uncle and he just looked at me and he sort of just shooed me away with his hand and I guess you know from maybe that moment on I was I realized that maybe I wasn't welcome in my mum's grief. And it's such a small moment, but we take those cues so vividly when we're kids and we put them in a box somewhere inside of us and, you know, never to be spoken of again. So I think I took that shoe into heart very much

and maybe it stopped me from then asking more questions. And you say you're then uncle. Your mum went on to marry. To marry my dad's brother, yes. And how was that? Well, at the time, again, I was very young. So as far as I could see, it was, oh, how lovely. This man has stepped in to look after our family.

And it was lovely. And he is lovely and I've nothing but love for him but obviously there were people who maybe thought differently and had some judgment upon that and again it wasn't talked about so there was just a lot of undercurrent in my family of things that we didn't talk about and we just got on. And I think it's just important for me to say as well that I think, you know, my childhood, you know, I was I had lots of happy times. And I think those can live alongside the anxious times and the sad times as well. You know, I think that what I've learned as I've grown up is that we are just so many different things all at the same time and that we shouldn't be scared of being all of those things and confronting the difficult points in life that you do so brilliantly in this book

i mean you say when you kind of suppressed all these feelings and it came out your medication was alcohol wasn't it yes it was when you left home tell us a little bit about that so i think i i always had this feeling that I didn't belong. I always had this, like, everybody else seemed to know the secret to life. Everybody else, like, knew how to live, and I didn't. And I never said that to anyone because I thought, well, people will think I've gone mad. And alcohol just quiet, just made the voices inside my head just a bit quieter. So I would dampen those voices down with alcohol.

And after a while, you know, it was in my sort of late 30s, I realised that I felt like I used alcohol in a way that maybe other people didn't. And I wasn't, you know, I want to make this really clear because I think addiction is fairly misunderstood. I had not got to the point in my life where I was destroying things or I wasn't able to hold down jobs or I wasn't able to hold down relationships. I was what you would call a very, very high function and alcoholic. But what I saw was a future for myself that I didn't want. I saw a future for myself, this relationship that I had with alcohol.

I thought, I don't think it's going to get better. I think it's going to get better I think it's going to get worse so when I went into recovery it was me trying to say no this I want more for myself and and and what can I do to change and the only thing I had to do was just stop drinking the alcohol and suddenly once I stopped doing that I was able to face and talk about so many it gave me the space to confront all of the things that I hadn't been confronting. And that was very, very useful. Because I'm sorry to have to ask you about this next chapter in your life, but your partner, Matt, died in a very similar way to your dad. If it's not too difficult, can you talk to us about what happened to Matt

yeah Matt um was also very keen on exercise and um he went to a spin class one morning and um he died in the class um so it was very very shocking and it was very unexpected. And once that had happened, I just knew very, very deep down inside of me, I just knew that I was going to have to go on this journey and I was going to have to walk straight through it. There was going to be no avoidance. There was going to be no over or under or around. I was going to have to walk through it. And I knew ultimately as well that all the feelings of grief that had been unprocessed from my dad,

they were going to have to be dealt with as well in sobriety. That is so tough. So, so tough. And you, I mean, you detail it in the book, you know, you don't shy away from all the issues that that brought up in your life. But did you ever sit there and think, why me? Why has this been visited on me twice in my life? Yeah, I very much suffered from what you would call in therapy like the cursed child. I very much thought that there must be something wrong with me. I must be cursed.

I must have done something bad in a previous life. I mean, all of these things that just are absolutely just made up in my own head. And I had to work through that. And I had to really, really try and process those thoughts of why I thought that would be. And, you know, I realized that, you know, loss is, it's not personalization. You're not being punished. It just happens. It's really strange, isn't it?

