Woman's Hour - Weekend Woman’s Hour: Kids social media ban in Australia, Cassa Pancho, Rage rooms, Camille O’Sullivan

Episode Date: November 29, 2025

Australia’s under-16 social media ban comes into force soon. From 10th December, platforms must take 'reasonable steps' to stop under-16s from opening accounts and remove accounts that already belong to them. Companies who fail to comply could face fines of up to £25m. BBC Sydney correspondent Katy Watson has been talking to teenagers in the state of Victoria. She explains how we got here and updates us on a new legal action being brought to challenge the ban.Cassa Pancho founded Ballet Black in 2001, aged 21, in response to there being no black or Asian women performing in any of the UK’s ballet companies. This week Ballet Black conclude their UK tour of SHADOWS at London's Sadler's Wells and features as part of its double bill Cassa's adaptation of Oyinkan Braithwaite’s international bestselling novel, My Sister, The Serial Killer.Have you heard of rage rooms? Or even visited one? Turns out demand for them is surging, and 90% of the UK customers are women. Believed to have started in Japan in the early 2000s, rage rooms are places where people can smash up items such as electronics, white goods and crockery. Nuala McGovern is joined by Jennifer Cox, psychotherapist and author of Women are Angry: Why Your Rage is Hiding and How To Let It Out, and culture journalist Isobel Lewis who has visited a rage retreat.Camille O’Sullivan has toured with the Pogues and was chosen by Yoko Ono to perform at Meltdown festival in the Royal Festival Hall – now the Irish-French singer is bringing her hit show to the Soho Theatre in London. LoveLetter is a personal response to the loss of the artists who inspired her - particularly her late friends Shane McGowan and Sinéad O’Connor. Presenter: Anita Rani Producer: Annette Wells

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 and welcome to the programme. Coming up, highlights from the Woman's Hour Week. Two teenagers are challenging Australia's upcoming social media ban for children in the nation's highest court, alleging the law is unconstitutional as it robs them of their right to free communication. Raid rooms. Have you heard of them? Places you can go to break stuff and let off steam. Well, demand is surging and 90% of the customers are women. Why might that be?

Also, Casapancho, who founded Ballet Black back in 2001 when she realised that were no black or Asian dancers performing in any UK ballet companies. And music from multi-award-winning Irish French singer Camille O'Sullivan. But first, on December the 10th, Australia plans to introduce the world's strictest laws governing how children access social media with an outright ban on children under 16 using social media platforms. That includes the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit and streaming platforms kick and Twitch. Under 16s, with accounts on those platforms, have been getting messages telling them that they're about to be suspended or deleted. Two of those teenagers are challenging the law in Australia's High Court, alleging the law is unconstitutional as it robs them of their right to free communication.

We wanted to know how young people and their parents in Australia see it. Nula was joined by Katie Watson, the BBC's Sydney correspondent, who's been following the change in the law and speaking to young people, and we'll hear from some of them in a moment. But first, Nula started by asking Katie, why the Australian government decided to bring in this law. They say it's about protecting young Australians at a critical age of their development.

The e-safety commissioner, which is effectively the online regulator, they say this is not a ban, this is a delay. But certainly when the legislation was announced by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the plans to do this last year, he very much made the point that this is about getting teenagers off the screens and onto the footy field and the fact that he had parents' backs on this. This is really important to stand with the parents.

Enough is enough. This is about mental health, making sure that they can grow up away from pressures and risks when exposed to the likes of social media. So that is the government's ambition. And I mentioned a number there that would be affected. There are platforms like Google's classroom or YouTube kids that's owned by Google's parent company,

alphabet are unaffected. So there's a couple of little areas perhaps where children under 16 can go. Yeah. So they're not wanting to target educational platforms that things that are used, you know, to be able to help kids with technology. The conditions for the restriction on the ages is, effectively, the sole purpose has to be online interaction between users that, you know, that could have material posted on the surface. So it's about that kind of that social interaction. But as you mentioned, you know, if you mentioned Google Classroom, there's YouTube kids, there are other things. So messaging is unaffected, as well as gaming. And actually, that's one of the things that is increasingly talked about. In fact, I've just been at this, like, parents for a moment

at a school, Padreau College, which is just about an hour and a half outside of Melbourne. And one of the parents put their hands up and said, what about the likes of Roblox? And there was this kind of hush and a big kind of murmur in the room and everybody going, exactly. So there are huge emissions that a lot of people feel, you know, and just not part of this so-called ban. And do we know why? Because messaging is a way of interacting socially on some form of media and gaming. I mean, kids chat to each other directly there. I know myself from doing this program. It's a place where cyberbullying can take place. Exactly. So I think this is one of the discussions. I've been speaking to, you know, academics and politicians and parents and kids. And

