Woman's Hour - Weekend Woman's Hour: Tracey Emin; Susan Rogers, Prince's sound engineer; Panic attacks

Episode Date: May 8, 2021

Tracey Emin was one of the leading figures of the Young British Artists movement of the 1990s. She has recently undergone radical surgery to treat bladder cancer. For her latest exhibition - The Loneliness of the Soul – she has selected masterpieces by Edvard Munch to show alongside her most recent paintings. Mental health blogger and author of ‘F**K I Think I'm Dying: How I learned to live with panic’, Claire Eastham explains how she manages her panic attacks. She is joined by psychotherapist Dawn Estefan to discuss why we have panic attacks, how they feel and how best to cope with them.Whether you’re an experienced cyclist or if you're completely new to cycling, there's no doubt it's intimidating on the roads. Cycling expert, Aneela McKenna shares tips for how women can feel more confident while riding their bikes on the road.Rosie Ayliffe’s daughter, Mia Ayliffe Chung was killed in 2016 at a remote farmworkers’ hostel while backpacking in Australia. Since Mia's death Rosie has been campaigning to improve conditions for young casual workers, helping to change the law in three of the six states of Australia. What's behind the decline in male fertility? The global population currently stands at 7.9 billion, and is projected to peak at 9.7 billion in just over 40 years' time. Those huge numbers are often blamed on women having too many children. In reality, fertility has been in long-term decline for decades. Dr Shanna Swan, Professor of Environmental Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York thinks we should be paying much more attention to the chemicals in our environment that come from everyday products as her research is showing consistent effects on sperm counts, sperm quality and overall male fertility.Susan Rogers talks about what it was like working with Prince as his sound engineer on albums including ‘Purple Rain, ‘Around the World in a Day and ‘Sign o’ the Times’. After two decades in the music industry she left and went on to earn a doctorate in psychology. She’s now a professor of music at Berkeley College in Boston, and is being awarded the Music Producers Guild’s ‘Outstanding Contribution to Music’– the first woman to ever win the award.Whether you’re an experienced cyclist or if you're completely new to cycling, there's no doubt it's intimidating on the roads. Cycling expert Aneela McKenna shares tips for how women can feel more confident when riding their bikes.Presenter: Anita Rani Producer: Paula McFarlane Editor: Sarah Crawley

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to Weekend Woman's Hour. And what a selection of the standout moments from the week just gone we've got lined up for you. On the programme today, Rosie Acliffe talks about her daughter Mia, who was killed while backpacking in Australia. Dr Shanna Swan explores the chemicals in our environment that come from everyday products and the effects on male fertility. I don't think we can go on and just accept this as business as usual. It's too risky. There are many, many species on the planet that have been endangered or wiped out,

and we don't want the same fate to happen to us. We hear from Susan Rogers, who was Prince's sound engineer in the 80s, and who also worked with David Byrne, the Barenaked Ladies and Jeff Black. And cycling expert Anila McKenna shares tips on how women can feel more confident when riding a bike, padded lycra maybe. Now, Tracey Emin was one of the leading figures of the young British artist movements of the 1990s. Hers is a uniquely provocative confessional style which confronts issues such as trauma of abortion, rape, alcoholism and sexual history. Her famous artworks include

Everyone I've Ever Slept With from 1963 to 1995 and she came to greater prominence in 1999 with a Turner Prize nomination for her famous piece, My Bed. She's recently undergone radical surgery to treat bladder cancer. For her latest exhibition, The Loneliness of the Soul, she's selected masterpieces by Edvard Munch to show alongside her most recent paintings. Tracy explained what initially drew her to his work. Well I've been a massive Munch fan aficionado since I was about 17 and up until then I was aware of artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and then when I came across Expressionism first of all Egon Schiele through David Bowie, his album covers Lodger and Heroes. And then going through the only bookshop in Margate,

Albion Books, I came across one book on expressionism. And there was one picture of Edvard Munch's work in it. And I just saw it. And I just thought, wow, this is me. Same as Deacon Sheila. I suddenly found these friends. And not knowing whether they were male or female or anything I related to those images this sort of kind of angst and emotional way of making art and so since then Munchers but I did my thesis on Muncher art school I I've just been totally in love with a man basically my thesis was called my man monk and I even remember the opening sentence which was was he was not a wild woolly Norwegian running over fields that's how it started and I always saw monk as being someone who was incredibly compassionate and also very

feminine in his in his way of of making art because he was dealing with emotions that at that time a lot of well even now men don't deal with so I identified with him as a human being which was really important as an artist so young to latch on to something that I understood and I felt that I had I needed to express and this was someone who was saying to me with their work that it's okay it's it's good to be free emotionally free within your work and you touched on there his relationship with the female sex and his representation of women yeah well people sort of had this mad idea that he was like this sort of graph you know crazy norwegian and but he wasn't when you look at all his work sort of analytically and you realize that he was

you know there was freud and this and that and or psychoanalysis was coming to the you know forefront then but Monk was much more Jungian and he was like looking at like this sort of in the inner soul and like time immemorial feelings jealousy fear hunger desperation anger loneliness and that's what he dealt with, things and emotions that everybody understands. It's about primal existence. And I'd say that Monk 30 years ago was wholly, wholly unfashionable. Almost like a joke with the scream, you know, and the work being stolen. It was all the cartoons and everything. Whereas now I think, especially during the pandemic, people really need emotion.

They really need true feelings and they need it clearly identified so they don't feel ashamed within their own emotions and that things are easy to express. And Munch does that. Munch does that better than anybody. When you're picking and going through his archive, what were you thinking to try and bring from yours?

