Woman's Hour - Weekend Woman's Hour: True crime, parental alienation and Borscht

Episode Date: April 27, 2019

With countless television documentaries dedicated to true crime cases, why do women make up the majority of the audiences? We hear from Julia Davis editor of Crime Monthly Magazine, Jacqui Hames former police officer and presenter of Crimewatch and criminologist Dr Gemma Flynn.Parental alienation is the process, and the result of psychological manipulation of a child into showing unwarranted fear, disrespect and hostility towards a parent. We look at whether there is a growing understanding of this concept with Charlotte Friedman a psychologist with a background in family law and mediation and with Paula Rhone Adrien a family law barrister.What is the best way to support a partner who is suffering from depression? The journalist and author Poorna Bell, psychiatrist Linda Gask, Nicole Krystal Crentsil a public speaker and couple Alan and Karen Phillips discuss.It’s six years since the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh which killed more than a 1000 garment workers. How do we raise awareness of where and how our clothes are made and how do we all learn how to consume less? Fashion industry insiders Alice Wilby and Bernice Pan explain.The author Jennifer Eberhardt, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University talks about her years of research into unconscious racial bias.When Josie Rourke became the artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse she was one of the first female theatre directors to be appointed to that role in a major London theatre. Eight years on she tells us why she has picked the musical Sweet Charity as her swan song and how theatre has changed in the last 10 years.And the food writer Alissa Timoshkina joins us to Cook the Perfect... borsch.Presented by Jenni Murray Produced by Rabeka Nurmahomed Edited by Jane Thurlow

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

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Good afternoon. True crime in books, on television and in podcasts is more popular than ever. Why do women love to read, watch or listen? Women still have very, very heightened levels of fear of crime, despite the fact that crime is low. Men are overwhelmingly much more likely to be attacked violently. They're much more likely to be murdered.

You know, if you looked at the data, really women should be walking men home. What do you do if your partner is suffering from depression or anxiety? How much can you help? On the anniversary of the collapse of the Rana Plaza clothing factory in Bangladesh, we discussed sustainable fashion. How wise should we be to where our clothing is being made? Biased, the new science of race and inequality. Jennifer Eberhardt explains the extent to which prejudice can be unconscious. Sometimes when you try to teach your children, for example, to ignore colour,

they also ignore the discrimination that could come with colour. And so you're actually teaching them to do the opposite, to actually ignore inequality rather than combat it. Eight years ago, Josie Brooke became the artistic director of London's Donmar Warehouse. We look back on her career and ask why she's chosen Sweet Charity as her swan song, and cooking the perfect borscht, Alyssa Timoshenko's recipe from her book Salt and Time. Now I suspect at some time or another we've all done it. Dad has done something really annoying and you've been less than respectful in front of the children or it could be the other way around and dad's the one being rude about mum. But what happens if the

parents separate and the disrespect or even hatred goes further? This week, a group of fathers marched on Downing Street to raise awareness of what's known as parental alienation. It was cited in a case on Tuesday where an eight-year-old boy was sent by a judge to live with his father because he was picking up hateful feelings towards his dad from his mother. The parents, of course, were separated. The judge had concluded the boy was exposed to significant emotional harm. While Paula Rhone Adrian is a barrister who specialises in family law, Charlotte Friedman is a psychotherapist and the author of Breaking Upwards, How to Manage the Emotional Impact of Separation. How does she define parental alienation?

When people separate, there's always a bit of jockeying for position in respect of the children, especially when they're young, because when you've lived with your children 24-7, it really feels quite an anxious move to have your children be shared between two households. So both parents obviously would like to have the bigger share of the children. And there's a bit of bowed mouthing and belittling that goes on, and that goes on whether you're together or you're not together. Parental alienation is really a psychological manipulation without any legitimate justification. So it's a sort of

creating an unwarranted fear or hostility in your child with a view to completely excluding the other parent from having a relationship with the child, which leads to estrangement. And that's right on the other end of the spectrum of just badmouthing the other parent and is very damaging. Paula, how much is it a term that's coming up more frequently in family law? It's definitely a term that we are learning to recognise and applying in the cases where there is an intractable dispute about contact. More and more, the clients that you have also are familiar with the term, and so will use that when they come to see you first. And so it's already a live topic just at that first meeting.

