Woman's Hour - Weekend Woman’s Hour: Irish folk singer Cara Dillon, The Hampstead Paedophile Hoax, Maximalism

Episode Date: March 16, 2024

Cara Dillon won the All Ireland singing trophy aged only 14 and has gone on to receive countless awards and accolades including Album Of The Year at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. She has worked for Disney – singing the title song to the animated movie Tinkerbell and the Great Fairy Rescue, and topped the charts with dance remixes. She joins Emma to discuss her book and a new album – Coming Home – in which she brings storytelling, poetry, and song, offering personal memories and stories inspired by her native Co. Derry, and exploring themes of family, identity and home.The government in South Korea has said the country’s birth rate has fallen to a record low, despite it having spent billions on initiatives to encourage women to have more children. It dropped to 0.72 in 2023 - and for a population to hold steady, that number should be 2.1. Why are women in the country deciding not to have children? BBC journalist Yuna Ku in Seoul explains.We continue our series looking at how porn in shaping our sex and relationships today by speaking to Dr Fiona Vera-Gray. She says that when we think about porn we still mostly think about men, men as the producers and the consumers and women as the product. Her new book, Women On Porn, details the experiences of one hundred women and their views on porn and she joins Emma in the studio.For the first time, four mums are speaking out about what it was like to be at the centre of a conspiracy that went viral, even reaching the USA. Accused: The Hampstead Paedophile Hoax is a new documentary that looks at what happened to them. Director Emily Turner and mum ‘Anna’ (not her real name) join Emma Barnett to talk about why they wanted to speak out and share this story.The Women's Six Nations begins later this month. Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France and Italy are taking part as well as England who are looking to build on the glory of 2023, when they sealed the grand slam in front of nearly 60,000 spectators at Twickenham, a record crowd for a women’s game. We'll continue to cover the Six Nations as it gets underway but to kick us off Emma is joined by England Rugby player Meg Jones.In recent years, maximalism has been all the rage in the interior design world. Patterns on patterns and riotous colours. But what are the pros and cons of adding personality to your home? Pottery artist, Mary Rose Young and Kate Sandhu, interiors influencer and founder of Kate Sandhu Renovation, join Emma to discuss.

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

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Anita Rani and welcome to Woman's Hour from BBC Radio 4. Just to say that for rights reasons, the music in the original radio broadcast has been removed for this podcast. Hello, this is Claire MacDonald and you're listening to the Woman's Hour podcast. Welcome to Weekend Woman's Hour. Put the kettle on, grab a cuppa and settle in for this week's highlights. Coming up, Irish folk singer Cara Dillon performs live in the studio and tells us about her new book and album Coming Home. What do women think about pornography? We speak to Dr Fiona Vera Gray about it. And are you a maximalist or a minimalist when it comes to design?

But first, in South Korea, the government says the birth rate has fallen to a record low, despite it having spent billions on initiatives to encourage women to have more children. The country's birth rate dropped to 0.72 in 2023. Now that figure represents the average number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime. And for a population to hold steady, that number should be 2.1. Globally developed countries are seeing birth rates fall, but South Korea has the lowest in the world. I spoke to Eun-A Koo from the BBC Career Service, who has done a lot of research on this issue, and began by asking her why women in the country are deciding not to have children. I have to say it's hard to come up with a single concrete answer. To name a few,

there are so many reasons. Soaring housing prices, expensive education, gender conflict, competitive workplace culture, social instability and more add up to this problem. So it's multifaceted. The government has put money into incentives to try and get people to have children. So tell me about what those incentives are. The government has been pouring billions of dollars to address this issue. Let's say if you were to have a child this year, you would be receiving approximately $750 every month for a year. And in addition to benefits such as a low-interest loan to buy your own house and some part of tax exemption and more.

Furthermore, the government even provides assistance for fertility treatments, including IVF. And is that having an impact? Because that's pretty much across the board, isn't it? You get money to stay off and look after your child, you get low interest loans, you were mentioning earlier about housing being difficult and expensive. What impact is that having on the birth rate? Apparently, it's not having a great impact. However, a low birth rate is not something new for South Korea because the country's birth rate has been declining for the past several decades. The country's birth rate was 4.53 in the 1970s

and then made a sharp drop to 2.06 in 1983. And the reason for this was because of aggressive birth control policy by the government in the 60s and 70s, because at that time, South Korea just came out from Korean War, and they had to cope with this widespread poverty. Since then, the birth rates have been falling gradually. As I noted earlier, the government scrapped the policy and began to pour money to boost up the fertility rate. But as you see from the recent numbers, it's not working so well. You mentioned gender conflict as one of the reasons as well. What is going on there? Is it just that young women want more out of their lives? They've got

careers. They don't necessarily want to stop that, give it up to have children. So we had this Korean War in 1950s. And ever since we had a very experienced, a very fast development, economic development over the last decades. However, what kind of falls behind is a change in perception. For example, like our parents' generation and grandparents' generation, they are still stuck with some old traditional thoughts, such as like women should focus more on house chores rather than working out in a company. And men should be responsible for all the economic burdens. And they should be the breadwinner for the whole family. But as you know, the society has been changing rapidly.