Well, I was curating the show with the curator in Oslo and also with Harry, who works with me, Harry Weller. And we did about five trips to Oslo and we went through all of... Like, one day we went through 800 of Munch's paintings. And the Munch Museum is like going it's like it's like going into the Bank of England it's like going down into these deep bank vaults and these kind of like you know submarine doors that you open and then they open out and the air is at a certain

temperature and you'll you'll kind of got this aprons on and everything and there's all these hundreds of racks and you pull these racks out and all these monks come, you know, like five or six monks at a time come out on these racks. And at the beginning we were going, oh, oh, oh, like this kind of orgasm over these paintings. And then after, you know, two days of this, we go, no, no, that isn't very good. God, he must have been so influenced by Matisse at that point. What was he doing yeah and we hadn't become blasé but we'd become so entwined with with monk and and yeah i suppose a little bit blasé with the work but it was phenomenal it was fantastic and

so what i did first of all almost like went with an animal show because monk was a fantastic painter of animals you know and because I love my cat so much it seemed like Monk's dogs my cat you know perfect show but then I realized that my issue at the time was loneliness and that's what I wanted to make a show about and Monk depicted this emotion so well within himself and his self-portraits and also about the isolation, like a kind of existential position of being inside looking out and understanding that there's isolation completely surrounding you. So if you take something like the scream, everybody thinks the scream is screaming, but it's not. The is holding covering its ears and it's the landscape

that's screaming and that's how monk works it's like an inside outside so what you see in the picture which looks first of all very obvious usually you have to flip it around and and then you went and looked to find some of those expressions of loneliness within your own work it well actually it was quite easy with my work. It didn't take me long. And what was interesting, we spent three years working on this show and curating it and putting it together. And, of course, most of that time I had cancer without realising.

And so when you go to the show and you see the images that I chose for my work, they're quite bloody, you know, and they're quite painful. And there's a lot of womb-like images and a lot of blood and a lot of, I'd say, bloody emotion, heartfelt, bloody emotion. But, of course, at the time, I had no idea I had cancer. It's just coincided with it all. You have brought up your cancer. You are cancer-free at the moment.

Yeah, at the moment. Every time I say it, I think, hmm, I cancer you are cancer free at the moment. Yeah at the moment every time I say I think oh I should have waited a year to say that but you know I had such nice wishes from people that I think it all helps. Yes. All positive energy. But it was very aggressive wasn't it? Aggressive bladder cancer. Yeah. I'm laughing because it was pretty shocking yeah it was unbelievable it all happened within three weeks the whole finding out that diagnosis the prognosis and the surgery it was pretty phenomenal and that surgery was also aggressive wasn't it yeah what did it entail i had my bladder removed i had my uterus removed my fallopian tubes my ures, part of my intestine, my lymph nodes and half my vagina. And it was quite funny because when the surgeon was telling me

what I was going to have to have removed and then he sort of said my urethra, I said, you're joking, aren't you? I said, please tell me there's nothing else. Anything else? Anything else, yeah. And he goes, actually, there is, your vagina. And I went, and that was it. I just was like, I was laughing, actually. But I think I was just putting on a brave face at the time. What else are you going to say? They listed it almost like a menu.

Actually, there was another part of my anatomy, which luckily they saved. So I don't know if I can say it on the radio, but clitoris. Yes, you can. You're on Woman's Hour. I'm very relieved to hear that. I'm sure you were. No, last time I think I said something like that on Woman's Hour,

I got banned for about four years. Well, no, welcome. Welcome. I don't think you were. I'm happy to have you. So no, that's very good news because I did read that you'd quite like your vagina back. Are you able to talk about that and get to that point?

I think a lot of people would be really interested because it's kind of interesting. I think anyone that's had this sort of dramatic surgery understands what I'm talking about. But actually, there's not that many people. And I think it's much it's probably the same as maybe someone who's had a sex change about what you would have to do to get it back. But at the moment, I'm just really happy getting my life back and I'm not being greedy and I'm just really... Like, I go from, you know, I go from deliriously happy to, like, you know, kind of,

oh, dear, now I've got to get on with it. I think it's a bit like having a baby. You have a baby and, you know, you're pregnant and it's really a bit like having a baby. You have a baby and you're pregnant and it's really difficult, the pregnancy. And then you have the baby and you think, oh, now it's the rest of my life. And so now with this surgery and with everything, I sort of was so happy to be alive.

And now I've got to get on with the consequences of it all and things. And I suppose just coming back to what we were talking about with your art and what you're trying to share with people, you know, you're living a life changed now through your surgery and a life in pain, I imagine, at times, or certainly with discomfort and additional issues. then also because I had to catheterize and that was horrific I'd catheterize about six seven times a day and if anybody knows what that entails they know what I'm talking about so in a way pain is pain we all bleed you know and we all suffer and it's finding a way to deal with our suffering that's important not actually the suffering it's finding a way to deal with the pain. And we all have different levels of pain within our life. Some people live through phenomenal things that you could never believe that they could survive. And you do, you do survive.