I think there's this huge discussion. Why is it not included? Is it a bunch of slightly, you know, older politicians making up rules for younger people who know far more about technology and, you know, really don't understand? I mean, there were a lot of people who felt that, you know, why are certain platforms targeted? There's 10 platforms in total that are targeted. There are plenty more out there that are not. And the risk, of course, they'll no longer be on these platforms so kids will find other platforms to go on. Why is gaming not included? Because the idea being is that, you know, according to legislation, people go on to those gaming platforms to play a game. If the game wasn't there, would they be on those platforms? But of course,

it takes away from this idea that people are also going on there for social interaction. And so, yes, it's a flaw that people are definitely talking about here in Australia. The government hasn't said anything specifically on that at the moment or any moves. So their view is, is that this isn't perfect. This is legislation. This is a start. And that it will be dynamic. So, for example, when it was announced there were I think nine different platforms and you know just in the last couple of days and they'd been adding to that and that they say is likely to continue so it might be that as soon as they you know they work out that another platform is perhaps being used too much and that that appears to be a threat as several people have described it to me this could be a game of whack-a-mole

that was exactly the phrase katy that was coming to my mind as you were laying out what the looks like. You talk about the word dynamic as well just this morning as I was coming into work I see that two 15 year olds backed by a rights group, the Digital Freedom Project, are arguing that the ban disregards the rights of

children. One of them is Macy Nayland has said in a statement we shouldn't be silence. It's like Orwell's book 1984 and that scares me. Could they stop the ban coming in or the delay as the government would call it? This has been, yeah I mean this has been talked about

In fact, Australian media have also previously reported that Google, which owns YouTube, had also be considering launching a constitutional challenge. I mean, certainly there's been a lot of anger about this and about the right way to go about it, whether this is for the government to do, should this not be down to social media companies. But there are plenty of people who say, well, social media companies just haven't done enough. And if it's about threatening them to make sure that they can comply and make the online world safer, maybe that's what they need to do. So, yeah, I mean, this challenge, it might.

might throw something up, but certainly the proponents of the legislation said they're not going to be cowed, that they're going to continue. But I think that the challenge brings up an interesting point is that who are you talking about when it comes to children being protected? There are plenty of young people I've spoken to who say this is a good thing, but there are also people, you know, there might be neurodiverse teens, there might be children living in remote and rural areas who depend on their, you know, online communities much more than you know a typical kid in just outside the city where I am and I think that is a concern is these minority groups perhaps

are not being considered when they talk about this blanket ban but you have been with young people at a school in Victoria in Australia I want to bring a little of what they had to say in response to this law to our listeners many social media platforms I should let our listeners know already restrict accounts to those who are over 13 in Australia Chloe begins. She's 17 and she's talking about just how ineffective that restriction is. Currently, there are lots of ways if you're 13 or 12 or 11 to like get past that age restrict and then still, like, for example, if you're on Instagram, you can put in a fake age and it's way easier to like escape that if that makes sense rather than this ban, which will fully like cut it out.

So as somebody who, none of you have had to face this ban and you're all going to get away with it, do you feel that if you'd have had to have. a ban that might have been better for your early teenhood. Billy 17, I definitely agree with that because like two, three years ago I would use my phone quite a bit and I actually deleted social media of my own accord due to how addicting it was and how much time it was taking. Alex 18, I also think there can be a lot of benefits though. Like obviously being a teenager is already a really isolating experience. I think it can help connect you socially with people a lot of the time.

And it can help connect communities as well together, especially if you're living rurally. It's also, like, news-wise, I know I get a lot of my news from feeds from, like, news, social media accounts and stuff. And I think it's part of being a global citizen as well, is keeping connected with that and making sure that you know what's going on. Well, so interesting to listen to them. The one about being a global citizen, here's a message from Ailish in Brighton.