And there are so many women in South Korea who continue on working even if they get married and give birth to a child. However, they find it really stressful because they feel like support from the government and the workplace are not enough to balance out the work and life. Tell me also about something unique to your culture, women having to balance their work and life with the burden of their husband's family as well. There is an expectation, isn't there? Your in-laws, you actually kind of go and help them quite a lot, don't you, in South Korean culture? Yes, that's kind of influenced from old Confucianism in South Korea. Women are expected to take all the responsibility of house chores, not to satisfy not only their husbands and children, but also the mother-in-laws and ancestors. Not ancestors of her own, but the husband's families.

And that expectation is still there, is it? We can see from the numbers and statistics that young couples are travelling overseas during long holiday weekends, which means they are no longer visiting their parents' house during this long vacation. So we are definitely seeing some changes. But still, as I noted earlier, the parents' generation still have that kind of expectation that continued on from the past. I know specifically when you look at individual companies as well, there's a construction firm in South Korea that announced this month that they're going to pay more than $70,000 for each baby born to its employees. And that's setting a precedent. But do you think that will make a difference as well? Certain sectors saying,

come and work for us, and we will incentivize you to not only have children, but stay with us. Some experts that I interviewed think this is a striking example that shows, clearly shows that severity of this issue in South Korea. Of course, there could be other motives behind this decision, but the choice to invest this amount of money to employees highlights societal priority. You're painting a picture of society, of young women now of childbearing age in South Korea, of being caught between two very different generations. It sounds like a society that is moving towards a more modern idea of women and having families and staying in the workplace, but it hasn't quite got there yet. So women aren't feeling that support. I know that you've spoken to a lot of women who have children and then have ended up leaving the workplace after a couple of years when they come back.

Why is that, Yuna? I actually interviewed an employee who was granted with $70,000 from the company because she had a birth to a second child. So I was thinking maybe she will be super loyal to this company and she will be hoping to stay in this company. However, she also told me that, of course, this kind of financial benefit, she really appreciated. And she has been receiving many kinds of financial support also from the government. However, she's saying that this kind of support is focused on newborn child. So let's say if they enter elementary school and middle school, this kind of support goes away. As time passes, women have to cope with this work and life balance without government support. She said that she actually saw so many

female employees eventually leaving the workplace three or four years after giving birth to a baby because eventually they find it so stressful. And even if the company allows them to work more flexibly, they are sorry for their colleagues who are not married and do not have children. They have to take over her work. That's Eunice Koo from the BBC Korean service. Now, according to music magazine Mojo, Irish folk singer Cara Dillon has quite possibly the world's most beautiful female voice. She won the All-Ireland Singing Trophy aged only 14 and has gone on to receive countless awards and accolades, including Album of the Year at the BBC Radio Two Folk Awards. Cara now has a book and a new album entitled Coming Home, in which she brings together storytelling, poetry and song.

Cara joined Emma live in the studio and started by explaining how this project came about. During lockdown, I started to write just lots of my thoughts down in scribbles of paper and tucked them away. And I found it very relaxing and therapeutic. And I never had any intention of anyone ever hearing these pieces. And here we are. And I can't believe the journey that I've been on. It's about three, four years ago now. And I remember reading a couple of the pieces out to Sam, my husband there on the piano,

and my nephew, Oren. I was kind of reading it just to see, you know, what they thought, but they got very emotional and their reaction was great. And suddenly the poems got set to music. I think I felt very vulnerable at the time when I was reading them out and I could only have done it with Sam. This is Sam Lakeman, your husband and partner at the piano, the beautiful piano here in the studio, ready to play in a moment. It's always good to introduce your accompanist in full,

even when the husband is involved. But they are personal. The track that you're going to play for us is Coming Home. And what inspires that? Take us to that home where you grew up. Yeah, well, I'm from a very small town in County Derry, right in the north of Ireland, northwest. I grew up saturated

with culture, the music, lots of storytelling, lots of traditional singing and just great people. You know, I'm from a town where a lot happened, you know, in the Troubles. And the one thing that we've got is this great sense of community spirit. And, you know, I started to feel that as I started to travel the world and sing songs and like bring lots of the local songs all over the world. And I just remember feeling incredibly homesick and incredibly proud of the people and where I've come from. And on one particular occasion, you know, I felt so homesick that I had to phone my father from New Zealand and just have a big chat with him down the phone. And it made me feel so much better, that connection being at the other end of the world, but knowing I'm still there and still part of the community.

So, you know, it's a special place. And you've got, talking of special places, I mean, that's a theme in the sense of special place, special people. There's a track called The Daughter. Yeah. And you write about also your twin sons who were born prematurely, only at 26 weeks. Yes. Yeah, they came very early. We were doing a concert and I went into labour on stage.