And my analogy to this is like, it's like I've fallen out of an airplane. I landed and I was picked up and I was put back together again. So I have this sort of survivor instinct of how lucky I am but also having to now pay much more attention to the world that I'm living in and not take it for granted and make the most of every moment really and be and be patient and be more um yeah I'm sounds weird but I've never been so happy. Really? Yeah. So some people would be very unhappy in my situation now,

but I realise how amazing my life is, and I never realised before. What an uplifting and remarkable interview, Tracey Emin speaking with Emma there, and Gee emailed in to say Tracey Emin spoke with such strength about her response to life-changing surgery for cancer. She totally got that life-changing surgery was also life-giving and that a changed body was not something to hide away or feel ashamed of. I've also had surgery for cancer and I'm positive most of the time but as Tracy understands life-changing means for the rest of your life. You don't really get back the bits that have been removed. For me, some decades on,

I do have days when I wilt a bit and it all feels a bit too hard. Today was one of them, and listening to Tracy was the best therapy there could have been to get me back out there, living the life I won back. I went swimming in the public baths, changed body image and proud. And if you'd like to get in touch with us about anything you hear on the show during the week or today, then please drop us an email by going to our website or you can text us 84844 or go to our social media. It's at BBC Woman's Hour. Mental health blogger and author of We're All Mad Here, Claire Easton, has now written a new book, F Word, I Think I'm Dying, How I Learned to Live with Panic. Claire has suffered from panic attacks for nearly a decade.

She says panic is something I live with like IBS or eczema. She joined me alongside psychotherapist Dawn Estefan to discuss panic attacks, why we have them, how they feel and how best to cope with them. I started by asking Claire what a panic attack is. A panic attack is literally fear incarnate. It's like having liquid terror injected into your veins um i always liken it to do you know that moment when you almost fall down

the stairs and you get that overwhelming fear of the shock yeah your legs your legs turn to jelly a little bit yeah you get that cold sweat your heart's pounding and you can't quite catch your breath and it's really really scary for a a moment. But then you think, oh, I'm OK and we carry on. Well, a panic attack is that sensation, but it builds and builds and it doesn't stop. And it continues to the extent that it is overwhelming and the symptoms can feel quite violent at times. Describe your first major panic attack. Where were you? What happened? How did it feel? Well, I'd been living with undiagnosed social anxiety for about

10 years when I had my first panic attack and I went into a meeting room to interview for a promotion and I knew something was wrong it was this sensation that something wasn't quite right but I sat down and thought it's okay you know we can pull this together and then I felt this kind of warm not unpleasant sensation oozing around my body which I now know was adrenaline and the moment that it hit my heart it absolutely exploded and it was pounding against my rib cage I was sweating my eyesight went blurry my limbs were numb my mouth was dry and oh and I couldn't yeah couldn't a breath. And it was this absolute spiral of, I think I'm going to die. I think I'm going crazy.

I think I'm having a stroke. And in that moment, it didn't matter that I'd spent weeks preparing for this interview. I didn't care about making a fool of myself anymore. I stood up, left the room, left the office and ran all the way down the street. That was it. Panicked out of there. And since then, you've spent a lot of time trying to understand what happened to you, what was going on in your body, what made you get there to that point.

I've written this brilliant book about it and your tone of voice is fantastic, by the way. I mean, it is you. Now that I've met you and I'm hearing you speak, that is the voice that comes through and you're very matter of fact, very funny even, the way you talk about it. What is the science? What's going on in our minds? As somebody, full disclosure, who has suffered three in the last few years, I am very attentive.

I'm all ears. I've done no work on trying to understand them. So you're going to explain now. What's the science? Well, knowledge is power to me. You know, it really is a way of building confidence. Once you understand something, it grounds you. I really believe that. And a panic attack, in a sense, is a miscommunication between kind of reality and the rational brain and the amygdala in the brain, which is responsible for the fight or flight response. Now, this is completely natural. I always say to people, the fight or flight response keeps us alive you know it's evolutionary it's why we can identify and respond so quickly to danger

to use the stairs analogy again you know if you do nearly fall on the stairs you just and suddenly you grab the banister and you've not even thought about it. You just do it. And these symptoms happen. You think, oh, gosh, that was that was a close call. But if that happens in the supermarket or a meeting room, suddenly the rational brain can't quite equate what's happened. You know, it's been triggered in error almost. So there's almost this battle between the two parts of the brain. We're desperately trying to understand what's happening and because you can't see an external threat you might think it's internal and that's why thoughts of i'm having a stroke i'm having a heart attack occur which then

goes straight back to the amygdala who then re-triggers another panic attack because it thinks you're in danger again and it's this kind of storm of activity and confusion. I want to bring Dawn in here, because Dawn, Claire has obviously made herself an expert on it, written a brilliant book about it. Is that what we should all be doing if we've suffered them? We should gen up and make ourselves experts. What advice can you give?

I think what Claire's been doing, it really is at the heart of how to deal with panic attacks. You know, there's a saying, there's nothing to fear but fear itself. I think one of the things that in any condition, mental health condition, that you maybe experience is to self-empower, empowerment. Feel that you can do something, feel that you can get on top of the problem. You know, when you look at the word attack in a panic attack, an attack implies a fast, dramatic and intense response.

So bearing that in mind, we have to arm ourselves. And you arm yourself with educating yourself about the condition and reaching out for help. Claire, you talk about triggers. Explain how they work and how you deal with them. So a trigger is, you know, an emotional response to a moment where you felt threatened. And for me, it was meeting rooms because I had my first ever attack in a meeting room it started off when I returned to work after I had a leave of absence that anything any meeting room would trigger an attack because my amygdala now associated that with danger. So Dawn if like Claire you are if it's a meeting room or you know the

office space or whatever that trigger might be should, if it's a meeting room or, you know, the office space or whatever that trigger might be, should you, if it's a place of work, should you talk to your boss? Should you speak to your employer? What should you do? I just wanted to add before I answer that question that actually not all panic attacks have triggers. And I think that's what makes them so tricky. Some of them, they come on suddenly without warning and others are triggered by certain situations. So that's also worth noting as well. In terms of letting your employer know, I think that's a very individual decision to make. As a psychotherapist who really advocates for destigmatising mental health, I'd say yes, make sure that everyone knows and actually help to educate those around you about the condition.