Because we all know that people die all the time. And yet when the people we love die, we think, how could that happen to me? But it just happens because it happens. It's like facing life on life's terms. And that was really hard. But once I'd accepted that, that I wasn't being punished, it became much easier to accept that I had had these two amazing men in my life and yes I'd had them for a lot shorter a period of time than I would have ever wished for

but I could take from the time that I did have with them and I could I could remember the joy but that was a big old journey to get to that point yes and the fact that you started to address it when you gave up alcohol and then you suffered a second tragedy. By this point, you had a young son, Harvey. How did that help? Because obviously you have a chance to kind of almost do your life over. So in your childhood, the adults around you said, we're not talking about that. You didn't take that path with your own son, did you? Yeah, I just I just remember thinking okay I've got to be as honest as I can with my son and basically the approach I took was that I was gonna be honest about how I felt but I was always gonna follow that up with but I will be okay and I will get

through it because we can like as human beings human beings, we're amazing, we're brilliant. So I would often, you know, he'd come home from school and he was a very eloquent, sort of emotionally eloquent little boy anyway, but he'd say, how are you, how was your day? And often I'd say, honestly, Harvey, it was pretty awful today. I've spent most of it crying. I'm really glad to see you, though. I'm glad you're home. Do you mind tonight if we just watch our favourite programme

and cuddle on the sofa because that's about all I've got in me today? And he'd be like, yeah, that's OK. And I would just try and do it in that way because I just thought I cannot, I do not want my son to look into my eyes and see this crumpled, pained face and for me to go, everything's fine. It's OK. Let's go to the park. It'll all be OK. I thought, no, I can't bear the idea that he's going to grow up and think, why is mom lying to me?

You know, you had some quite ingenious ways of helping him deal with big emotions. Tell us about the charity shop on the china he kept saying to me i'm angry i'm angry and i thought yeah damn right i'm angry too and he's like i want to smash things and i thought well yeah let's just smash some things so i went to a charity shop i bought all the china they had got him some goggles got him a hammer got some mats put them out in the garden and I was like smash away have a go and I was watching him and I was like can I have a go as well please can I can I have a go so we both just smashed up this china and it was great but I just wanted him to learn that emotions do not have to stay in your body there are ways and different

different emotions and there's different ways to release them and I just wanted him to learn that lesson it's it's just honestly there'll be so many people listening to this I think that's such a brilliant practical way to kind of let you know grief that sits in a child come out just brilliant you say in the book bereavement made me feel different even when you are out amongst friends you've known a long time they still don't really know what you're going through so what advice I mean this is what I thought was so ingenious about your book is like you've got advice in it for people who are around someone going through grief if those people are listening now I think I can't reach this person I don't know what to do what would you what would you say one of the things that I say is try and be as specific as possible because when you're in grief and somebody says, how are you?

You just think that's too big of a question. Like, how long have you got? So I would really appreciate it if people said, how was this morning? How was school drop off? How was that coffee you had with a friend? Be specific because then I can say to you school drop-off was painful it was awful I stood there on my own and no one spoke to me or school drop-off was great whatever so I would say be specific with your friends that the how are you question

is just too big to come by and also just if you can give them your time and you can listen without trying to fix them, that is gold dust. Just witness them. Just give them space. It's really valuable. And you also say the tissue in front of the nose when someone starts crying. What is that? You feel that's like a signal to stop? Yeah.

So when you start crying, and I learned this from my friend Donna Lancaster, when you start crying and someone just immediately, while you're still crying and you're telling them why you're crying, they're in their bag and they're searching for a tissue. First of all, you think, well, you've stopped listening to me. And secondly, the signal feels like, don't cry. It's too uncomfortable when you cry. And what we really want to say to anybody that's struggling is yeah tears are completely you know expected they're completely legitimate it's fine to cry so it's just the searching for the tissue and shoving a tissue in someone's face can just feel a little jarring yeah listen we've

had a huge response on the text Jill uh to this Lynn says my mum died 40 years ago of a sudden cardiac arrest at the age of 46. I was 23 my sister 17. I'm not sure we really coped well. We just got on with life. Dad died also of a heart issue. Three years later it's still raw at times. One recent way of helping to cope is that I've been raising funds to increase the number of 24-hour accessible defibrillators in Portsmouth City. So a practical way of dealing with this. An anonymous message, my father died suddenly when I was 15. It's taken to my 50s to process it with the help of therapy. It's only recently that I spoke to my sister and we discovered that we had similar dreams about our father. I also realise now that when I met a potential partner, I started from the assumption that they would leave. Hence,