And yeah, it was very traumatic, actually. And, you know, it's like anyone who's experiencing something like really traumatic like that. You don't realise that there's a whole unit in a hospital, a NICU ward, where little babies are fighting for their lives and then suddenly it becomes your whole world. And, you know, I wrote this piece because I was just thinking about how much expectation we have when a baby's born

and that we're all just waiting for everything to be OK and it wasn't in that particular time. And I wanted to write my own story down because, you know, I've realised as I've gotten older, people don't really talk very much about things like that. How does the mother feel after you leave the NICU ward and you're at home and just how vulnerable you feel? Because I should say you were able to take them back. We were

after three months so you know we were all a bit institutionalised for a few months but then you know thankfully I have a very happy ending to the story. They're both six foot one at the moment and they're 17 and it worked out okay but one of

them was born on call. I don't know if you've heard of that before they've born in the amniotic sac and it's supposed to be a sign of incredible good luck and good fortune for the child so I remember you know being told this by a midwife and I just held on to that news with every fibre of my body because I just thought right right, this is what we need to focus on, the look and knowing that it's going to work out. Hard to do though at that point. It is, yeah, but you're really looking for something

to hold on to. And you have talked about your children illuminating your life in ways you couldn't have imagined. It's striking this week, another musician, Lily Allen, saying they've actually ruined her two children and having children have ruined her career. And saying, you know, she wants

to say you just can't have it all. And I suppose it's different once you are in that place with your line of work, but it can also take you to a different place. Yeah, I mean, I suppose Lily Allen's in a different league maybe than I am. I think with folk music

we're very lucky. We've got a great network around us, great support network. We've got great grandparents and family who help and great childminders. We've always had that in place. And, you know, they love it. That's all our children have ever known.

Our three love to see us going off and they've come with us on tour many times. I think it's nice and healthy, I hope. Just beautiful. Irish folk singer there, Cara Dillon. And lots of you got in touch about Cara's performance. One message says, I had to pull over and have a good cry at that beautiful song.

My husband is in hospital and our daughter is in Australia. We miss her so much and it felt like a love letter to her. And another message here says, Cara Dillon, just what some of us need at the end of the week, pure mindfulness. Now, we've been discussing pornography and its impact on our sex lives and relationships on the programme. And we continued that series this week with someone who has specifically studied how women feel about pornography. Dr Fiona Vera-Gray says that when we think about porn, we still mostly think about men, men as the producers and the consumers and women as the

product. In her new book, Women on Porn, Fiona details the experiences of 100 women and their views on porn, what they like, what they don't, how they consume it and how it affects their sex lives. It has been said that porn sites account for more than 20% of what we search for on our phones. So how is this shaping the lives of women? Emma spoke to Dr Fiona Vera-Gray and began by asking Fiona why she chose to look at how women respond. I think that women have been excluded from the conversation about pornography in a really particular way. So there's two dominant positions, dominant narratives that are associated with women's views on pornography. You've got on one side, sex positive, feminist, cool girl, loves pornography, uses it, thinks thinks it's great doesn't have a problem with it and then on the other side you've got in quotes frigid sex negative women who do not like

pornography don't think it's useful at all and have never used it and actually what I found and what I thought going into it because it's position, was somewhere in between the two is where probably a lot of women's experiences and maybe some men's experiences lie. That there's women out there who are using pornography more so now than ever before because of how easy it is to access and might not be entirely happy with everything that they're coming across, but are still using it. So don't reject it so much because of the content. And what I wanted to do was see if we could introduce some nuance, some complexity, and actually hear the range of women's voices on this issue. I think women, a lot of the time, we're reduced to stereotypes. And I wanted to actually really capture what do women think about pornography? How has it affected their life and what does it mean to them. Let's get to some specifics of what you found then because you know the idea of putting women at the heart of it is of course what we try to do all day every day here. Well for the hour

live but in the prep for it for this program. But you for instance found that women, a lot of women who are heterosexual like watching lesbian porn. Yeah, exactly. So this again speaks to the content. So what I found that was is that I think there's a lot of conversation about women watching ethical pornography or feminist pornography. But what I found for the women that I spoke to is the vast majority are watching mainstream pornography on the mainstream platforms. Makes sense because it's free. It's easy to get. And a lot of women were talking about they don't have a massive commitment to pornography that means they're going to pay for it. And what we know about the content on these mainstream sites is that it's fairly misogynistic, it's fairly racist, it doesn't necessarily represent sex as something that's always for women. It's more that women are there for men.

So women would talk about having to navigate around that content to find something that centred women's pleasure. And the way that they did that a lot of the time was heterosexual women would look for lesbian pornography, or also pornography of women alone masturbating. So in some way, I mean, it's a sad indictment of pornography that in order to find material that wasn't misogynistic, women talked about having to remove the men from what they were watching. But also lesbian women that I spoke to and some straight women as well watched gay male pornography. So pornography with no women in it at all. And they would talk about this also being a way to remove the misogyny

from pornography, that sometimes when there was just two men, there was no way that they could see misogynistic content. And that in itself, even though it didn't represent their sexual lives, enabled them to feel aroused without the sense of conflict about what they were watching well also perhaps because it doesn't represent their sexual lives it's more arousing as well yeah because it's different exactly can you imagine just as a side point the uh the energy that would be back in uh women's systems if they didn't have to navigate around and find work rounds yeah exactly just generally

i was thinking even within pleasure, there's a bit of extra work perhaps that goes on to try and find your place. Yeah, another form of invisible labour that women are kind of habitually having to do. You said it far better than me. That's why you're a writer. I mean, I do write occasionally, but not all the time.

I think it's another example. Are there other examples from what you found specifically that you want to bring to people's attention, to women's attention? Yeah, I think one of the things that's important is that all women have a relationship to pornography today because of how prevalent it is in society. So that means even women that aren't using it, that have never used it, you know, we are surrounded by colleagues, by teachers, by everybody in our society. And because of the access to pornography, that means we have a relationship to it. So women, you know, I spoke to women who used it.