However, there are some organisations out there that are still not on point in terms of working with mental health or understanding the needs of people who work for them and with mental health. And there are other organisations that have it embedded in the organisation's culture. What I would say is most important is if you cannot discuss that at work, is to make sure that you have support around you or an environment around you where you can discuss what you're going through because it's really important to have support with issues such as these. And if someone came to you with a panic attack what's the first bit of advice you'd give them? Well if someone came to me talking about experiencing panic attacks we'd start to look at ways that they could they could get some help so we could talk about psychotherapy such as what I do we could have an immersive kind of exploration around what the relationship between fear and past history narratives are.

We could look at things like cognitive behavioral therapy, which apparently has like a 20% lapse rate. But we can also look at things like speaking to our GPs about medication, or looking at more holistic things like meditation meditation or grounding exercises, things that we can practice for ourselves at home. Most important thing is to get help. And so many of you got in touch to talk about your own experiences of panic attacks, like Susie, who emailed in to say, I had panic attacks in my late teens and twenties. They blighted my A-levels, although I was able to study later. I noticed there was continuity in the places and situations they occurred and decided that I was triggering an adrenaline rush by simply thinking

about the panic attack. I decided that I should distract my mind by taking part in activities I really enjoyed, dance classes to start with. I did a lot of sports and later was recovered enough to do some really adventurous traveling, even in war zones. I still don't like heights, but apart I even stopped a fight by stepping between two men without any fear or wobbling afterwards. That was in my 60s. B emailed in to say, And we got lots of texts. terrified of flying, but managing deep breathing cured me. It's impossible to breathe deeply and have a panic attack. And we got lots of texts. Thank you for that talk on panic attacks. It made me very emotional. I've suffered for 10 years and tried to hide it. My first was in a car driving on

the motorway. That is now my trigger and it's very debilitating. They've gone away before, but I've come back since lockdown. Thank you for talking about it openly. I'd like to share that talk with my family to help them understand. And that for talking about it openly. I'd like to share that talk with my family to help them understand. And that's from Sarah in Scotland. And then a panic is a psychological event connected to stress, but I now know to walk around

and steady my breathing until they pass. I usually call someone and they just wait with me until it passes. Someone else messaged to say, had to, both when living in London and both on public transport in London. Extremely frightening. Tunnel vision, windpipe felt like it closed up and I couldn't breathe. Heart felt like it would burst. In one case, I collapsed on a stop train in a tunnel on the Circle Line. In both

cases, I was travelling alone. None of the strangers around me tried to help and I ended up on a station platform fighting for breath. Since leaving London and the hectic lifestyle seven years ago, I've had no panic attacks. People are in the main kind and good, but I could not shake the fact, in retrospect, that people didn't try to help. Now, on Monday, we devoted the whole programme to talking about breaking barriers to cycling for women.

Whether you're an experienced cyclist or if you're completely new to cycling, there's no doubt it's intimidating on the roads. So whatever kind of cycling you prefer, it's definitely worth sharpening up on your road sense. I'm a pootler. I have a basket on the front and I just potter around. That's the kind of cyclist I am, in case you're interested. Well, presenter Melanie Abba asked cycling experts Anila McKenna for some tips. Anila started by explaining how women can feel more confident.

It can be really intimidating for women. And, you know, if you've not been on a bike before, we know a lot of women go into a bike in their later stages of life. So it can be intimidating. Later or earlier stages. Yeah, and you have more responsibilities in life. You have children. So you're thinking more about the risk and you have more responsibilities in life you have children so you're you're thinking more about the risk element that you would if you were a child

or a kid so you know these things can be difficult so it's about being able to be confident in doing that the best pieces of advice i would give is get yourself in a club and actually learn some of the skills and how to ride on a road confidently. Here's a good one that I think lots of women do wonder about. Pants or no pants when riding a bike? This listener says, this has often baffled me. Seems the general consensus is no pants, but then I'm not sure what female cyclists do when it's their period. I love this question.

I'm all for no pants and I've experienced this myself because when I didn't know much about cycling, I used to wear pants. And what was the end result of that? Pulled hairs and abscesses. So I recommend, yes, it was very painful. So can I recommend that you wear a chamois? And what's the chamois the chamois is like a padded short and it keeps you comfortable and on a bike on your saddle so yeah I would definitely wear a padded short and don't wear your pants underneath that and if you do get some chaffing use something like a chamois cream but no help you with that but no pants when you are on your period? Can it be tricky? Well, I'm not sure. For me, I'm just going to be, just say what I do.

I will put my sanitary towel actually in my padded short. Now, back to a bit more of a practical one. This listener says that she's loved to learn to cycle. She's never, ever done it. What's the best bike to start with? My advice would be is get something like a hybrid bike something that does have straight handlebars that you can feel comfortable on and go to your local bike shop and just ask them to actually get you set up on it look at what the the options are for you and get something that is an introductory bike don't go straight into a full suspension tracy mosley type bike because if you're going to do that then it's going to be too

much bike for what you want to cycle you can listen to the full program on breaking barriers to cycling for women on bbc sounds and the emails came in jane said i've been cycling to work for about five years now and every time i, I get close passed by drivers. It's so scary, but I'm determined not to give up. I love cycling. I like the freedom it gives me, and of course, it keeps me fit. It begins with education. All drivers should start off as cyclists before they begin to learn to drive.

