Woman's Hour - Weekend Woman's Hour: Matrescence, Ramadan & the 'sandwich generation', The Traitors' Harriet Tyce

Episode Date: March 7, 2026

The BBC has had exclusive access to the world’s largest study scanning pregnant women’s brains. The BeMOther project is based in Spain and has found that women's brains change significantly through pregnancy and beyond. Nuala McGovern talks to Smitha Mundasad, a BBC health and science reporter and Lucy Jones, author of Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood.Ramadan is a time for worship and reflection. But many women of the so-called 'sandwich generation' may feel that they are up against the clock, juggling caring for young children and elderly parents, while also trying to find the time to fuel their bodies and their minds. Anita is joined by Shelina Janmohamed, an author and podcaster, and Tabassum Niamat, a mother and community activist, both of whom think of themselves as 'sandwich carers.'According to the NGO International Justice Mission, live-streamed online child sexual abuse is one of the fastest‑growing yet least‑detected types of child abuse globally. Nuala is joined by Molly Hudson from the International Justice Mission, and Sharon Pursey, co‑founder of SafeToNet, a British online safety technology company.Barrister turned bestselling crime author and recent star of The Traitors, Harriet Tyce joins Nuala to talk about her latest novel, Witch Trial. Harriet reflects on how motherhood was the impetus for her career change, how her knowledge of the legal system inspires her work and her experience as a ‘Faithful’ on the hit BBC TV series.Model, author and activist Charli Howard says she has always been treated like a sex object. Charli joins Anita to discuss how, through a new book of essays called Flesh, she is reclaiming her body for herself, piece by piece. Presenter: Anita Rani Producer: Kirsty McQuire

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. This is not the future we were promised. Like, how about that for a tagline for the show? From the BBC, this is the interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life.

And all the bizarre ways people are using. the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, I'm Anita Rani and welcome to Woman's Hour from BBC Radio 4. Hello and welcome to the program. Coming up, Barrister turned crime writer and traitor's faithful Harriet Tice on her new novel, Witch Trial. Model and activist Charlie Howard explores piece by piece how her body has been objectified in her new book, Flesh, and we'll also hear about an extremely tough issue, a hidden form of child sexual abuse live streamed onto phones. But our guests do have a solution to offer.

Plus, how to carve out time for reflection during Ramadan as a sandwich generation carer. But first, matressants and the transformations that come with pregnancy, birth and raising a child are only just starting to receive attention as a distinct life stage that some women go through. Only in recent years has it started to receive the widespread attention of neuroscientists asking what happens to women's brains as their bodies go through the changes of pregnancy and beyond, but already the answers are fascinating. The BBC has had exclusive access to the world's largest study scanning pregnant women's brains. It's called the Bee Mother Project based in Spain,

which has found that women's brains do change significantly through pregnancy. Well, Nula spoke to Smita, Mundersad, at BBC Health and Science Reporter who visited the trial in Spain for her documentary Baby Brain. What's Really Going On. And Lucy Jones, the journalist and author whose book Matrescence on the metamorphosis of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood was published in 2023 and became an instant classic. I met the volunteers, mothers who volunteered to have their brain scanned before, during and after pregnancy five times because they were so eager to find out what happens not just to them, but to other women during this time.

And what the research has found, they compared them to about 50 women who haven't been pregnant and weren't pregnant at the time. And they saw this really intriguing pattern with the grey matter in the brain. Now that's the outer layer, the nerve-rich layer of the brain. And they saw that it dipped by about 5% during pregnancy before gradually coming back up, though not fully six months after giving birth. And I know when we hear grow matter dips or decreases, we get a bit scared and we think it's probably instinctively a bad thing. But the scientist, Professor Susanna Carmona, one of the leading scientists in this field, says in this case, as you said, less is probably more.

To think of it kind of her metaphor is the pruning of a tree, that maybe they're pruning nerve networks and other nerve cells to make the brain more efficient and make it more adapted to motherhood. She's got some really good reasons why she thinks this. For example? Yeah, the women in the study, they all did questionnaires before, during and after pregnancy. And they found the more the brains changed, the more they saw that dip and recovery, the more the mothers were well bonded and content with their babies. But also, they see a similar process in adolescence where the grey matter starts to thin. And many neuroscientists think this represents a pruning of nerve networks to make the brain more efficient as it matures into adult hold. And finally, her other main reason is animal research

because, let's face it, as she said, there's a lot more research on animals, pregnant animals, than there is on pregnant humans. And so you have to look to the animal research to see what's going on. And in animals, they see the brain changing in pregnancy and it kind of switches on this maternal or caregiving behaviour. So for all these reasons, she thinks that this change that they're seeing is a good thing.

So I can't remember whether it was mice or rats that they were experimenting on. and if these brain changes didn't happen, they didn't have any interest in their offspring. Yeah, I watched a video of some of the research on this. And when the rodents were not pregnant, they just went past the pup, ignored it completely.

And then when researchers gave them some pregnancy hormones that they think switch on these brain changes, suddenly they were making a nest and they were putting the pup in this nest. It was utterly fascinating. Yeah, I was interested. There was women that were in a circle, chatting about the changes that they felt,

some of them felt that, that they were getting forgetful about certain aspects, but perhaps it's about the mundane or the stuff that doesn't really matter if you're trying to keep another little human alive. Exactly. They said, you know what? It was mostly the small stuff, and why sweat with the small stuff?

Actually, our priorities, our attention has shifted. And so even if we're not remembering those things, those things aren't as important as the things that are straight in front of us. And actually, within this research, the area of the brain, one of the areas of the brain the changes the most is an area called the default mode network. And that's kind of about self-perception, how you see yourself, but also altruism and empathy.