it is only recently that again with therapy, I've been able to let that wonderful man into my life. You have a new man in your life, don't you? Does that ring a bell with you? I do. I completely relate to the last message and I'm very sorry for the losses that we've heard about. So I do have a new person in my life, and he's amazing. And I can honestly say hand on heart, much like the last message, only through the therapy and the process and the talking and just absolutely allowing myself to feel all of the grief that came my way um could I have made space for this new person so now I have dropped the idea that people

are going to leave me people who I love are going to leave me or that I'm going to be ultimately disappointed now I can thankfully just think this person's great and I really love being with them and that's such freedom for me so and when your grief visits you yeah does it visit on a daily basis how do you deal with it I would say it's definitely on a daily basis and I have tried really hard to make it my friend it used to be an enemy it used to be something I ran away from it used to be something I would kick to the curb now I literally talk to it and say listen I know you're with me today but today let's say I'm going to do woman's hour so you're just going to have to sit quietly next to me and just let me get through it and then we can have a chat later on or sometimes if I'm on my own that day I'll say okay what do you want to say to me today what have have you got to teach me today? And then I will let it really in my body and I will cry

or I will do any of the things that, you know, help me process it. But it's my friend. That's the main message to get across really is it's just not my enemy anymore. And how's Harvey doing? He's great. He's so great. I'm biased. But he's just a really emotionally intelligent kid who will actually tell me how he feels, which I feel really proud of. I was about to say that it's down to his mother. It's a fantastic read, Jill. A really, really important piece of work. The book is Jill Halfpenny, My Journey of Hope in the Midst of Loss, A Life Reimagined.

Thank you so much for coming into the woman's our studio thank you great to have you here now let us uh move on as we do on woman's hour we were talking earlier in the program about stealthing uh the met and restoring women's trust in the police violence against women and policing is an issue that political parties have been addressing in the run-up to the election on the 4th of July so we thought we'd run through some of what each party has to say on this the Conservatives, Labour and the Lib Dems have all talked about restoring trust with the police either through better vetting processes or more community policing the Green Party and the SNP want to make misogyny a hate crime and Plaid Cymru say they will introduce better

training for police around domestic abuse and also a victims commissioner for Wales. And in the Women's Hour election debate Reform UK's Maria Botel said the issue came back to policing and her party pledged 40,000 more police officers in England and Wales funded by stopping paying interest to the banks. So that covers the approaches of many of the main parties. Do text the programme on anything you hear. As ever, we love your contributions. You can text 84844. Now, there is a world first for women taking place in Exeter this week.

A conference on how menstruation and menopause link with mental health. Experts from across the world from a broad range of academic disciplines, including psychology, medicine, policy studies, law and humanities, are coming together to aim more research in an area which some say is still underfunded and poorly understood. Conference organiser Professor Gemma Sharp from the University of Exeter's School of Psychology has just opened up the second day of the conference. Delighted to say she joins me now. Welcome to Woman's Hour. Hi. Great to have you here. This is obviously something that really needs looking at in a lot more detail. So why did you decide to pull all these kind of disparate strands together and get all of these experts in one room yeah it's really important for us to be

to be able to come together in this way so um the the field in general has been historically very underfunded and people were working on menstrual health and on mental health and on menopausal health but in silos so they were working thinking from their own perspectives their own using their own skills and we didn't really have a community um so that was when i when i came to the research field that was the the issue that i saw and so i just started reaching out to different people that i knew were working in these areas and it just kind of snowboard from there um and yeah so now we've all brought together so that we can share those perspectives and collaborate on projects but not just um academics but also bringing in