That's a very clear relationship. But also women who didn't use it, who found that it was being brought into their sexual lives by male partners predominantly. So women in their 20s talking about it taking quite a while for them to feel able to say what they did and didn't like in sex because of how much pornography had infiltrated their understanding of what sex was, but also the understanding of what sex was of the young men that they were having sex with.

But then also speaking to slightly older women who had a relationship to pornography through their male partner's use, sometimes, and I know that you've had women talk about this on the show as well, discovering that a male partner had a pornography habit that they weren't aware of, discovering that they were watching kinds of pornography that the women felt particularly confused by. So women talking about suddenly feeling like, who is this person that I've been married to for 10 years, 20 years? I didn't know this about him. And feeling torn again, you know, another sense of conflict,

feeling like I should feel OK with this. I want my partner to have a private sexual life. But there's something in the content that they're consuming that's making me feel very uncomfortable. Did women feel that they need porn to masturbate, to have pleasure alone? So for the women that were using pornography, it's a really interesting question actually. They did talk about, in the research, we talk a lot about escalation and the impact of pornography on our sexual imagination. But no one has ever looked at that from the perspective of women.

And I did have women say to me that after using pornography habitually for a while, it became more difficult to imagine, fantasize themselves freely. What they found that they were doing was when they went to fantasize by themselves without pornography, they were imagining scenes from pornography. So that in some ways it kind of seized their sexual life. I had a couple of women who talked about the fact that they started to feel they didn't like, no one really spoke about addiction, but there are a couple of women that said they didn't like how much they were using pornography and how much it was affecting their sexual imagination. And so they tried to kind of wean themselves off it. And they definitely said that eventually within three to

four to six months, that sexual imagination, that ability to freely fantasize came back to them, but that it was a struggle. And again, when you think about women's lives, we're so busy. And sometimes all we want to do is just get off quickly. And the fact that pornography, this mainstream stuff is there, it's so easy to access. I think women are going to it to get that easy kind of pleasure to get it out. But it's also introducing a lot of conflict and a lot of shame because of the content. Could you put an analogy a bit like junk food, you know, in how easy it is?

And I mean, it's free in quotation marks. Yes, there's adverts there. So it's slightly different in that respect. But that busyness and that hijacking and that need to numb and get something and feel nice for a few minutes feel good and then the fact that that could then be waylaid with a load of other feelings it's difficult isn't it you know you go towards a fast food or whatever because you haven't got

the time you're hungry you're craving it and then afterwards you can also feel pretty rough yeah yeah it's not always but sometimes you feel great afterwards. But it's exactly that. So women would talk about things like being very aroused by what they were watching, even if it wasn't what they necessarily went to search for. So on these mainstream sites, for anyone that hasn't seen it, the platform themselves is projecting a lot of stuff to you. So they would be aroused by the different material that they were seeing. They would then masturbate to it, come, and after orgasming, feeling a rejection. So women would talk about doing things like deleting all their history, closing their laptop, throwing, one woman talked about throwing her phone over the other side of the room, being a bit aghast at what they were watching on the screen

when they were no longer aroused. And so I think there is definitely something there about the way the sites are set up to encourage this kind of overwhelming sense of arousal. There's so much sexual information coming into your mind that it's overwhelming, maybe your internal sense of what kind of representations of sex you want to see or what kind of representations of women you want to see. I had one woman, you know, in this way that when you interview women, as you do, sometimes they just say things that are perfect. And she said, it's a conflict between my pleasure and my principles.

And so, and I think that that articulates something that I haven't previously heard articulated in terms of women's experiences of pornography. And I wonder if it resonates for men as well. Can I read you a few of these messages? Let me share them with everyone. I'm a heterosexual female who enjoys watching female porn. We had our internet provider changed and now the channel I watched it on is blocked, but I daren't ask my partner to unblock it in case he's

offended. You're smiling. Yeah, I definitely had women talking about not. So I think, again, the conversation about partners hiding their pornography use from another partner, we always think about that in terms of women, terms of men hiding from women. But I had a number of women saying that their partner had no idea what kind of pornography that they watched or even that they watched pornography at all. It was a very private practice. And I know we talked about the choice to watch lesbian porn for some women,

but there are other categories, aren't there, when you talk about this overwhelming experience on the websites. And they can also make women feel differently, and specifically I know you've spoken to black women as well. Yeah, so what was really interesting in terms of what came out was talking to black women about representations of blackness, both black women and black men, on pornography sites because what definitely came up in talking to them was the representation of black men they found

incredibly racist. And the representations of black women, for some black women, they were talking about, it's a bit, again, this conflicting feeling, because in one way, it's actually nice to see a black woman's body being eroticised in that way, in the way that we don't see in a lot of the mainstream media. So they would talk about a conflict, particularly if they were watching black women with a white man, where they actually liked seeing a white man kind of fawning all over himself over a black woman's body.