And the thought is that perhaps our brains as mothers are changed forever in that you are now thinking of someone else, bringing someone else into yourself. And you're sort of prioritizing that person. So interesting. Lucy, you must have been fascinated seeing some of this that has been coming out in neuroscience. You were talking about it in metress. as well. The work of Dr. Susanna Carmona and the Beam of the Project have been published since then. But I'd be curious what your thoughts are this morning. I can't wait to see the documentary.

And I think it's a really exciting time for this kind of emerging science of metrescence and potrescence, the transition to fatherhood. And it speaks to an area of life which has been very neglected and under-acknowledged, under-explored, underwritten, and the focus that we now have on what happens in the brain and the body and to people when they become pregnant is so crucial

because we minimise it so much in our society. We kind of, we, you know, we idealise motherhood and we kind of romanticise it a bit, but actually the transition to parenthood is a vulnerable time and a woman's risk of depression doubles in the postpartum period and we're living at a time of really high rates of postpartum mental health problems and stress and exhaustion and loneliness. So I really welcome all this amazing science by these scientific heroes across the world.

And also I think it's important to talk about kind of the social aspect of matressants. It's a very social experience. So tell me more about that. Well, I think, you know, we don't value mothers. We don't value care. There's kind of lip service, I think, to mothers. But we don't actually properly support new parents and new mothers. You know, we have inadequate maternity care, unsafe maternity units,

inadequate postpartum care, mother and baby units, few or far between. And we, you know, the transition back to work can be a big shock. For many people, you know, that's when the egalitarian office party is over. And, you know, for me, when I became a moment, I was kind of stepping through a portal into a time where I thought feminism hadn't been realised and there was a lot more work to do. So interesting. Just a message coming in from Mandy in Lancashire says, I can't even remember who I was before I had children.

That is my warning. I'm very happy, so I'm not in any way saying it's a bad experience, but physically and mentally it's so overwhelming. You simply become another person, in my opinion. I'm 59 this year and I adore my children in life, but I would try to prepare my daughter far more than I ever want. if she were to consider pregnancy. What do you think about, Lucy?

I think preparing is a really important and really strong point because matressants and this transition can be a sight of a lot of deception, actually, and misinformation. So, you know, there's plenty of birth trauma and lack of information about the realities of birth, the kind of recovery of birth, breastfeeding, even, you know, the simple fact of what a baby needs. I think we actually kind of, because it's so privatised and we're all in these nuclearised, isolated families,

it can be quite a shock actually what a baby needs to kind of survive. Care work, nurture, they aren't profitable. So we don't value them properly. They're kind of hidden. And I think this focus on this transition could be really revolutionary. What do they hope to do with this data, Smeather? One of the things they hope to do, and you spoke a little bit about it, Lucy, is to create a map of what happens in pregnancy, a neurological map,

because we don't know yet. We don't have that much neuroscience research on what happens in the brain in pregnancy, because the pregnant brain is also a vulnerable one. It is a time where one in five women get things like postpartum depression. And so if we can work out what goes on, the idea is that hopefully we can also help women when there are complications. So that is one of their main reasons for doing this work. I was also wondering, because many people,

I'm pregnant, but do not give birth. It could be through a variety of things, whether it's miscarriage, abortion, it could be at the other end, a heartbreaking stillbirth also. But with their brains, do we know what happens? This is another area that Susanna really wants to look into. From the research so far, it looks like the brain is changing within the second trimester. Second trimester.

We don't know yet about the first trimester because people aren't scanning within that first trimester. Yet many would know hormones are raging in that first trimester. So the answer is we don't know. And in terms of how long these changes last, that's another really interesting question. Professor Sizana Carmona has looked at brains up to two and then six years. A small number of women have continued this research up to six years already. And in their brains, you can still see some of these changes. So perhaps pregnancy and motherhood leaves a signature in the brain forever. What do you, what would you like people, Lucy, to know about metrescence? I think the word metrescence and the kind of the concept of it can be quite transformative

because well my sense is since publishing metrescence, the book, a couple of years ago, is that it's a pretty normal experience today to have a baby and feel quite shocked by the experience. Yeah. You know, whether that's birth or your kind of psychology or, you know, your social role, your relationships. And that's what Dana Raphael, who coined the term metressants. She was an anthropologist was talking about. She was talking about how in most cultures and societies across the world, there is this sense of a kind of newborn mother. And there are rights and rituals in order to kind of support and hold the newborn mother as she cares for the baby.

And I think, you know, we've kind of lost sight of that. And metrescence, I think, can normalise this process of transition. Would it have helped you speak to the word or did you know the word? I didn't know the word. And absolutely the word would have helped me, knowing there's research in this field, would have helped me because it really does feel like a transition. And to have the language to talk about it is a huge thing. Is it without a word to talk about it?

How do you discuss it with people? Exactly. And I think it's a time where actually there's a lot of taboo about talking honestly about the experience of motherhood and the institution of motherhood. You can feel like if you complain about being a mother, it suggests that you don't love your child. Which is immediately what our listeners felt they had to say.