Only then can we appreciate other road users. Claire says, I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease four years ago at the age of 37. Cycling has proven to be really beneficial to help reduce the symptoms of Parkinson's. I'm sitting in Scotland just about to set off cycling. I'm cycling from Land's End to John O'Groats. I'm actually finding that cycling 40 to 50 miles a day is reducing my shaking symptoms, which is really pleasurable. Claire, good on you. Now in 2016, Mia Ayliffe Chung was killed at a remote farm workers hostel

while backpacking in Australia. She'd ended up working at the farm in an attempt to extend her visa for a second year. To do that, she had to fulfil the 88-day rule, which meant getting a casual job on a farm. She found herself at a hostel, forced to share a room with a man who worked as a supervisor on the farm. This man, Smael Ayad, had a psychotic episode and fatally stabbed her and another backpacker, Tom Jackson, who later died from his injuries. What she didn't realise at the time, and what her mum, Rosie Aliff, later discovered, was backpackers like Mia were exposed to widespread exploitation, including sexual harassment, inadequate health and safety, and substandard living conditions.

Since Mia's death, Rosie has been campaigning to improve conditions for young casual workers, helping to change the law in three of the six states of Australia. She's written a book about Mia called Far From Home. Rosie spoke about the night Mia was killed. Mia was in a working hostel in North Queensland and she was in a room with a man who had become obsessive about her and had talked about her to many other

of the occupants of the hostel my understanding is that she asked to move rooms and wasn't allowed to that night she was going to bed very early she told me she was going to bed early because she was so keen to get her farm work done so she was in bed early and he dragged her out of the bed onto the landing um and stabbed her she was lethally stabbed at that point and then ran she was fighting him she fought him to get away from him and at that point um he did a sort of head dive off the balcony but managed to land well because he was a jiu-jitsu practitioner. And so he landed safely. Tom Jackson went to check him because he didn't realise what had happened. Meanwhile, an ad called Daniel Richardson was with Mia in the bathroom and stayed with her until she died.

And Daniel sat there and had no idea why he wasn't killed too. So he survived. My gosh. What was going through your mind with very limited information about what had happened to her and why this had happened? I thought it was just one of those things that she'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time. I phoned the hostel almost to offer my condolences to them for having been through it.

And then I found them very guarded and they were telling me how what a lovely man I had had been which I thought was bizarre but you know fair enough that's what they felt they needed to do but yeah so that's as much as it registered at that point. When when she was traveling were you aware of the 88 day rule and the sorts of conditions she was living and working in i was aware of the 88 day rule and that's that i mean she was working and she didn't want to go and do her farm work she desperately didn't want to go and i didn't know why i just assumed like most youngsters 19 19, 20-year-olds, a little aversion to that level of hard work.

I thought it was Camp America, basically, that they would be put in safe places that had been regulated by the government and, you know, that were working to a certain set of principles. And that was what I thought was going on. And what was going on instead? What is going on still is it's the wild west basically our young backpackers, young migrant workers from all over Europe and Asia arrive in Australia they decide they want a second year out

there a lot of them are dreaming about staying out there because of the conditions that they're coming from so they're not middle class gap year students, as has been suggested. They're from all over the world. And they have to do this 88 days to get a second visa. And they go into the unknown. They have to go to the outback. They have to go to the furthest reaches of Australia to get these days ticked off. Always remote areas. And they don't know what's at the other end. There might be a completely compliant, well-run farm with decent accommodation at the other end of that phone call. rapist pig farmer who's going to keep you imprisoned for as long as it takes, you know,

for as long as it takes for you to get out. I have so many stories about the abuse. It's not just, I mean, it starts at underpayment and it starts at a hostel like me is where they take the passport away from you so you can't leave. They then give you very little work. So the accommodation is extremely expensive. You pay for transport. The accommodation could be rat infested. It could have no sanitation. It could have no fire escapes.

And when you've got no money and your passport's been taken off you, you're incredibly vulnerable. Even if you manage to get your passport back, you can then be released in the middle of the night into the outback. Well, you've been fighting this, haven't you? You've been fighting to change how this is. And I know that you've actually had some success in changing the laws and the rules in some ways,

but it doesn't go far enough for you. The thing is that this is a countrywide and Australia-wide federal scheme. And yet the changes that have occurred have only occurred at state level. So the first thing is, if a perpetrator, if a criminal wants to carry on recruiting backpackers, they can just move across the state boundary. So that part of it plus the backpackers don't really know which state they're in half the time let alone which laws apply so the regulation needs to be at federal level but also there needs to be some sort of enforcement of the scheme and that's what's missing that that enforcement and you know the stories about the uk and how we treat our migrant workers occasionally these

stories pop up and it's really distressing what's happening we have somewhere for people to go to to report that and we have an enforcement agency which is uk wide and which has the powers of arrest and can just zoom in on these situations and nip them in the bud and you know I know I met people through campaigning who contacted me and said this is what is required out there this is what they want this is what you need to campaign for and that still hasn't happened they've now got a modern slavery act and the backpackers are mentioned on Hansard as part of the modern slavery issue. Are you so driven to doing this, apart from all the obvious reasons of it's the right thing to do to try and improve people's lives and their rights when they're trying to satisfy a piece of legislation effectively? But are you so driven to do this because of your daughter, because of Mia?