non-academics as well who are actually uh more kind of working on the ground with women and people who menstruate so that we can get our research findings out there and they can actually have an impact and improve the lives of those people. Do you think I mean it seems to be there's a lot of focus on your first period and then we kind of skip to the menopause don't we? They seem to be the main sort of information areas and not that they're not important but there's a whole life experience in the middle that do you think is pretty much overlooked or there's just not enough research that goes on into it yeah absolutely so so there's so there's some

research around um what we call menarche or the first menstrual period and the timing of that specifically it's mostly around the timing of that um and then there's um a lot of research around the timing of menopause again and and in menopausal experiences um but then in between we don't really think about menstruation it's just not something that um that people have been researching uh that much um so now it's yeah it's really great to see people looking at that a little bit more looking at menstruation in the workplace, etc. Yeah, and that's one of the themes that has come out from the conference, I think, is that we really need to take this life course approach to think about these things throughout the whole reproductive life course. So what have you found interesting about the kind of people you've put together in the room?

As you say, they're all in silos. Give us an example of something that's come out of this you think well they wouldn't have you know had that conversation had i not set this conference up yeah we had a really fascinating um panel discussion yesterday afternoon and um that was a a lot of non-academics on the stage and then a lot of academics in the audience and we were discussing what are the what the the problems and the reasons that we haven't been having this joined up thinking and essentially we've just not been talking to each other so it's been really great to get everybody all in the room at the same time um yeah so so we had um people like um from the femtech company clue um people from the charity well- company, Clue, people from the charity Wellbeing of Women,

and they were saying it's been incredible to see all of the research going on in this area. We didn't know that this was happening. And then on our side, we're kind of saying, well, we're doing all this research and we don't know how to get our findings out of there. So it's been great to bring everybody together in this way when it comes to the mental health side of things what is going on now with research uh into that area and what still needs to happen oh yeah so i mean a lot still needs to happen mental health is um is much more researched than uh menstrual health um and so um And so we're looking at the intersection, both from in terms of, you know, how can periods affect mental health? So how can, for example,

like heavy menstrual bleeding or severe pain affect your day-to-day mental health and well-being, but also on the flip side, looking at the impact of mental health and well-being but also the in on the um on the flip side looking at the impact of mental health on um on menstrual health so you're um changing the kind of timing of your period so the length the heaviness but also um yeah just kind of uh thinking about um how we would uh improve improve those steps as well. There's a lot of stigma still, isn't there? Even discussing this, it's a cultural thing. We started off the programme talking about the culture of policing

and how that affects women. And this is another one, but this is kind of a medical stigma. How do we change that? Because women have been told for generations to sort of hide this away, this natural bodily function that is part of the cycle of life. Where do you think we need to begin with that change? Oh, yeah, it's, I mean, it's deeply ingrained. Like this is one of the issues with the field in general,

I think why it's been underfunded. It's the huge amount of stigma around just talking about menstrual health. Another thing that's come out of the conference is, I mean, we're all united in knowing that we need to break down those barriers and that stigma. One thing that I think we agree on is that education would be a really good place to start with that and just normalizing menstruation so that um so that people from a really young age even pre-menstruation boys and girls um understand that this is a kind of normal process and and just removing that like embarrassing squeamish nature attached to it you're doing really important work so thank you so much for coming on

woman's hour to talk about it professor jemma sharp there from the university of exodus school of psychology day two of that conference is underway now thank you to all of you who've been getting in touch on many topics this morning we were talking about stealthing earlier on this is uh well it is a crime um if a condom is removed um when you're having sex with someone without your consent it can be male it can be female um as in victims can be both male and female and this text i reported a sexual assault two years ago and i'm now waiting for a trial scheduled for a year and a half's time my experience is not that the police or cps are trying to support women it's been a

horrific experience and it's not changing fast enough i'm laughing as i listen to this i've had to make several complaints and i now have zero trust in the police and would never report any crime again thank you so much for getting in touch and i'm very very sorry to hear of your experience um and lots of other people getting in touch after the Jill Halfpenny interview. She's processing her grief in a new book. Jill Halfpenny says this text, though helpful words about grief.