Yeah, absolutely. It's just the default thing you feel that you have to justify. But, you know, we can use the word metrescence and we can critique the institution of motherhood and the systems and the structures. It's not about the children, the children are perfect. but we can criticise how as a society we're treating mothers and caregivers and words like metrescence, I think, just give us the language to do that

and also to say, you know, how's your metrescence going or how was your metrescence? Lucy Jones and Smytha Mundesad speaking to Nula there and the BBC documentary Baby Brain, what's really going on is out on iPlayer. Now, for many people across the country who are observing the holy month of Ramadan, It's a time for reflection, spirituality, worship and mindfulness. But for some women who are caring for children as well as for elderly parents, in the so-called sandwich generation, it can prove difficult as they race against the clock to take care of all their daily responsibilities,

including preparing the daily if they're meal, the meal to break the fast. So how are these women making the time to fuel their bodies and their minds and making time for themselves to also have a positive spiritual, Ramadan experience. Well, to discuss this, I was joined in the studio by Shalina Jan Mohammed, an award-winning non-fiction and children's author, Calmist and Podcaster, and also Thabasim Nyameth, a mother and community organiser with local charity Bowling Green Together in Scotland. Ramadan is a mix of spirituality. It's a religious prescription, so people will fast during the daylight hours. But it's also a time of trying to reset, block out all

of the busy noise of the world and the heaviness of it and really focus on your spirituality as well as your family and your community. And it's about resetting and finding a little bit of time and space for yourself so you can go back to what you really want to be. I was thinking this morning, I think we might should probably explain for people who don't know, like what happens during this month? How is the fasting observed? Like what is expected? So you fast during the daylight hours and that means no food and no water. At the moment, a lot of Muslims up and down the country will be breathing a sigh of relief because we are fasting before the time change. So it's from around 5am till about 6pm. In the summer, it would have been really long hours from something like 2 a.m

until 9pm. So no physical intake, no, how should I put this, only 1030, no hanky-panky, no smoking. You know, it's really about the spiritual. No hanky-panky. No, just, well, you know, you can wait until after 6pm if you want to do that. But it's about people will read a lot of Quran and that's about the religious aspect. People will go to the mosque to pray. But there's also, of course, a cultural family part. People want to eat really lovely foods at Iftar. Mums, particularly, I call them being the chief memory officers. We're trying to create that feeling, that nostalgia of Ramadan in the same way somebody might for Christmas. And then you might wake up at something like half past four in the morning to have, in quotation marks, breakfast. In our house, that's a lot

sleepy people eating a lot of porridge. But some people do have quite a big meal. Is this something, I'm going to ask both of you this, because I'm a imagine there must be the whole family waking up at dawn and breaking the fast together. Like what how meaningful is that experience at the Bassem? Certainly when I was growing up with my siblings, it was a whole different experience. Kids nowadays, they've got like a million different demands of what they want to eat. And most often not, they just want to sleep rather than eat. And as I said, with the summer fasting, I think everybody wanted to get up and replenish themselves before they do the long,

bass, but in winter now I'm finding they're not as hungry as they were last year. So in some ways, the Sahur has become a little easier, but the Iftar is the nightmare. Why is that? I hate to describe it. I hate to describe if Thar is a nightmare. It's what we touched on before. It's going against the clock. Honestly, I feel daily, tick, tick, tick, tick. So the minute I wake up, there's obviously the work that I do, my day-to-day. I'm involved with a lot of community activism as well and then the meal prep getting everything and then cooking it that's all on me and i just every day something that i really love doing that's the thing i really love cooking for my family i used to do it when i'm the oldest of seven siblings so this is something that's been ingrained in me

since age of 13 and i don't begrudge it at all i love it but it's just this whole thing of how do i balance what I have to do outside of my home to then what I have to do inside the home. And it's almost like it's all the efforts that I'm putting. It's like this battle that I'm doing myself. And I feel like no one around me is realizing that I'm a human as well. Like I need this moment, this Ramadan. It's just as important for me. But instead, I'm just thinking of everyone else's emotional, you know, stuff that's

going on in their head and that everyone's going to be fed on time and just this constant running around and it's like at what point do I get to breathe and enjoy this month the way I used to I'm going to bring in the cavalry, going to bring some support in Shalina just explain some more about this, the sandwich generation because it's not just children it's so for the sandwich generation it's dual caring responsibility so you're looking after some elders and you're looking after children as well. And in the UK, there's around 1.4 million people who are sandwiched generation carers. And like all care, it's very gendered. So nearly two-thirds of all sandwich carers are women. So on the one hand, during normal daily life, that's really stretched to

capacity anyway. I called it living in a state of emergency because you're on the go and they're all full-time jobs. And I was working as a lot of sandwich generation carers are. And then you add that to Ramadan. And we've heard the strain that Ramadan can bring. And it is very difficult to use the word strain because Ramadan is very beautiful. It is a time of great relief and spirituality, but that doesn't mean the reality isn't that it's really hard. And then you bring those two things together. You've got the strain of sandwich caring and then you have Ramadan as well. And those deadlines, as we've heard, become non-negotiable. You're trying to make Ramadan special for the elders who have caring needs. So you still need to feed them if they're not fasting and you still

need to feed your children if they're not fasting or they have those requirements. And you're still working, but the deadlines are tighter. Your body's under strain. You're much more exhausted because fasting is a physically draining activity. And you also want to do Ramadan for yourself. And that becomes a really, really heavy, challenging thing to do. And I know when I experienced it, it was really difficult to do. And this year I wrote about that experience because I wanted to make people feel seen

because we don't often think about looking after our elders as in quotation marks care, because it's in quotation marks again, women's work. We think of it as low value, as unskilled. It's really, really challenging work. And I wanted people to recognise that when they help their parents out, you take them to a hospital appointment, you drop some food off to them, even just listen to them and they've got some needs. That is care.

So, Tabasim, when do you find time for yourself and time to reflect? because that is the purpose of this month to have that quiet time if you are, you know, you've got the strain of working, doing all the work, community work and your children and all of it. So how do you carve out the space? And as Selena had mentioned, parents as well

and my parents are both alive and the care is split between myself and my younger sister. So, and the old medical, my dad took ill recently, so there's a lot of appointments that have to attend with them. And if I be perfectly honest,

the benefit of the summer Ramadan because it was longer. It may not have been that great for, you know, food-wise, but it gave me more time. But as the Ramadan's getting shorter and shorter, the fasting time, like I said, that deadline just feels imminent and I don't get that time. Everyone says to me, just say no, but that's easy to say in practice. What about delegation? Why do we not delegate? One of the biggest practical pieces of advice I would give to anyone in the situation is that Ramadan is a time about community and people want to do more charitable works. And the hardest thing about being a sandwich carer is to ask for help because it all comes back to you.