Yes, absolutely. of your daughter because of Mia yes absolutely um when I first started hearing the stories I started to realize how dangerous it could be and then I'd get stories about deaths and you know I I was in a position to recognize how somebody's life is destroyed by the death of a young person. And those deaths would affect me physically. I would just break down. She was your only child, is that right? That's right. How are you now? The campaign and writing.

I'm a writer anyway, so that's my therapy, really. So I've campaigned and written a book and between those two I'm in a better place than I ever thought I could be I mean before Mia went away I said to my my husband if she doesn't come back I won't survive I won't get over it you know if anything happens to her and he said I know you won't survive. I won't get over it. You know, if anything happens to her. And he said, I know you won't, you know. So to be in this place now where I can function and we're running a business and I can do the things that I want to do. And I'm functioning and happy. I never thought that would happen, but actually facing it full on and talking about it almost, you know, infinite number of times to the Australian media has helped me to function, has helped me to recover. That's been my therapy. Tell us about Mia. How should we remember Mia?

Mia was, she was beautiful, but she was beautiful inside and out she had a kind of spirituality about her and I'm not the only person who's noticed this she decided she was a Buddhist aged eight but before that she told me about her previous life now you can believe what you like you can take from that what you like, but she was too young to be making it up, if you know what I mean. But she was just, she was fun. I would say that locally, no party was a party until Mia got there. She was so popular, so well loved, and so naughty and fun. That was Mia. Now, a spokesperson for the Department of Home Affairs in Australia says, the Australian government is committed to ensuring migrant workers are protected from

exploitation or abuse, regardless of their citizenship or visa status. Working holiday makers working anywhere in Australia are entitled to the same basic rights and protections as Australian citizens and permanent residents under applicable workplace laws. Employers who engage in criminal conduct against temporary residents are subject to the full force of Australian criminal law. Now the global population currently stands at 7.9 billion and it's projected to peak at 9.7 billion in just over 40 years time. Those huge numbers are often blamed on women having too many children but in reality fertility has been in long-term decline for decades. Some of this is due to more women actively choosing to have smaller families but an increasing number

of studies have shown male sperm counts are falling off a cliff and could be making it harder to conceive in the first place. Research in 2017 showed that sperm counts in Western countries have halved between 1973 and 2011. But why? Dr Shana Swan, Professor of Environmental Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, is one of the lead researchers on that 2017 paper and is also author of the book Countdown, How Our Modern World is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive

Development and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race. She started by explaining just how bad male sperm counts are today. Where we are right now, we're not sure. But when our study ended in 2011, sperm counts were 47 million per milliliter. That sounds like a lot of sperm and is a lot of sperm, but it's actually a pretty low number because it turns out if that number goes below 40, then it becomes harder and harder to conceive and takes longer and longer. So below 40, the fertility drops off very, very quickly. And we're now arguably below that point. We're not sure exactly where, but we are in a dangerous zone for sure. The focus often is on the woman and what's going on with the woman in terms of fertility. Do you think we really have to shift the axis on how we look at that?

Absolutely. Women have been blamed, of course, over the years for being the one responsible for a couple not conceiving. They've been blamed for miscarriages. They've been blamed for all kinds of reproductive failures. And these blames, if you want to call them blames, should be shared equally between men and women. We know now that men contribute at least half to these problems and they haven't borne this responsibility. There are lots of factors that contribute, smoking, exercise, obesity, too many hot baths.

But what do you put it down to that's also causing the drop in sperm? So in addition to those lifestyle factors, which are certainly important, we are exposed every day to thousands of chemicals that have the ability to alter our body's hormones. These are called endocrine disrupting chemicals. And this may come as a surprise to many people because scientists talk about this, but people on the street do not. And these are chemicals in our foods, they're in our household products, they're in our cosmetics, and they're in our dust, and they're in our air, and they're in our water, and they're coming into our bodies all the time. And they're measurable. You can measure them in the United States, they're in in everybody and they're at high enough levels to do harm. What are they called? They're called phthalates? Endocrine disrupting chemicals. Endocrine. Okay. But what, sorry, what are phthalates? How do they fit into this?

Ah, phthalates. Okay, good. So, phthalates are one class of these endocrine disrupting chemicals and they are also in our foods and their wrappings. Think about soft plastic, right? Soft plastic, squishy plastic, shower curtains, rubber duckies in your baby's bath. All of these things have the ability to lower testosterone. And I think most people know that testosterone is really critical for reproductive health and for sexual function, by the way. And they can affect men and women, by the way, in terms of reproductive health. So it's not just the man that's affected by these.

And for people now thinking, hang on, you just mentioned the rubber ducky in my child's bath. You know, what can I do about this? You know, I know you don't want to fear monger. And there are also regulations, many more in the EU. And of course, we'll see how Britain moves forward with those regulations. There are many more to protect people. But what do you do or what can you do? And there are more, I should say, than America to reduce your exposure? Well, I think we have to do a little inventory of our homes and look for soft plastic or look for plastic that's hard, like a baby bottle or a water bottle, because there are chemicals of other kinds,

for example, the bisphenols, which are in tin cans and baby bottles and so on, which also have the ability to lower our hormones. And so we can, as mothers and as women and as, you know, go through our homes and try to have an eagle eye out for these plastics. And then we can watch what kind of food we eat because the primary source is through our foods. And this is hard because we don't have any warning. They're not labeled, but any food that's been processed is likely to have these chemicals. Foods that have been raised on a traditional farm will have pesticides, which are also risky and also may contain phthalates. So I think we just have to really open our eyes to these chemicals in our lives all the time. And I should mention personal care products.