Thank you. My husband died last year and it is very hard, but good to hear her thoughts. And this one, Jill Halfpenny is talking such sense. I find it difficult when people tell me how well I'm doing or how well I'm looking. It's a thin veneer for public consumption. Jill is right. It's more about the other person's needs, not me. We need to talk more openly about death. Thank you so much for your text. I'll get through as many as I can before 11. You can text 84844. Now, let's talk about a fabulous new exhibition. So if you were to put 500 years of historical heartbreak into a song,

Six, the musical, Six has gotten huge acclaim for reimagining the wives of Henry VIII taking to the mic to tell their stories. And the performance outfit worn by Catherine. Imagine a black and gold sparkly mashup of Tudor costume meets Beyoncé. It's currently on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London. It's one of many extraordinary and gorgeous items, both modern and historical, included in this new exhibition,

Six Lives, The Stories of Henry VIII's Queens. There's always thought, they are rather always thought of as a collective, but this exhibition highlights the stories of these individual women rather than their infamous husband, of course, and their transformation over the centuries into popular icons. Delighted to say I'm joined in the studio by Charlotte Bolland, who is the brain behind this whole exhibition, Senior Curator at the National Portrait Gallery. Welcome. Thank you so much. It shifts the emphasis, doesn't it? Why did you think it

needed shifting away from Henry VIII and them being, you know, they are his wives, they're women in their own right, they're interesting. Absolutely. I think the stories of the Tudor court have been so popular, but Henry looms over everything and completely overshadows the stories of his queens. And then the way in which they've been remembered, that shorthand rhyme of divorce, beheaded, died, is so effective that everyone has an idea, they know a bit of the story. And it's been reproduced in kind of stamps and on coasters and Christmas decorations, this kind of collective identity as a group. But that shorthand kind of completely erases their individuality, that you only think of them as six wives, not as six women who lived in a really extraordinary time

and were kind of shaping and witnesses to this period in English history. And I know that there's a room dedicated to each woman as she moved through this exhibition. So what did you want to put in those rooms? You know, if I come along to this exhibition, what do you want me to feel when I walk into that room? Yeah, it's amazing. It's such a kind of privilege to be able to work on an exhibition like this and thinking about how do you meet an individual across 500 years of history? And of course, portraits at the Portrait Gallery, that is our kind of prime mechanism. And so included in the exhibition are a number of the most famous images of the queens and their contested portraits. But also, of course, how do you sort of animate those portraits? Because always in the 16th century, you know, you'd have the voice of ambassadors and courtiers who'd flesh out the

characters of the Queens as individuals. And so we wanted to bring different kinds of objects into dialogue, and particularly kind of, you know, most resonance of letters from the Queens. So an amazing letter written by Catherine of Aragon to Henry VIII after the defeat of the Scottish army at the Battle of Flodden and writing how she was sending James IV's coat to him to make into banners and with this wonderful line of your grace shall see how I keep my promise which I think says a lot about Catherine's kind of integrity and strong-mindedness.

And then also thinking about the kind of magnificence of the court that they came from. So evoking other cultural elements, particularly with Anne Boleyn and music and that sort of court culture that's often hard to include in an exhibition. So we have within it a lute, an amazing mid 16th century lute, because, of course, it was musicians that played a key part in Anne Boleyn's downfall with the arrest of her musician, Mark Smeaton, was the first person to make the accusation against her. It's so fascinating already. It really, really is. I mean, you mentioned portraits. Let's talk about Anne of Cleves.

She was Henry's fourth wife, famously judged for her portrait. And when they met, he apparently said, she is nothing fair. I like her not. And we remember that. But Anne of Cleves then, how do you give agency back to her? Because as you say, it's divorce beheaded, died or comments like that. And you know, how do you 3D these women? Exactly. Well, I think it's so interesting that the story of Anne of Cleves and to be remembered

like that for 500 years, that we have in the exhibition, the amazing miniature painted by Hans Holbein the Younger, where you can see Anne. And I think this was an object that was created for Henry VIII to enable him to fall in love with her. And because she was the first queen who he hadn't met before, this was the first time he'd had to use portraiture in this way. And while this exhibition is about the queens, it is also about the way in which Henry is popularly remembered as a husband and his ideas of love. And I think Anne was the trouble with their relationship was a mismatch in expectations that Henry had this sort of grand melodramatic idea of chivalric love, of love at first sight, that Anne could in no way kind of hope to meet. On your first meeting when someone is in disguise