I think the word sandwich is a bit of a misnomer because it's not like you're in between. It's you're the thread that keeps everything together. So ask for help and see if you can get the community involved. That I think is a really difficult thing to do as a woman anyway, let alone as a carer. I mean, it's woman's hour. So I feel it's, I mean, when we do talk about this, it comes up often. And I don't know what the situation is to busten, but is it what about your partner?

Could he not cook? And is the responsibility always on you to prepare if they are in the evening? Yeah, they can't cook. They can't cook. And the thing is I have adult children and I have young. I have a young, a nine-year-old, but then I've got adult children in the house as well. And for certain medical reasons, they can't wash and stuff dishes because they've got allergies. So, and it's just one of those things.

my circumstance is such and I don't begrudge it. I love my family to bits. But it's, I feel they just see me as this mom, like this idea of super mom. Like that's just your job. And it's never malicious is the thing. I don't think they think about it. They just assume, well, all moms do this. And like I said, Ramadan for me, I love it.

It's such a great time. But unfortunately, I think sometimes it's not even malicious. It's just they don't think. They just assume this is just what all. moms are doing and why are you complaining? Well maybe now people listening will be able to think and think about their own mums

who may be preparing and doing everything or their own women in their family. Yes, Shalina, quickly. I would just remind everyone that love is a verb, love is the things you do and actually when you do an active service, it's a really beautiful thing and that is Ramadan in itself and I think it's worth taking the pressure

off ourselves to kind of do Ramadan in what might be a very masculine way which is to go to a particular place or to do rituals, it's okay that when you serve people, that's also part of love and part of Ramadan. So I'd say just be intentional in what you want to do and remind yourself that everything has a season and this is a season for care.

Shalina Jan Mohamed and The Basim Nyameth. Still to come on the programme, Barrister turned crime writer and traitor's faithful Harriet Tice on her new novel, Witch Trial. And remember that you can enjoy a woman's hour any hour of the day if you can't join us live at 10 a.m. during the week, All you need to do is subscribe to the daily podcast. It's free via B.

This is not the future we were promised. Like, how about that for a tagline for the show? From the BBC, this is the interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life. and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet.

Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. BBC sounds. Now, earlier this week, the UK government launched a consultation on new measures to protect children online, including whether to ban social media use for under 16s, a step already taken in Australia. Regulating the internet and keeping young people safe on social media sites is one of the defining challenges of our time. A charity is drawing attention to a particularly hidden form of child sexual abuse

that takes place on social media and other online platforms. Some of the details are distressing. According to the NGO International Justice Mission, this is one of the fastest-growing yet least detected types of child abuse globally. Offenders pay to direct the real-time sexual exploitation of children via any internet-connected camera-enabled device, often with very little risk of being caught. Most identified victims are in the Philippines.

And the UK is among the top three countries consuming this material with the United States at number one. To discuss the scale of the problem and what can be done, Nula spoke to Molly Hudson from the International Justice Mission and Sharon Percy co-founder of Safe to Net, a British online safety technology company. So what International Justice Mission has found is that the UK is one of the top consumers of live stream child abuse. And what we mean by that is a man, and this is horrible to hear.

So I just, you know, apologize to listeners. This is not going to be easy, but it is important that we understand what is happening. Because when we understand it, we can help stop it. So I have a man sitting in somewhere like the UK who is using just an everyday device like your phone and an everyday platform. And he is talking to somebody, say, in the Philippines and saying, there's a child there with them and he's asking them to abuse them live sexually

for his pleasure and there is nothing that is stopping that from happening at the moment. I know this can be across various social media platforms we're not isolating any one particular platform to speak about this and I think this is part of the issue. I mentioned the Philippines there because I've heard you describe it before

as like a ground zero when it comes to these issues Why is that? And what numbers are we talking about? So IGM did a study with Nottingham Rights Lab, which found that almost half a million children were being abused to produce new child sexual abuse materials, including live streamed abuse in just 22 alone. That's one in every hundred children, which is a deeply distressing and disturbing reality. And what we saw is that what's happening with these children is that they are being abused in some of the most sickening ways that you can imagine. So that's everything from siblings being made to do things with siblings to act with animals. And it's just the sort of thing that you just think should never be happening in this world today.

But yet it is. And that is why we're absolutely committed to trying to stop this abuse before it starts. And like you said, this is happening across all different types of platforms. It's not one outlet. But there are now new tools that could be used that can help detect and disrupt live stream child sexual abuse that you can put on a device in the operating system that can. actually determine that this is a child who's a prepubescent who's being sexually abused and they can just stop it from being transmitted so you can't upload it you can't download it

it just doesn't you can't get it onto your device in the first place and that's what we're really hoping will happen and the UK government could take a lead in doing you're nodding there sharing yes so we have specifically developed this AI it's called harm block to be trained to recognize and discern child sexual exploitation material. And I think what's very exciting at the moment is we've reached this point of conversion on devices, operating systems and processing power, whereby we can put technology like harm block into the operating system. It's very, very fast and it's very, very accurate. So it works in live stream. And the exciting bit is that it works across every application on the device,

including the camera. And it sits behind the screen rendering layer. So, So everything has come out of the applications and it hasn't compromised the privacy in any way, but it would stop it from being rendered to the screen or broadcast via the camera. Can you explain that a little bit more to me in the sense that you say it doesn't hinder or impact the privacy? So it's very important that people's privacy remains intact. And I think interrupting applications

or getting interrupting getting into the applications is where you know that that problem can occur and the beauty of this

integration is that it doesn't compromise anything other than what's being rendered to the screen. So it is the image that it interacts

with? Would that be fair? It stops the rendering of the pixels onto the screen. Yes, so that the image does not become... It doesn't get realised, so to speak.