But the vast majority said they stayed away from representations that were two black people together, and they really stayed away from representations of black men because of how racist they were. And so for a lot of the black women that I spoke to, they would watch white women in pornography. Because again, it was a way to consume content where you didn't have to necessarily also consume at the same time the levels of oppression and discrimination that you face in your day to day life. Women are very good at talking to other women. And I think that this is one thing, pornography is one thing that we haven't spoken, speaking generally, the vast majority of us haven't spoken to our girlfriends about it in the way that we talk about literally everything.

You know, we talk about the sex that we have and everything, but we haven't really spoken about that. I think that part of it is because of this dominant narrative where we either are watching it and loving it or not watching it and hating it. And I think we need to open up the space so that we can talk to female friends, maybe before or maybe instead of talking to our partners, to be able to just make sense ourselves of what we've seen, how we feel about it and what it means for us, both personally in our sexual lives, but also on a societal level. Dr Fiona Vera-Gray there. And you can hear more of our series on the impact of pornography on the programme next week.

Still to come on the programme, what do you think of maximalist design? We're going to be speaking to two fans of it. And England rugby player Meg Jones tells us what it's like being Welsh, but playing for England in the upcoming Women's Six Nations. And remember, you can enjoy Woman's Hour any hour of the day. If you can't join us live at 10am during the week, just subscribe to the Daily Podcast for free via BBC Sounds. A new Channel 4 TV documentary, Accused, the Hampstead paedophile hoax, looks at how a conspiracy theory centred around a satanic paedophile ring in Hampstead went viral and reached people on the other side of the world. Mothers whose children appeared on

a list of so-called victims were subject to harassment, including death threats, and calls from real paedophiles interested in their children. Now, four of the mums at the centre of the conspiracy are speaking out for the first time. The documentary uses their real voices from audio interviews and their parts are acted and lip-synced by actors. Emma spoke to the director of the documentary, Emily Turner, and one of the mums, Anna, I should say that's not her real name.

Emma began by asking Anna why she decided now was the time to speak out. I think obviously we've had to think long and hard, the four mums, about speaking out. And that's a good question. I think we understand that there is a risk with us doing so and raising our head above the parapet where we've, you know, we've spent a long time trying to get rid of material online predominantly about our children. But we feel that we do have a series of really important messages and now is the right time. Predominantly, I think, you know, there needs to be an awareness with people about oversharing on the internet we we weren't particularly guilty of that but we did see various people harvesting photos from Facebook from amongst the teachers and the families that were concerned and then also

we feel very strongly that all of the material that was hosted online was done so almost with the blessing of the social media companies and we had a really long hard fight and sometimes an impossible task in being able to remove the material about our families that was there predominantly our children whose futures were going to be affected by it you know we know that everybody googles everybody now and when they were going to go to college or to university or go to a job interview, it was likely that people would be Googling and that, you know, this material would be found about them. So we really do want to sort of join the growing narrative and the growing sort of talk, I think, of trying to have social media companies take responsibility for what they're hosting. I mean, they were hosting very illegal content about very real children.

And when we said, you know, these are real children, their names and addresses are online and they're nine years old, we were continuously met with this does not breach our community standards. So we're not willing to remove it. So there's been a lot of cases that I think that have come after us where there is an awareness that social media companies need to really look at what they're hosting. So I think it was the right time for us to tell our tale. Yes, and it's certainly, you know, other parents with very tragic stories are with their voices being very much at the front of that fight. And also what's

gone on in Parliament as well with law change. If I can, I'll come back to that. But to your story, life pre-2015, I imagine it was pretty normal in your corner of North London. Absolutely. You know, we were all working mothers and we were just sort of getting on with our lives. We were trying to juggle running businesses, you know, active careers, trying to juggle that, you know, school run, drop off, homework, family life, social life. And what happened on that date? At around about 4pm on the 5th of February 2015, we received an email from the school to say that there had been some allegations made regarding the school, but the police had investigated and there were no further investigations required and the case was closed,

which is probably the worst email that could have been sent because your natural reaction is to say, well, what allegations? And of course, you know, you turn to the internet. And unfortunately for me, it didn't take me very long to find out the nature of the allegations and the fact that myself, my husband and my child had been implicitly, you know, named online. And this was the accusation from two children, and we'll get to sort of how that comes about, that there was this terrible act, these terrible acts taking place in the community. There was a video of two children which went viral around the world. Ella Draper, the mother of the two children who made these initial allegations, and her boyfriend, Abraham. The children say that they were coerced into making these allegations though that was the video that you were able to see at this point or was that not out there yet yes yes it was one

of the the coercive videos where in fact it was an odd one because it was a third party it wasn't Abraham or Ella in this one instance but she was being Ella's daughter was being coached by a third party to name him. And he said, does this happen to anybody else? And she said, yes, my friend, and named my child. And then he said, well, who's doing this? And she then named myself as my husband and various other parents and teachers as being the abusers. I mean, how did that feel, seeing that?