She says, I absolutely agree with the ban on social media for children under 16. Personally, I think it'll save lives. children can still communicate. Why can't they meet in person? So much of today's world is online and that is sad to see. I want to see governments and those in power do something positive about this

before another child ends up dead because of harmful content. And of course, that's talking about how she sees that role off social media. And another one. The problem with a ban is that kids will find a way around it while it releases the media companies

from taking any responsibility for their content. I mean, you alluded to that, Katie. And the one thing we do not. know about teenagers is that they can be very creative. They can and certainly you know there was a discussion here about people putting kind of like old man masks on and tricking because what these companies are having to do and there's been a big report on it and a big kind of project companies have to have an age assurance technology to make sure that these kids are not getting online and actually this whole legislation puts the on us on the company it's their responsibility

to do it if not they face a fine of about 50 million Australian dollars that's about 25 million pounds, which is big, but the other argument is they make millions and millions of pounds every day, is it enough? Especially, Australia is a small market, you know, it's like 26 million people. If it's not, you know, profitable, will they go and leave and go elsewhere? That was Katie Watson, the BBC's Sydney correspondent speaking to Nula. Cassa Pancho founded Ballet Black in 2001. She was just 21 at the time and it was in response to the fact that no black or Asian women were performing in any of the UK's ballet companies. Well, this week, Ballet Black concluded their UK tour of Shadows at London's Sadler's Wells.

The Double Bill features Cass's adaptation of a Yinkin Braithwaite's international best-selling novel, My Sister, The Serial Killer. It's very different from traditional ballet stories. The novel starts with a murder, which Corrida, a nurse living in Lagos, Nigeria, has to clean up. And it isn't for the first time, and it's her sister, Ayola, that's killed him. man. The show also includes a piece called A Shadow Work, which explores the practice of shadow work, a technique that choreographer Chanel de Silva encountered when going through therapy. Well, Cassa joined me in the Woman's Hour studio this week, and I started by asking her why she

wanted to tell this specific story through dance. So I love ballet, but I do not love the narratives of women being saved every 10 minutes by some dippy bloke. I don't like the idea of women being cursed and turned into swans or killing themselves because the guy doesn't love them. And this book, although the deeper story does start with some abuse from their father, the rest of the book is just these women taking care of themselves and no harm is inflicted on them. The only harm, unfortunately, comes to the men in Ayula's life. And I really enjoyed the idea that they look after themselves, whether they're doing right or wrong.

Second on the bill is a shadow work by Brooklyn-born choreographer Chanel de Silva, which explores this profound technique she encountered when she was going through therapy called shadow work. Tell me about that. Well, when she brought the idea to me, I thought, I don't know if that sounds very heavy. And the way she spoke about it was a very American way, which is about, you know, self-discovery and journeys. And I thought, I'm not sure if our British audience is going to love that. But she said, just bear with me. So I did because I knew she was a brilliant choreographer.

and what she has created is a ballet of vignettes of moments of her own life so the sudden passing of her mother when she was in her 20s her father abandoning their family and she has turned it into a really beautiful moving piece of work you started ballet black 24 years ago when I knew you were coming on I thought I need to get into the head of this 21 year old because we love a strong-minded woman on Woman's Hour

where did that fire in you come from to want to change the landscape of the industry. Tell me what you saw around you. What I saw around me was entirely pale. And being a mixed race student with a father from Trinidad and a mother from Britain, but looking kind of Italian or Indian or... Yeah, culturally ambiguous.

Which can be a superpower, by the way. It is my superpower here because I was able to hear comments from teachers and people in the dance world about what they thought black people could and could not do in ballet, what they thought black and Asian people would like or not like. And people would speak very freely in front of me before knowing that actually 50% of my family is from the Caribbean.

And that made me realize I look like this. If I looked any darker, would I have progressed any further in ballet having heard those kinds of comments? Definitely not. Probably would have quit. So there was a colour bar. A huge colour bar. That is not gone today. Okay. We'll get to that. But why does it exist? What's the thought process behind?