But my understanding, and let me throw this back to you, Molly, is that not only is the reluctance, perhaps, to implement a device like this, and you can tell me specifically what you've heard, I mean, there was a reluctance even before all of that to even talk about it. We've mentioned it's a tough topic, but you found that organisations, governments,

policymakers don't want to engage with this, why? Well, it's such a distressing issue, isn't it? It's very difficult to get the awareness of this issue. I mean, I'm grateful for you having us here today because that's actually a massive part of getting changed. And I've talked to government ministers who've said, you need to get the word out there that this is happening. Because as soon as people realize this is happening, most people don't want children to be abused in this way, especially because it's not just children in the Philippines who this impacts. It impacts children here in the UK. So, for example, men who live stream sexually with a child.

child, they've already crossed a psychological barrier that makes it more likely that they will then go on to abuse a child in person in a place like the UK. And men who abuse children online are two and a half more times more likely to then abuse a child in person. So this is a massive global issue right now. It's affecting children all over the world. But it's hard to talk about. And so once we do talk about it, I think that's when we start to see change happening. That's like this week we're seeing Lord Nash putting forward an amendment in the House of Lords. which would mean that tech companies would be,

and device manufacturers and operating systems would be required to use the kinds of technology that Sharon's described this on-device detection, which would stop a lot of this abuse from being able to happen in the first place. And so I think we're starting to see progress. And, you know, Kirstearner just a couple of weeks ago said that he wants the UK to be a leader,

not a follower in online safety. And, you know, this is a prime opportunity to say we're not going to stand for this. So with that particular amendment, you've been speaking to policymakers, do you expect that to pass? Well, we don't know yet because it hasn't happened. But it would be amazing if it does, if it doesn't. And I hope that the UK government will choose to take a lead on this anyway.

And we've had positive conversations with people within government. There is an openness to discussing this. And I think that right now we're seeing such a massive explosion in the scale of online abuse. We've talked about 500,000 children in the Philippines alone in one year, but it's not just the Philippines. And so, you know, 300 million children are being abused online every year globally, according to childlike. Now, that is huge. We just can't turn a blind eye. We have to do something about this. I mean, can I give you one example of the kind of abuse I'm talking about?

Let me just, before you do that, Molly, I do want to read a statement from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. They have said that protecting young people online is at the heart of their new violence against women and girls. strategy and obviously this is boys and girls that you're talking about as well. Yeah, absolutely. So I'll give you an example of one girl. So Joy, who is now in her 20s, she's an amazing woman who's like powerful advocate. She's speaking to global governments about why life stream abuse has to stop. When she was eight years old, her mother, she's from the Philippines, her mom went to work abroad in order to send money back for the family. When she was passed around different relatives while her mum was away and she said she felt

like a stray dog kind of being passed from place to place. She went to the home of one relative who told her, come into this room and take off your clothes and stand in front of this camera. She was then abused for men in places like the UK to watch live. That abuse happened for seven years. And it wasn't just her, it was her brother as well. And when IJM and police worked to bring them to safety, several children were brought to safety,

but that's too long. That abuse should not be happening for seven years. When there are tools now that are new that could be put in place, it would mean that it would be too difficult. for many offenders to be able to engage in this abuse in the first place. And so that's what we're hoping will happen. And we hope that DEC and the Home Office and others will start to look at these tools and use them. And I suppose at the heart of this, Sharon, it's a sign of the times in a really terrible way,

in the sense that technology has gone ahead in leaps and bounds. This is, I suppose at the crux of Eureli is that it's live streamed is how it's not able to be clamped down upon in the ways that perhaps it would have been with previous iterations of child sexual abuse. Correct. It's so fast. The accuracy is extremely good. And the inference rate is phenomenal that it is considered to be real-time intervention because you cannot unsee harm once it's happened.

So it's actually stopping the harm from happening in the first place. I wanted to just give some stats here. Americans are the number one global consumers of live streamed abuse. I mentioned the UK in the top three. Law and enforcement estimates in the US that they have infiltrated only 0.0001% of actual cases. What do we need to know about that? Well, like Sharon was saying,

the thing that's difficult here is that live streamed abuse is harder to detect than other forms of online child sexual abuse materials. So if you have an existing image or video, the police will be looking for that, they will give it like a hash code and then they will be looking and taking that that content down. Whereas

live streamed abuse is happening in real time. So, you know, it's a video call essentially. And those video calls are not being monitored because of various privacy laws, which means it's very difficult for police to actually become aware of where that abuse is happening. And so then the times that it is discovered

is when things like financial trails are followed and you realize that this is the rest suspicious financial transactions happening between, say, the UK and the Philippines, and those get flagged or when law enforcement find that somebody has been downloading illegal content like videos and images and they see like a trail of, you know, chat messages or whatever that are related to live streaming. But it has not been, they have not been downloaded.

Obviously, this is more looking at how long somebody was on a call, so to speak. Sharon, I mean, you mentioned privacy concerns there, but there must be arguments that people put forward about why they do not want to use this device that could block it. Well, we're just beginning this conversation. I think Lord Nash's amendment is going to be very interesting and this hasn't had the public, the awareness isn't there yet. So I think what we want to do is to be able to reassure the public that it doesn't compromise privacy in any way because that's not a legitimate concern.

Why wouldn't we do this? Child sexual exploitation material is illegal anyway. So I'm struggling to understand what the barrier to moving ahead with this is anyway. When the UK's Online Safety Act under that, the tech companies are required to proactively detect and block child sexual abuse material. I mean, does that help in these instances? Absolutely, it does. And because this is the evolution of technology, this is a new way of looking at this.