It was a complete shock, you know, a heart-stopping moment. I could not believe what I was hearing. Because presumably you recognised these children? Absolutely, yeah. I knew straight away that, you know, it was my daughter's classmate. And I had, right from that get-go, I had a very good sort of, you know, reason to think that it was Ella and her partner Abraham at the time that were behind the coercion and the root of the children's allegations. So yeah, heart-stopping moment. I mean, you know, to receive that email and literally within 10 minutes not only discover what the allegations were, but, you know,

to then discover that you're part of the centre of that allegation was, yeah, unbelievable. And you got in touch with the police? I did. I called the school. I spoke to the headmistress and was advised by her that, you know, she had been advised if any parent were to contact her, that, you know, she was to say that we should contact the police, which I did straight away. You know, we'd been accused of something completely wrong. And it seemed, you know, I followed that advice and said,

I don't really know how to explain this, but we've been accused of being paedophiles. And, you know, unfortunately for our family, we weren't given much choice to sort of keep our child sheltered from that because they literally said, well, the police are on the way. You've got 30 minutes to tell her. And they came to the house and didn't afford us the opportunity for her to be separated from us while we explained what had gone on. And then the police officer said, oh, you know, took my husband into the kitchen and said, oh, don't worry, we've satisfied ourselves, you know, that your child is safe and we won't be taking her away from you tonight. And I should say at this point, because I think it's very important to say, people have never come across this story before, that all police investigations came to nothing. There was nothing found. It was all dropped. But there is a whole other life to this because of then what happens with what goes on online let me let me bring in Emily at this point give you a moment

to catch your breath it mustn't be easy to talk about this Emily why did you want to look at this story and put it together it's an in-depth film and people will have it all in front of them I was actually working in Hampstead at the time and was given a leaflet by somebody pamphleteering in the area and said did you know there's a satanic paedophile cult operating in the area and so it's always been a story that I was aware of from then and I just I sort of thought well this must be something there must be something in this and so got in touch and I made contact with a woman who had developed a website looking into the hoax and sort of putting all of this incredible information out there.

She said to me, well, actually, this is a slightly more important story than you think it is. I think you need to speak to the mums. And so she introduced me to the four of them. And I think it was really over lockdown that we were sort of seeing so much of these conspiracy theories really taking hold. And I know certainly when QAnon was going on

and the Pizzagate thing that went on in America, I know that a lot of traffic was being redirected back towards Hampstead. So despite the sort of lurid and quite frankly ridiculous allegations that were being made, this was something that really had a grip hold in terms of the online community. And so it was after speaking to the mums, I thought, actually, this isn't a silly, ridiculous story. This is something that's had huge, you know, real world impact. Exactly, exactly. Because I started to introduce the two individuals, Ella Draper and her boyfriend, Abraham. Ella

Draper had been involved in a long custody battle for her two children. It's an important part of the backstory to this. And she also claimed that the father of her two children that she was fighting in court and for this custody battle was also part of this satanic paedophile ring. So, you know, in a classic sense, you've got a motive there in some ways. And those two children were taken into care. Yeah, yeah. And a high court judge as part of that custody ruling did an investigation into this case and ruled, kind of, I think her words were that this is absolutely baseless and anybody who perpetrates these lies is evil and or foolish judges Justice Paul Flea announced and actually instead of setting the record straight that actually inadvertently poured fuel on the fire because I think these

people thought well the you know the cover-up is endemic the courts are involved it's spread to the courts because that's I mean and that's the thing for those listening again to this, Anna, coming new to it. And it's not new to you, sadly. You might just think, well, once it's been closed, case closed, can't you just move on at this point? But it carried on, didn't it? Absolutely. As Emily said, it fuelled the fire. Justice Palfrey's report fuelled the fire. I think a lot of the people in the conspiracy world are very much of the belief that the family courts are secret, not that they're, you know, closed and behind closed doors for privacy and confidentiality, that the courts are secret and they're taking children away from their families in order to feed to the sort of elite paedophiles within the justice system and the parliamentary world. So it just it fueled their fire and and a list of names of the children's names were put online with their addresses that's correct and and really you

know lots of people might say well why would you fight back against all of this and i think the real difference for us was that that you're correct there were two class lists from ella draper's daughter's class and from her son's class, which were published at the hands of Sabine McNeill alongside Ella. Sabine McNeill is another, I'm not going to say character as if it's a fake story here, our addresses, our children's names in full, our full home addresses, our telephone numbers, our email addresses, everything that you might have on a very innocent class list in order to arrange a play date had suddenly been published online alongside of all of the allegations. So all of a sudden you have people believing that you are abusing your children and they're wanting to come and rescue those children from us. So people were coming off of the internet. It became real world harassment. We had people coming to the school, coming to the church every Sunday, police officers undercover on our school gates on drop off and pick up for weeks on end. And we were literally watching people on Facebook saying, well, I've got a truck and I can be in Hampstead tomorrow

and why don't we just sort of come en masse and rescue the children? And our names and addresses, the children's names and addresses are online. So it's not just as simple as shutting the laptop and thinking, well, you know, why don't we just ignore it? What effect did this have on you? Has it had on you? You know, at the time, it was horrific. And for many years afterwards, it was horrific. You know, this abuse just grew. And it was just, it was every day, it was relentless. And every time any material,

we were successful in taking that material down. It was like whack-a-mole, somebody would have saved it, our names and they would repost it and it never sort of really died down it was just incessant for for a number of years and you know it's still there it's the fabric of our lives and the internet never really forgets and although we've been successful in a lot of the takedown there will always be somebody that wants to repost it and it's never really truly going to go away. I know we're not doing anything about your identity but do you still live in the area? Are you able to, have you been able to carry on in the way that you were before in some ways? I think you know it's taken a long time to sort of regain some peace if that's the right word and you know I live not a million miles away from the area but I think you know our children now are a lot older. This you know did take place nine years ago. But I think, you know, our children now are a lot older.