pretending to be a messenger, quite how you play that is impossible. And one of the things I wanted to kind of bring into the exhibition to think about the challenges of Henry's fantasy and the reality that Anne had to kind of encounter is in two maps, one of which is the map that the English proposed for Anne's journey to England,

which was by sea and a kind of daring demonstration of the English naval power. But the map, the route that she actually took, which was much more practical across land, kind of in many stages, and that idea of the fantasy of the reality. And there's a really kind of slightly heart-rending kind of mirroring going on that miniatures are often based on and mounted on playing cards they're a practical bit of card support and so the miniature of Anne of Cleves is mounted on a playing card and Anne of Cleves while she was waiting in Calais for weather to cross the channel she asked Henry's kind of courtiers to teach her two-person card games that she could

play with Henry because she's like how am I going to build a relationship with this man right card games this could be a way and so you have the idea of two people sort of trying to build a relationship across on either side of the channel that is just undone instantaneously on the first meeting through a kind of culture clash nothing to do with what anybody looks like incredible incredible detail it's really really fascinating fascinating. What do we know of how the queens interacted with one another? Well, that is the kind of really intriguing part because many of them served each other as ladies-in-waiting. And so that idea of being in royal service, being in the court, and then taking the place of your kind of former mistress, that there's an incredible moment that Catherine Howard likely first met Henry when she'd been made a lady and waiting for Anne of Cleves and was waiting for Anne's arrival. That was probably the first moment

that she met Henry. She kind of rises in Henry's favour very, very quickly. And there's this kind of awful new year after the divorce where Henry's divorced Anne of Cleves, quickly married Catherine Howard, and they meet at New Year. And how on earth do you kind of play this? And Anne of Cleves quickly married Catherine Howard and they meet at New Year. And how on earth do you kind of play this? And Anne of Cleves kind of insists on falling to her knees in front of Catherine and saying, you know, you're now queen. And Catherine being incredibly sort of gracious and how to deal with this saying, no, no, of course you must rise. And they actually exchange gifts. And there's this rather sort of pointed moment, you kind of wonder, where Catherine actually gives Anne one of the gifts Henry's just given her. And so this kind of re-gifting network.

Ahead of their time. Exactly. If there's one thing that you discovered briefly, if you can, that you thought, this is incredible. I mean, you're the expert, but you must have learned stuff. Yes, absolutely. And it's amazing. There's one portrait in the exhibition that's never been on public display of Catherine Parr, Henry, the last wife, the wife who survived. And this is a portrait that was long thought to have been lost in a fire. It's been rediscovered and conserved. And it's got a tiny, tiny detail in Catherine's jewels, in which she has engraved

Laos Deus, praise God. And this idea of Catherine as a religious reformer who nearly died for heresy praising God in her portrait. Fantastic Charlotte they're going to be knocking down the door Charlotte Boland there curator of the exhibition Six Lives the story of Henry VIII's queens on at the National Portrait Gallery just time to tell you join me for weekend Woman's Hour tomorrow Rachel Stevens of pop group S Club 7 talking about her time in the band from the 90s and the new production of the play The Wedding Band taught you then That's all from today's Woman's Hour Join us again next time

I'm Kavita Puri and in Three Million from BBC Radio 4 I hear extraordinary eyewitness accounts that tell the story for the first time of the Bengal famine which happened in British India in the middle of the Second World War. At least three million people died. It's one of the largest losses of civilian life on the Allied side and there isn't a museum, a memorial or even a plaque to those who died. How can the memory of 3 million people just disappear? 80 years on, I track down first-hand

accounts and make new discoveries and hear remarkable stories and explore why remembrance is so complicated in Britain, India and Bangladesh. Listen to 3 Million on BBC Sounds. 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.