So platforms and services have over the last few years been the brunt. And of course we should keep on with that. But this is now, you know, a new way, a new solution. And rather than, you know, the definition of madness continuing on with the same. And when you go and speak to people, Sharon, what do they say? That people won't want that on their phone or? No, absolutely not. They love it.

They want it. Jess Phillips says, why wouldn't we? And so you feel you are getting buy-in? Yes, ever the optimist. Yeah, yeah, because I think that you are coming with a message of how this can be resolved. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, right now what we're saying is that millions of children around the world are at risk of harm. They're already experiencing harm.

Children in the UK are also at risk, because this kind of technology would help to stop things like child's extortion as well and other forms of grooming in the UK and sort of harm groups that are being created. So this would just be technology that helps, keep all children everywhere safer. It's safety by design. It's basically requiring that when you create a device, you think about the ways that your device could also be misused.

And when you think about that, you create tools that can help stop that device from being misused. And this is actually just technology is, to be honest, I think common sense. It just protects everyone. It protects children. It keeps everybody safer. I think, though, as I was listening to you on other interviews as well as reading about you, Molly, I did think this is such a difficult job you've taken on personally. Yeah, do you know what?

It just makes me so angry. I can't believe that this many children are being abused in this way and no one's doing anything about it. The injustice of that is horrific. And when I've met, I've met people like Joy. She's amazing. She's a really amazing young woman. She's now a social worker because she wants to help other children

to recover from the kinds of abuse that she's been through. When I talk about this sort of stuff with you, I'm thinking about joy and I'm thinking about others who I've met and I'm thinking, what would they say in this situation? And they would want me to say, please do something to stop this. If there's something that can be done, please do it. Molly Hudson there from International Justice Mission

and Sharon Percy, the co-founder of SafeTenet, both speaking to Noola. And in response, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has said that protecting young people online is at the heart of their new violence against women and girls' strategy. And if you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this discussion, you can go to the BBC Actionline website where you'll find links to support.

Now, if you're a fan of The Traitors, you'll be familiar with our next guest. She's former barrister turned best-selling author Harriet Tice, and her new novel is Witch Trial. Many of you will have seen Harriet putting her advocacy skills into practice on this year's series as one of the faithful on the hit BBC TV show, while Nula started by asking her about stress versus fun in the Traitor's Castle. I think it starts as fun and then it becomes increasingly stressful. It's, I mean, it's a very intense game. I've spoken about this on other interviews, but they create an incredibly immersive,

believable psychological environment that when you are in the castle, you really are in the castle. You are as a faithful, completely unsure of the reliability of anyone to whom you're speaking. And so paranoia starts to build. And, you know, even though they take huge care

of you as a production and they make sure that you have enough time to sleep. Of course, sleep becomes harder and harder to achieve because, you know, I was going back to my individual lodging and, you know, writing down everything that I had seen and heard during the day and trying to work out my theories and, you know, with your mind racing, it's hard to get to sleep. And then, you know, one wakes up incredibly early. So it was intense. But, you know, It was being alive. So from that perspective, it was definitely fun. And I think that, you know, fun is not always fun, if that makes sense.

Fun is not always enjoyable. But to have been able to play a game where it was possible fully to have suspended disbelief is something that would never, I think, have been able to happen in any other environment. Because, you know, you can do these murder mystery weekends or whatever. But you'll always know it's actors. you'll always know that you're going to go back and it's not real. This felt real. And I think that that's the real strength of the show

and it's the real strength of the drama. That, you know, especially for those of us participants, you have active imaginations, that, you know, everything is there to make it look like, you know, you have to hunt down murderers. And that's it. That's your job. You were very successful in lots of ways.

And I love this idea of you firing an old silver. and being sleep deprived, which people might think then you're a traitor if you've been up late. But you saw through Rachel, who was a traitor, along with Stephen,

but why do you think, because you know, you've got these silky skills as a barrister, why do you think you couldn't persuade the others to see what you were seeing? I think Rachel was too good for me.

She was exceptional in her, she was exceptional in her people skills and her strategising and her ability to deflect questioning in a way that I simply wasn't, you know, that everyone thought they were getting a criminal barrister, which of course I was for, you know, about 10 years back in my 20s. I'm now in my 50s and I'm a crime writer. You know, I sit in bed in my pyjamas making up stories. So I think that the ability to take lots of different clues and lots of

different sort of feelings and vibes and spin them into a narrative that was convincing for me. That was the crime writer aspect, but it was a messy first draft when I got to the round table. It was a messy first draft and no one is convinced by a messy first draft. Everyone needs it to have been edited and shored up. And I believe that possibly if I had not had the honour of meeting the Traitors in the Smoke and Mirrors Challenge where I went into the confessional, it might have been possible to keep my head down for a few more days and to build up more evidence, but as it was, I didn't have the evidence. And so I thought I might as well just go in hard on the drama. And also, you know, I wasn't acting. That was real. You know, I had, the confessional

had taken everything I had. And actually the strain of having realized the person that, you know, one of the people I was closest to was actually not fully telling the truth, you know, that she was hiding, that she was a traitor. And then I was trying to hide myself. I had kept my intellect down, I had kept my achievements down. I had, you know, I'd hidden under the, flown under the radar as a middle-aged woman, you know, with that sort of veil of invisibility. And I had really sort of kept myself down. And that was actually quite, my ego did not like that, you know, it was quite stressful.

And I was being underestimated. Okay, I had created an environment in which I was being underestimated, but I didn't like it, you know? And it, and that's why it sort of, it came together as it did. You know, is all I can say. I can also say with my later guest, I know a proclivity to downplay your intelligence can be a sign of intelligence, which I have learned so maybe that's you.