This, you know, did take place nine years ago. They're all healthy, happy, well-adjusted adults who are now living their lives and, you know, getting on with going to university and college, etc., as they should be doing. Which is, I suppose, the goal when you're fighting something. Yes. As awful as this.

And the other striking thing, for those who are listening, you might be thinking, well, what happened to the original Ella Draper and her boyfriend Abraham? Is it right that they never faced charge? No, they fled as soon as they became aware that the police were interested in talking to them about the abuse that the children suffered at the hands of both of them in order to gain these videos.

And they've remained to be sort of on the run, so to speak. So no, they've never to be sort of on the run so to speak so no they've never faced accountability for their actions and just just a final word then on on that to you i mean when you're trying to anna feel some sense of closure or something is that is that difficult to live with i think so i think if the police had in the first couple of weeks done a better job and arrested them then we may not have had to have suffered years and years of abuse. It would have shut it down straight away. Mum Anna there, not her real name,

and the director of that documentary, Emily Turner. And the documentary, Accused, the Hampstead paedophile hoax, is now available to watch on all four. Now, the weather is improving, and with it we inch closer to a summer of women's sport. From the Paris Olympics to the 2020 cricket series there's something for everyone. First on the calendar is the women's six nations. Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France and Italy are taking part as well as England who are looking to build on the glory of 2023 when the team sealed that grand slam win in front of nearly 60,000 spectators at Twickenham, a record crowd for a women's rugby

game. We will continue to cover all of the UK nations that make up the Six Nations as it gets underway. But to kick us off, Emma was joined by England rugby player Meg Jones. Meg began by telling Emma what we can expect from the tournament. I think the best thing is the fact that it's now a standalone tournament. So it was coincided with the men's campaign, but now it's a standalone tournament. So it means more rugby across more months, which is amazing. I think from the women's perspective, you know,

it means we can market a lot better as well. But the game itself, you know, I'd hope we're a bit more exciting in terms of running rugby, but also just, you know, putting on a spectacle for the spectators, which I think is part of it. So, yeah, we've got Italy first up on the 24th of March, again, which will be amazing because Italian rugby has grown massively over the years. And as England, as favourites, we're keen to start the campaign off with a high.

So, yeah, we're looking to win it all, get a grand slam and keep that winning streak. So, yeah, every game is going to be really competitive for us. Picking up a bit of Welsh accent there, but you play for England. Tell us a bit about that. Not the most conventional. Yeah, I can never hide it as well. I'm back back in Cardiff as well so I think it gets a bit worse

but yeah I say worse probably better really but yeah no my mum's from Bristol so I qualified to play for England dad's Cardiff boy so yeah I was born and raised in Cardiff made the decision to jump ship when I was about 16 I jumped over to Gloucester, Hartford College is where I did my A-levels. So I just made the decision with women's rugby not being professional. I think the first professional contract was 2014 for England. And then for the Welsh women, it's only been the last year or so where they've had professional contracts. So, yeah, and I think in contrast to the men, you know,

they were getting probably brown envelopes and then full contracts in 1996. So, yeah, big disparity in when we started becoming pro. So, yeah, I just thought, you know, short career, need to make the most out of it. And England was the best option for me, really. Pragmatic. I like it. A woman after my own heart. But I imagine sometimes causes a bit of a headache in the house when you have to decide or the family have to decide who they're supporting. Oh massively yeah I think my dad always says I always support you and I'm like okay that obviously means he's just supporting

me and not the team as such now but he's he's a huge supporter and he's been massive in my journey you know little things like he used to unstitch the Red Roses badge off of some of the kit I'd get him because he said he couldn't wear it down the pub. So, yeah, he's still a proud Welshman and he keeps it as PC as he can. I love that. The image of that is a striking one.

But it is growing, you know, support for for the game and i'm sure you you must be feeling that and that momentum also must be important for the team as it's as it's going in as the favorites yeah massively i think as well we've got a home world cup in 2025 so it'd be in england so we we as a nation are pushing that and because we want to win because we haven't won since 2014 so that's that's our bigger picture obviously six Nations is first up, and it's going to put us in a good position. We've got new coaching staff, some new players coming in. Again, having it a standalone tournament

just means we're able to market it a bit better and also show our characters a little bit more as well. But it also means we get a lot of staff from the men's game that come and do the women's game so that almost equal opportunity there which is amazing so yeah, I think the noise around it is phenomenal. Yeah and I suppose in some ways you've got to prepare for people knowing more about you and who you are

and we've had a bit of a discussion this morning as often can be a little bit of the terrain here on Women's Hour, about what it's like being in the public eye and how people react. Are you prepared for that? How do you feel about that side of things? Yeah, I think even since my first cap in 2015, oh God, that sounds ages ago now, but we always spoke about, you know, how important your image was on social media. So I remember going back through my Facebook and deleting photos. And this is my first cap now, so it wouldn't have been a name as such. So we've definitely been taught quite a bit

and particularly learning a lot from football as well, I'd say. You see so much online now, particularly football, get quite a lot of heat, I think just because of the prestige of it. But you almost got to avoid reading some of the comments because it does rattle you. Yeah, I think it's just about understanding the reason why you do it. And what is the reason? Take me there, take me to the pitch. But what's it like in your mind when you're playing? How do you feel? What gets you to want to do this?