I mean, ballet came out of, you know, European royalty. But that was so long ago that I think that when I hear that as an excuse as to why it's not culturally relevant to anyone else, I don't really believe it. Because whose culture is fairies and witches and, you know, whose actual lineage? Who comes from fairies? Nobody. So I think there are, it's a combination of it being perceived as a very elite art form, where in fact, when you start ballet, you normally start in a church hall somewhere. So there's nothing less elite than going to a church hall and hanging on to the back of a chair as a ballet bar. And then there are all these racial stereotypes around black people, particularly black women, about being aggressive, angry, too strong to be the kind of frail character in a ballet like Gilles. for example or you know so I think all these things came together with there's historic accounts of students being accepted into very prestigious ballet schools in this country and told we'll train you but you'll never join the company that's associated with this school and you

know these things have a lasting legacy and a lasting impact you have had your own ballet school to kind of readdress to look at this problem to address it 24 years later and post black lives matter? And you're saying not much has changed or has things changed? I think the thing that forced the conversation was the murder of George Floyd. Yeah. And that we were all stuck at home watching it because of COVID. The positive, if there can be a positive to that, is that it forced a conversation that everybody felt like they had to participate in. The Black Squares on Instagram, the pledges to do more. And then as we moved forward in time, some people who were very genuine.

about it, stayed the course and others fell away. So we are talking about it more now, but we've been here for a very, very long time. So what's ballet black going to continue to do? Well, we're going to continue to show you. You don't have to be a certain colour to be great at ballet. You just have to be great at ballet. And we do that by performing through our school. We tour the country. And there is no colour bar within our company. So if you're black, Asian, mixed race, very dark, very light, you'll be cast because you're amazing. Casapancho there and Shadows, which is showing at Sadler's Wells in London, ends this evening. Now, let's talk about rage rooms. Have you heard of them? Have you ever visited one?

Turns out demand for them is surging and 90% of the customers are women. Believed to have started in Japan in the early 2000s, rage rooms are places where people can smash up items such as electronics, white goods and crockery. Well, Nula was joined by Jennifer Cox, a psychotherapist, and author of Women Are Angry, Why Your Rage is Hiding and How to Let It Out. She was also joined by Culture Journalist, Isabel Lewis, who has visited a rage retreat. She began by asking Jennifer, was she surprised that rage rooms are so popular amongst women? It wasn't a surprise to me at all. It's only a surprise that it's hitting now, frankly.

I mean, I guess my book did seem to. set something off a bit. But I think that that nerve was already raw. It was ready to be jangled. And yeah, I mean, I guess it is just surprising to me how it feels as if this is news. And what is rage? Is it anger? Is it something different?

Well, essentially, it's our nervous system responding with fight or flight. And this is adrenaline, this is cortisol, and it can go any number of ways. And for women, it typically goes into the kind of more fearful, more flight-based end of the spectrum because we are conditioned to feel those feelings. And we're really pushed away and distance from anything that is more frustrated, angry, aggressive, rageful. And so we're just, we don't have a vocabulary for it. We've never been, you know, raised to talk about these things in those terms.

So it stays in our bodies and we repress it. which I would imagine is not a good thing. You're shaking your head, not a good thing. It's not a good thing, Nuda. What do you think ignites that rage? And obviously there's a myriad of reason, but you are a therapist, so I imagine women have spoken to you about this.

Yeah. So I think what I hear on the daily is more around the kind of systemic family stuff that is so kind of written into ourselves. As soon as we're born, we're expected to, fulfill very particular roles, you know, caretaking roles with a nice girl, the good girl, the polite girl. We're not the cross girl or the one who's taking up space and standing up for herself. And I guess, you know, when you see this across a lifetime and you see where we end up

as women in these very sandwiched places often between, you know, our jobs, our parents, our young children, you can see just how furious that might. make us. And do you recommend that people let it out? And if so, how? Oh, I do. I really do. I mean, I think, well, talking is the obvious one. So this is where the podcast, Women Are Mad, has really kind of taken off because I think it's the first time we've had this sort of formal conversation around rage and all these high profile women come and they want to let off steam with us. And so conversation is the easy one. But I think we need to get. it out of our bodies. It's an energy and we need to discharge it. So this is why all the

techniques that they're talking about, you know, in these articles at the moment. I remember I threw crockery. I wasn't particularly angry when I went into the room, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it. You know, the printer definitely got the rough end of the deal. What did you do, smash it up? I had a baseball bat. I also had for health and safety. Like you get a helmet and like a little visor and all that business so you can go nuts and you're not going to hurt anyone or your I mean, I really think this is what we dream of as women, just being able to absolutely let rip. Yeah, no one's going to get hurt. I quite encourage, like, mini-raid rooms in the home. So piling up cushions, pillows, really going for it. Yeah, you don't, there aren't many rage rooms. That's the thing. As yet, maybe that's going to change. Maybe that is going to change. And if people don't let it out, what do you see with the people you meet? Not good. I mean, this is where, because we repress it, it comes out in our bodies in all sorts of different ways. So anxiety, depression, OCD, I mean, migraine, stomach problems, you name it. It's because we don't have a language for it and we have never been allowed to sit at that end of our feelings,