You need to know when to switch it on and you need to know, dial it up and dial it down because no one likes people being, you know, too much of a show off. Well, let's get into some of the things we can show off about you, Harriet. And one of them is your new book, which is witch trial. It's your fifth novel.

Centres around two girls who are on trial for the murder of their friend. It is creepy. I've been reading it, but not too late at night. And there is a satisfying surprise at the end, which we're not going to go into. No spoilers this morning. But it is set in a Scottish court.

Scotland has a long history of actual witch trials in the 1600s as well. So tell me a little bit about the setting. And you must be very fond of the Gothic. I was thinking between this and trade. I am. Yep, I am. I'm very fond of the Gothic. I've always been scared of it. So I face my fears in terms of the research I had to do for the novel, which is fraught with tarot cards, Ouija boards and the occult. It's set in Edinburgh, which is my hometown, my place of birth where I grew up,

despite the lack of accent. And it is, I mean, in many ways this book, which trial is a love song to Edinburgh. It was originally, I have to say, going to be set in London in the old Bailey, because that's my experience, to barrister, and I'm lazy, and I didn't want to have to do research. But my father pointed out, my father's a retired Scottish judge, and he pointed out that there are no opening speeches in Scottish trials, which of course is catnip to a novelist who doesn't want to have to surprise with each evidence given by witnesses. So I was able to tell the story essentially introducing it witness by witness. And Edinburgh was an obvious choice too,

simply because, as you say, of the history of witchcraft and persecution of women in the 1600s and beyond. I mean, I think that my brief research showed that there had been an execution of about 300 people, at least, on the Esplanade in Edinburgh, up at the castle. King James the 6 and the 1st was obsessed with witchcraft and he had made it his personal

mission to persecute I mean men were also of course prosecuted but it was primarily women and you know one can see that there was a lot of misogyny at play there but to bring it back to Edinburgh it's a place itself the home of Jekyll and Hyde

the fact that it has got this world heritage site of grade one listed beautiful tourist centre architecture. But yes, in the 80s, it was the AIDS capital of Europe that, you know, still now drug deaths in Scotland override the rest of the UK.

You know, it's a wighted sepica in some respects. It's this beautiful, beautiful place. Yet, you know, you lift the stone and there's this seamy underbelly. And that was something that I felt very strongly about trying to explore within the novel. Matthew is our protagonist, the male narration.

I believe this is that the first time you've written a male protagonist. How did it feel to get under his skin? It was hard, you know. I try and write from a perspective that I can fully understand and that it's something that I can completely inhabit. And so, you know, I'm not a 50-something man, though, you know, I know many of them and are married to one. But I wanted to avoid too much going down the lines of falling in.

into cliche about the way that he might be thinking about certain subjects. I think the fact that he was a juror on the trial meant that he was mostly considering factual evidence. He was considering abstract theories, you know, that it wasn't just him thinking about something in a way that, you know, how a man thinks mannally, you know, it was better, I think. I don't think I could do something that was more stream of consciousness man. But I did feel, given that this was a story of two teenage girls who believed that they were witches, that if it was fully from their perspective, I would limit my audience,

that I would find that men didn't want to read it, that perhaps older women didn't want to read it. I wanted to try and keep this as broad as possible. So it seemed like the right approach to take. Harriet Tice, speaking to Nula there, and Harriet's book, Witch Trial is out now. Next, breasts, skin, stomach, thighs. The model author and activist Charlie Howard says she's always been treated like a sex object. From her school days to fronting global modelling campaigns, her body has attracted lots of attention. Now in her new book of essays called Flesh, Charlie says she wants to reclaim her body for herself, one body part at a time.

Charlie joined me in the Woman's Hour studio to talk Flesh. I had always kind of been very disassociated for my body. I never really understood why. And a couple of years ago now, I was diagnosed with complex PTSD. And to cut a very long story short, one of the reasons for that, according to the psychiatrist, was because of this ongoing misogyny from men and a lot of the relationships I'd had with men.

And I remember feeling so embarrassed about it because I come from a very military family and PTSD is obviously something we assume you know, people who have seen war, rightfully, you know, have experienced. But for me, he was saying that if you have this buildup of ongoing day-to-day traumas or things that you don't even think about, you know, eventually they all add up and they all kind of burst in your brain. And how did that manifest in you?

Well, I mean, you know, as a teenager, I had eating disorders, which I documented quite a lot, you know, throughout my work. And I got very into body activism and, you know, encouraged. women to really love the skin that they're in. But I think, again, even though that was great, and obviously I still firmly stand behind that, I think I was still very much focused on my body and always talking about my body and having people always asking me questions about my body. And, you know, I appreciate that I talk about that as a job. But I think that women as a whole are kind of expected to talk about their bodies, defend their bodies, speak about their bodies all the

time. You can't just live, whereas we don't expect that from men. So really, it was about coming back to myself and really starting to live a life that's joyful and whole. You've structured your book in body parts. So each chapter is a different body part. So it starts with vagina. Then you've got skin. You've got thighs, for example. And they all get a chapter or an essay.

And so there's lots I want to talk about. We'll start with the beginning. Let's start with vagina. It's woman's hour. It's woman's hour. And there's one bit that really struck me when you talk about how for us, our genitalia is in us and we are judged it's part of us. Yes. Whereas for a man, a penis is a separate thing.