From a young age, you know, I started playing when I was six. It just gave me a sense of belonging. And the fact that my gender did not matter. I'd go to this team, I was the only girl. And yes, OK, people would say, oh, my God, there's a girl on the team or, you know, I'm not tackling the girl. But the thing was, when they saw me play, they just said, wow, I want Meg on my team. you know I'm not tackling the girl but the thing was when they saw me play they just said wow

I want Meg on my team you know I want I want to be involved and I want to I want to I want a team full of Meg Joneses which was amazing because it then showed me from a young age even though maybe I wasn't conscious of it then but it showed me that your gender doesn't matter as long as you provide the work and you show that you're capable of producing something on the pitch in any line of work you know your gender is irrelevant so my opportunity should should be the same. England rugby player Meg Jones there and the Women's Six Nations kicks off on Saturday the 23rd of March. For the past few years maximalism has been all the rage in the interior design world and for some they've found wisdom and inspiration on

social media to ditch the beige and really go there with their home decor. But what are the pros and cons of adding personality to your home? And can more extreme decor impact the sale of your house? Pottery artist Mary Rose Young painted her house from top to bottom in bright colours and patterns, including the ceiling. Kate Sandu is an interiors influencer and founder of Kate Sandu Renovations. She found that her maximalist house won her lots of followers on social media, but when it came to selling, she had to paint it all white. Emma began by asking Mary Rose about what she's done to her house. I've done everything. I've maximised it totally, I think, put it in a nutshell. Well, I started years ago when I first bought the house and it needed a bit of character instilling into it.

So I used some of the designs from my pottery and a lot of the colours that I was already using on the inside of the house. And it set it alight and made it really lovely and fun. And I just had a lot of attention from the media at that time. And it just kind of spurred me on. It is incredible. And as a foremost radio lover, this is the only time I ever feel when we have these sorts of discussions,

I'm on the wrong platform because not being able to show our listeners, we will try and share some of this if we can on the Woman's Hour website, some images so you get the sense. Kate, just to come to you, you had gold stairs and patterned wallpaper. A lot of people,

this is in your previous place, really loved it online. But then I mentioned it was an issue when you came to sell. I am a maximalist too. I have a lot of different types of wallpaper. We're talking pink and white stripes on one wall, chinoiserie, Chinese style on another.

Am I going to have to buy, if I ever move, a load of white paint, do you think? I mean, maybe, but in a way, I guess, does it matter? Because I think the important thing is you know there was some people were outraged that we like sort of had to pack the wallpaper down and painted things but I think bigger picture we enjoyed the house while we were there there's no way that someone was going to buy it and have the exact same taste so I think you know it's really important to just enjoy your home treat it like your kind of palette it's kind of you know an extension of you and a piece of art in itself and then if you need to change

it to sell it then so be it because the bigger picture is you kind of want to move on to your next kind of project and next um adventure i guess so i mean that that's huge pragmatism of course but but you did we should say just so that people realise you had to arrive at that, you put it on the market and it didn't go straight little bit offensive we thought brilliant and an awful home that no one wants to buy and actually we just pulled it off the market stepped back and thought well do you know what you just gotta swallow your pride and think let's just do what we need to do to get it sold and and that enabled us to start fresh somewhere else but yeah it was a little bit of a kick in the teeth and it was um over the gold stairs. It was a slightly sad moment, but, you know. You did it.

Not everyone wants gold leaf stairs. I mean, I would, but that's just me. We seem to be coming from the same place. And so do you, Mary Rose Young. And have you ever thought, Mary, about the fact that others, what will happen to your property at some point and others may not be of the same view? Yeah, not really i kind of just like it so much i'm so into it and everyone that comes loves it so much i never really think that as far as um changing it into a white house because it would just look gray because it's kind of dark in in by its nature it's set down from the road so yeah no no no and more is more is more is more is that the motto i'm so

dyed in in the wool you know and the whole concept of color and it's such a successful sort of thing my life it makes me me so happy and my customers happy and people who come to the house are happy. So, you know, it's a no-brainer, really. Mary-Rose Young there and Kate Sandhu. And that is all from me on Weekend Woman's Hour. Emma will be back on Monday at 10. She'll be speaking to actor Imogen Poots about her new role as Rose Dugdale, the English heiress who

became a revolutionary in the new film Baltimore and our series on how pornography shapes our sex lives and relationships continues. You don't want to miss it. Until then, have a great weekend. That's all from today's Woman's Hour. Join us again next time. Hi, I'm India Rackerson and I want to tell you a story. It's the story of you. In our series, Child, from BBC Radio 4, I'm going to be exploring how a fetus develops and is influenced by the world from the very get-go. Then, in the middle of the series, we take a deep look at the mechanics and politics of birth, turning a light on our struggling maternity services and exploring how the impact of birth on a mother affects us all. Then we're going to look at the incredible feat of human growth and learning in the first 12 months of life. Whatever shape the journey takes,

this is a story that helps us know our world. Listen on BBC Sounds. I'm Sarah Trelevan, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy.

And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC 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.