we've sort of been coerced into calling it lots of different things that I think are far more convenient for society. Let's bring in, Isabel. The rage retreat. What was it? How was it? It was a pretty wild experience. It is something that I would never normally do. It sounded pretty, I think hippie is a word that I would use

and I am pretty cynical of a lot of that stuff. But I just come back from travelling and I was like, oh, I kind of wanted to do a lot more stuff that tapped into those kind of emotions. And anger is not something I really, as Jennifer was saying, I do not experience anger ever really. You mean you don't allow yourself to experience it or you just never have feelings of anger?

I don't, probably a bit of both. Like I think you're not aware of them. As you say, I'm definitely the, the flight side it's not really the fight and I think I was like oh I didn't really go into it thinking I have something that I want to be angry about but I found it was amazing like I think realizing that I couldn't be cynical of it I had to go and like really get the most out of it and there was lots of stuff that came up for me not so much about stuff that I'd gone and thinking I felt angry about but about hearing the other women hearing the stuff that they were talking about

they were angry with and a lot of that did feel quite societal and the stuff that women go through and I was like absolutely furious by the end of it about what they had gone through and I'm quite like upset like there were points when they kind of encouraged us to like scream and things like that and they were very like if that doesn't come naturally we say just basically make a noise and in a kind of fake it till you make it way and at some point it might change but at some point we were doing that and I was like oh I'm actually screaming for real and I don't really know when it shifted but I was like I'm absolutely Curious. But I think it's a really interesting point you bring up, Isabel, because we can feel rage on behalf of other people, most definitely. Jennifer?

Yeah, I mean, I see that a lot, actually. When I've done events like that in the past, sort of getting women to scream, often I say, if you can't do it for yourself, do it for a woman who has no voice, you know, because we're really good at that, aren't we? We're very empathic, we're very compassionate. We can put ourselves in other shoes. We just can't give ourselves the experience. and I think that's what we all need to get much better at. What about the Lions roar, Jennifer? What is that? So that's one of my personal faves. So if you're somewhere where it's just not appropriate to make a big noise, you can just tuck yourself away in a little corner. I mean, you know, obviously we do that a lot, don't we?

As women, minimise, make ourselves small. But we can release the energy in a big way doing that. So it's a sort of silent scream, basically, where your body and your voice are given the experience, of, yes. So I'm trying to do it here. This is radio, I know. So you open your mouth and you go for it, but just not making the sound.

So let the body go into fists, let your body tense up or shake it out with the mouth wide open. Does it give you the same release? Yeah, it's good enough. It's good enough. We talk about that in therapy a lot, something being good enough. I think it gets us where we need to be, roughly speaking. It's on the right track. Why are we, Isabella?

curious for your thoughts on this. Why, particularly from the retreat, why do you think we are so uncomfortable being around intense anger, which can be rage? I think there's a lot about in women that often I think a lot of these emotions just kind of get flattened down to emotional. There's not really much dissecting into what it is. If I think about myself as like a teenager, I wanted to argue, I'd so much to be, I felt I was angry about, but I couldn't really argue it without crying. Yes. Because a fear of tears, Jennifer, can be a real thing.

I mean, we saw it with Rachel Reeves, for example. The Chancellor, there was so much discussion about it afterwards with a woman crying in public. And it sparked all sorts of conversations. But for some women, as Isabel describes there, when they have a feeling of rage, it transforms into tears, which then are, I'm putting this in inverted commas, inappropriate to express. apparently. Yeah. I mean, I think I rail against this as well. Like, what's wrong with emotion? Why in society have we become so phobic of it? And why are, as we know, a lot of men are allowed to kind of express their feelings in very different way. Not all men. And there's a lot of feelings that they are not allowed to express. Perhaps women are allowed to express. I mean, this is an interesting one, isn't it? Because there's a real kind of polarity between where we're allowed to go and where they're allowed to go. But what I would say is, like, can't we just have different conversations around emotion in general? Jennifer Cox and Isabelle Lewis. That's it from me. Join us on Monday when Women's Hour will be talking to the former

Prime Minister of Finland, Sana Marin. Have a great rest of your weekend. I'm off to break some stuff. That's all for today's Woman's Hour. Join us again next time.