So these chemicals are in cosmetics. They increase absorption. So when we put on a hand cream, we want it to be absorbed. Phthalates help with that. But what you're describing is how we live. I mean, yes, you could go around your house. You can clean it. I know getting rid of dust is important. I know that you're also very passionate about um not heating food in plastic containers in microwaves just to say that so what you should put them in in crockery or just not use microwaves oh microwaves are fine just crockery you can put them in glass um glass is great just change the way you store and cook your food and try to buy organic, unprocessed food to the extent that you can afford it and that you have the time to deal with those bunches of carrots and broccoli and so on. It's much better to just clean and cook your own.

I suppose what I was getting to though is, I mean, I always like, as I call it, news you can use, things that you hear that you can put into your life. But a lot of this, are we just going to have to get used to this being in our systems, you know, as part of our daily lives? If we almost have to assume as a group, as a species, that this is part of how we live now, will we be okay with these declining sperm rates or can we reverse this? I don't think we can go on and just accept this as business as usual. It's too risky. There are many, many species on the planet that have been endangered or wiped out. And we don't want the same fate to happen to us, do we?

So we really have to make these important changes and do it quickly because the decline is not slowing down. We can only do little things, I suppose, by comparison to the companies that are wrapping up whatever it is, personal product, food, putting the chemicals in to increase absorption. That's correct. And this is a job for the companies and for the regulators to handle this in a way that protects us. And right now it does not. So we're exposed to low doses and lots and lots, actually thousands of chemicals. They're regulated one at a time. They're regulated at high doses. This is not how we're exposed. So they have to be regulated at the levels at which we're exposed and they have to be tested. And thousands of chemicals have never been tested.

I'm just going to warn our listeners for a final point here. It's quite a candid bit of your research. Men and women have obsessed, I suppose, about the length of men's penis, the penis length. But actually, it's the perineum length that can be a better indicator of what you're talking about. What have you found about this? So that's pretty interesting. We found that when the mother was exposed to higher levels of phthalates during her pregnancy, particularly early pregnancy, that the genitals of the male were less male typical. They were smaller, basically. The perineal length was smaller, the penis was smaller, the scrotum was smaller. The testicles didn't come down completely. So the male development was arrested. It was less male typical. And this played out in adulthood with the men having lower sperm counts and being infertile,

more likely to be infertile. So there's a direct link from what the mother takes into her body at the time she's pregnant to the way the man is going to perform when he's an adult. It's pretty amazing. And Elaine emailed in to say, I first heard of this in a BBC documentary circa 1985. Clearly no one listened. Since then, neither I nor my nieces have drunk out of plastic bottles or heated food in plastic containers. If you would like to get in touch with us about anything you hear on the programme, then you can email by going to our website or drop us a note on social media. It's at BBC Woman's Hour.

Now, what is it like to be present as pop history is being recorded? Someone who knows only too well is Susan Rogers, who sat on the other side of the glass from Prince as he recorded many of his classic albums, including Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day and Sign of the glass from Prince as he recorded many of his classic albums including Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day and Sign of the Times. Susan was Prince's sound engineer in the 80s and in an extraordinary career she also worked with David Byrne, the Barenaked Ladies and Jeff Black to name just a few. Then in 2000 after two decades she quit the industry to earn a doctorate in psychology.

She's now a professor of music at Berkeley College in Boston and is being awarded the Music Producers Guild's Outstanding Contribution to Music, the first woman to ever win. And as if we need an excuse to get some Prince in our ears, here's a burst. Purple Rain Purple Rain Purple Rain Purple Rain Purple Rain

Purple Rain I don't know about you, but my instinct was just to close my eyes, sway and put my arms in the air. My eyes are open again now. Dr Susan Rogers dropped out of high school aged 16 and she's entirely self-taught. I started by asking her what inspired her to go into sound engineering. I came from a family that was lower middle class so college was out of the question. We all kind of had to fend for ourselves and I knew I had this deep desire, this passion to somehow be involved in record making. I was one of those kids who was just crazy about records.

Kids like that will sometimes go on to become a DJ or they might become a music executive. But in my case, I felt the calling to be, you know, boots on the ground in the control room where records were made. So I had to learn a skill and then I worked my way up. And where did that desire come from? Because like you say, you know, when at that time you listen to music, most people either want to be a DJ or be the lead singer of a band.

Why sound engineering in particular? Who knows? That is such a good question. And I do believe that little children know who they are down deep inside, know their aptitudes, their skills. They kind of know what street they live on. That was the term that Prince called it, the street you live on. You kind of know who you are. And I felt like being a performer, a songwriter, that wasn't for me. I didn't feel attracted to that. What I felt attracted to was the art of making records. And I kind of knew that I had a technical mind and that maybe if I walked down that road,