It's very separate. We view the man as a separate being, you know, or actually we say, you know, oh, well, he can't control himself because he has these sexual urges or, you know, the way, like men, men will be men, boys will be boys, which is obviously a really toxic way of looking at things. Whereas for women, it's, you know, our whole identity is shaped around our vaginas and the fact that we're girls and the fact that we're born. I mean, in certain countries, even in this country, you know, some girls will be born and then automatically their lives take a completely different turn because they're not raised the same, they're not treated the same. Yeah, your life is kind of dictated to you for simply being born the sex, the gender

that you are. You dedicate the book to all women and girls who've ever felt reduced to their body parts and who know they are worthy of more. How much of your worth has been tied up to your body and how it's perceived by others? Oh my God, so much. I mean, someone said to me, oh, you know, do you think that you've experienced more misogyny because you got into modelling. And I think that whilst the modelling industry absolutely has a lot of weird people in it who kind of use it for their own advantage and to kind of get close to women and girls and there are so many stories involving that. I think, you know, even before that from a child, maybe even before, maybe even as a toddler really, I've been sexualised. And I think most women have and we're just not aware

of it in that kind of way. I think we we tend to think, you know, paedophilia, for example, I know it's a bit of a dark subject to bring it this morning. But I think that we tend to think of just a very rare few men who do that. But actually we're kind of seeing a lot of beauty standards moulded by these paedophilic ideals, I suppose. This obsession with youth, with body hair, with wanting to stay very small and palatable as well. And I think that we expect women, especially with thinness, to, I don't know, to just be easily digestible for the male gaze, essentially. And you, I mean, because you talked about this quite openly, because you did go into modelling. it's a very specific type of industry

where women's bodies are the subject and you know, make clothes look however that people want them to look. And then your experience of being in that industry it really did impact you because you were told that you were too large. Too big, yes, yes. And yes, tell us more.

I mean, look, my jaw has dropped. Yeah. At the time, I mean, I was a size eight, I think. I think I'd gone up to a size eight after being like a size six and working in Paris. And yeah, it was, you know, it was really difficult. And I kind of lost my mind at that.

And I decided to write a Facebook post. And so I wrote this post. And it really, I think, kickstarted a conversation about body parts. But like I said, you know, what I wrote about in the book is that I absolutely chase this dream of modeling and wanting to be a model in the hopes that I would be loved, that I would be seen, that I would be desired. And so without even knowing, really, so much of my desires for life, really, and what I thought happiness to be was driven by how I thought other people would perceive me. Other people or men in particular? Or men, I would say men in particular.

Yeah. And I think that, again, you know, now we talk a lot about body activism and we talk a lot about body positivity and things like that. But we're still very heavily set on the way women look, whereas we never expect a man to post naked on Instagram and go, I love my body. I feel so empowered. You know, it really isn't the same.

same kind of pressures that men experience. So I think the conversation needs to change now from, you know, constantly associating empowerment with the way that we look and with beauty and with sexual empowerment and what I kind of call pseudo empowerment, because I think so much empowerment is linked to how sexualized you are and how sexy you appear on the outside. And who is deemed sexy? Yeah, exactly. You explained that in your book, the sort of intersection of various cultures and your background. Well, that's what I mean because also, you know, beauty is a measurable. You know, sexiness is a measurable.

There are people that think someone like Angelina Jolie isn't attractive. You know, some of the most gorgeous, stunning women. There was, you know, some people will never find certain women attractive and that's fine. But I do think nowadays beauty is being, it's heavily tied to how sexual you can be and how sexual you can present yourself, really. And what do people have to say when you put images of yourself out there, loving yourself? I mean, look, on the whole, women are very supportive. There are a lot of people who say, God, why would you let yourself go like this?

You know, as if, you know, being a certain standard, obviously, is one particular way. I did unfortunately have a very weird message on Monday from a guy that I was dating. Bearing in mind I'm a size 10, by the way, guys. And I had a message off a guy that I've been seen since December, not anymore, may I add, who said that he couldn't go out with me because I was the biggest woman he'd ever been out with. And he wasn't used to someone of my body type, which is actually. nuts. I mean, I'm laughing because it's like, it's so strange. Strange, yes. But, yeah, but it's nuts. It's also very weird that a man would be that obsessed with my size. Because he was

saying, you know, oh, a size 12 is a woman who, who is completely let herself go. And I thought, okay, well, how did it affect you? Well, I'm not going to lie. I mean, you know, when, to receive a text like that, because it's in writing as well, this is what's so nuts. To receive a text like that, you know, you kind of can't help but go back to the feelings that you've had. about yourself before but you've got to just centre yourself try and block out the noise horse blinkers on and just remember that you are worth so more than just your body you have said so much in the book and we could talk about various topics all day but was it cathartic absolutely yeah absolutely i think i really got to the to the point of my own journey of understanding

why i i focused so heavily on what men thought about me why i chased male affection perhaps so much and I feel like that's a chapter done now almost. You know, I've written the book, that's a part of my life done. And I just hope that other women read it and they might see themselves or feel supported. Charlie Howard there and her book, Flesh, is out now. And you can still find all 20 episodes of Charlie's pioneering pre-pandemic podcast, Fashion Fix on Ethical and Sustainable Fashion on BBC Sounds. And as always, if you've been affected by any of the issues we've discussed,

then please do go to the BBC. Actionline website where you'll find advice and support. And if you're concerned about a medical issue, please contact your GP. That's it from me, but don't forget to join Nula for Monday's program. Folks singer Catherine Priddy performs live in the studio from her new album, These Frightening Machines. Enjoy the rest of your weekend and happy International Women's Day for tomorrow. However you're celebrating the women in your life and the achievements of women across the world. That's all for today's woman's hour. Join us again next time. Hello, wicked vundekins and degenerate do-gooders.

It's Russell Kane here, host of Evil Genius, the show that takes famous faces from history and knocks them off their high horse by revealing three unfortunate facts about their life. We shine a UV torch on the hidden evidence, then present our findings to a jury of three comedians who will decide, evil or genius. Join us as we rifle through the drawers of history,

then make a mess on the carpet. Listen to Evil Genius first. on BBC Sounds. This is not the future we were promised. Like, how about that for a tagline for the show? From the BBC, this is the interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews.

It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.