I could be of service. And this is a service oriented profession. Bringing music into the world is a little bit like being a midwife as it gets born. Oh, I love that analogy, like a midwife born in music. So how did you get your first foot in the door? Because obviously there weren't that many women doing this. No, I got started in something that was even more rare than engineering, which is being an audio technician. But an audio technician is an objective standard. If your tape machine or your console is broken, if someone can come in with the schematics and the toolkit

and the oscilloscope and fix it, we're done. We don't have to have arguments about whether it would be better to have a man or a woman or an older person or a younger person repair it. So getting my entree in the business as an audio technician served me really well. It was actually a tech that Prince was looking for. When I heard about the job opening with Prince, he wasn't looking for an engineer. He needed a technician. And that happened to be what I'd been doing for five years out in Hollywood. How did that union come about? Let's talk about Prince. Let's talk about you being in the same atmosphere as the great man himself. Well, he sent out the word to his management that he was looking for an audio technician

because he had just come off the 1999 tour. He had just had his first crossover pop hit single with Little Red Corvette. He was planning the Purple Rain album and the movie, and he needed someone to come to Minneapolis and get his home studio working properly and help with the technical aspect of that. As soon as I heard that that's what he was looking for, I knew immediately that's my job. He liked working with women. He did, yeah. I was a huge Prince fan. I had seen him live. I had all his records and we were a good fit for each other. So I got the job and he moved me from the technician role into the engineering chair. I mean, he's famously forward thinking and particularly, like you say, he liked to work with women.

He surrounded himself by women, whether it was professionally or romantically. So how did that dynamic work? Because he was a self-made man, he was really good at recognising raw talent in others. And he could kind of read people. He could see, it seemed like anyway, it seemed like he had magical powers. It seemed like he could read what we wanted and what we were made of. So he was really good at putting people in roles that would bring out the best in him. He was also really good at inspiring the best performance we could give.

My friend Wendy Melvoin joined his band as the guitar player when she was 18 years old, just fresh out of school. And Wendy is an incredibly accomplished musician today. Prince saw that in her. Same thing with Lisa Coleman and with me and with Peggy McCreary, with Sheila E, with the other women he worked with, we felt supported, we felt respected. And most of all, this word gets used a lot, but we felt empowered, literally. It's like he handed you the reins and didn't watch you drive. He didn't micromanage. Here, you do this. This is your job. I'm going to go do my job. I'm sure you'll be fine. That's incredibly empowering.

It sounds amazing. But there's still so few women working in the field of sound engineering. Have things changed, do you think, in the last 20 years? They do. They do change with the times a little bit. We know that, for example, the Music Producers Guild, the Music Producers Guild and the PPL, the Phonographic Performance Limited, the folks who are giving me this award, they have told me that membership in the Music Producers Guild females is up to 13% now, which it doesn't seem to be 5%. Just five years ago, it was 5%. It's more than doubled. So there seems to be a spreading activation of young women seeing more and more role models out there and realizing, yeah, this is within reach. I can do this. It's growing slowly. move on to the second half of your career because in 2000 having all the success and you've worked with some great artists including David Byrne but you decided to leave and go back into studying and study psychology why? I felt a calling and the calling was similar to what I had felt when I was

a child and wanted to be in music I had a profound curiosity about the natural world and I wanted to study consciousness in non-human animals. I wanted to study neuroscience. So I had a hit record with Barenaked Ladies from Canada in 1998. And with that hit record, I had enough money that I could start a whole new path in life. It turned out that since I got my PhD when I was 52 years old. I wasn't going to have a long science career. But by studying music perception and cognition, I can now talk about record making from two perspectives, the art of it and also the science of it.

We're talking about why people like what they like and why people choose one record and not another record and why we all have these different appetites for music. That's endlessly fascinating. So Susan, for women who are interested in this area, what would your advice be? First thing is that it's very competitive and you have to know your craft.

You have to spend years honing your craft. I have a friend who's a sculptor and he says to me, craft is what sustains you when art fails you, which it will 90% of the time. So the skills required in this business to make records, pretty vast. You need to know a lot of musical skills and a lot of technical skills. So that's the first piece of advice is really learn your craft. And second, I would advise young women if they're afraid of being exploited or being taken advantage of for their gender, they need to overcome that fear. My entire career was made possible from the men and women who supported me, believed in me, encouraged me,

made it possible for me to be successful in this business. There are more of those out there than there are the abusers. You hear the horror stories. If you encounter one of those, get away. Don't think that that's your only chance to be successful in this business. It's not. What an absolute legend and inspiration. That was me talking to Susan Rogers there. Tanya emailed in to say, Susan Rogers sounds like my kind of woman. When I was 15, I tried to persuade a lot of people in various recording studios near me to take me on as an apprentice sound engineer,

but got met with derision from the studio owners, all of whom were male. One told me that it got too loud for female ears. However, I do share a little of something with Susan, as I did end up working in radio for many years from the age of 18. Like Susan, I also had a complete career U-turn. Left broadcasting, a little sadly I will be honest, and I'm now an upholsterer running a small and successful business. A career of many colours is wonderful and gives you lots of stories to keep you entertained throughout life. Tanya, it sounds like we should be interviewing you on Woman's Hour. If you would like to share your remarkable stories, please do so. Go to our

website. We love to hear from you. And also you can go to our social media. It's at BBC Woman's Hour. Have a wonderful weekend. Do join Emma from Monday. Hi, I'm Glenn Patterson, and I'm here to tell you about my new Radio 4 podcast, The Northern Bank Job. It was the biggest bank robbery in British and Irish history and one of the most daring. Carried out in the middle of a busy city centre at one of the busiest times of the year. With missing millions, burning banknotes and precision planning, it is all the elements of a Hollywood heist movie. But this actually happened and its consequences could not have been more far-reaching.

I'll be telling the story of the robbery through the words of the people who were caught up in it, and those who dealt with its chaotic aftermath. Just subscribe to The Northern Bank Job on BBC Sounds. I'm Sarah Treleaven, 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 World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.