So Charlotte, how has the attitude of judges to parental alienation changed in recent years? What cases have you come across in your practice? Well, when I was at the bar, and I left the bar 12 years ago to become a psychotherapist, parental alienation was a concept, but it wasn't really talked about as such. And I did a couple of cases where there was such huge manipulation of the children. One mother where she said that the father had effectively raped her over a number of years, which absolutely was untrue. And she told the children that in the hope that they would hate their father. And another case which took place over a number of years where the father took the children when they separated.

They were small. And he created the idea of mother being a complete monster in their minds, and they would not see their mother and they would scream when they saw her. The judge didn't remove the children in that case. I understand that things are changing a bit now, but what I see in the consulting room is adults who were children of being alienated and they are depressed, they're anxious, they can't function, they can't form intimate relationships. It is hugely damaging. What sort of cases have you come across in your practice? Unfortunately, the same. It doesn't change. And you will have cases where a parent in the safety of the

conference room that you're having will tell you, Paula, I don't like him. And I don't want my children to like him. And I don't want my children to like his new girlfriend. And I will do everything in my power to make sure they don't have a relationship. And vice versa. If it's a father that I'm representing, I will hear the same thing. But what are the risks of it being given more weight in court rulings? How much investigation is there into claims of rape, claims of domestic violence, claims of coercive control? There is significant investigation and this is where, as frustrating as it is because it takes a long time, the courts will consider allegations in depth. The courts will consider whether there is any truth behind the allegations.

And if a judge finds that there is no truth, then that is the end of the matter. The allegations cannot come up again. The allegations cannot be relied upon again. And there will be a very purposeful move towards contact between the parent and the child. How often do you think people attempt to just make it up? I think people make it up a lot. I think that people make things up in order to hang on to the children for longer periods of time. It's when it becomes extreme. It becomes a sort of pathology and it creates a childhood trauma. I mean, it is totally abusive.

When I was at the bar, judges didn't have the children removed because they said that if children were settled and secure with the alienating parent, that actually it was more disruptive and more abusive to take the children away than to keep them in that household being emotionally abused effectively. And what about now? I mean, we heard of the boy being taken to his father's having lived with his mother. Well, I can only hope that this is the beginning of something new and that this Parental Alienation Awareness Day is going to actually start lifting the cloud on this and people are going to start having a conversation and take it seriously

because its long-term consequences are extremely serious for psychological development. I mean, you've talked about the long-term consequences and the people you see who are depressed and anxious. What about the little ones? How do they respond to it? Well, the way they manage is to collude with their live-in parent's view of the other parent because that's how they survive. They're entirely dependent on that parent looking after them. So in order to manage, they have to fit in with how that parent sees the non-resident parent.

It's living with a lie, effectively. It's living with a complete untruth and making it fit your world otherwise you won't survive. Paula it's something fathers rights groups have campaigned about for quite some time. Families Need Fathers were the ones who marched on Parental Alienation Awareness Day. How much do you reckon it is a gendered issue? Sadly, in my experience, and that's over 20 years now, it is a gendered issue. And in my experience, it is a mother who struggles more with allowing that freedom for the child to move to wherever the father has ended up, be that on his own or in a blended family. And there may be very valid reasons why the mother is struggling. Please let me get that across to your listeners. It may be that the mother has suffered from severe domestic abuse, be that physical or emotional. It may be that the mother

has very serious concerns about the father's capacity to provide good enough care for the child. It may be the age of the child, or it might be right at the other spectrum, where the mother hates the father. And it's as simple as that. How much would you say it's a gendered issue? I think it's an interesting question. I don't quite see it in that way. I don't think it is a gendered issue. I've seen it from both sides. And I think on the sort of less severe end of the spectrum, mothers do tend to say, well, the father can have alternate weekends and not much more.

And fathers don't feel that that's just and it isn't. But I think on the extreme end of the spectrum, I think it's completely non-gendered. I think it happens equally, men alienating mothers and mothers alienating their husbands and fathers. I was talking to Charlotte Friedman and Paula Roan Adrian. Now, you must have noticed that there's a boom in true crime stories. There are countless television documentaries about cases like the Yorkshire Ripper, the murder of Jill Dando, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and there are podcasts such as Serial, The Teacher's Pet, and My Favourite Murder.

Women, of course, are usually the victims of these crimes, so it's curious that we're also the biggest consumers of the genre. Why are so many of us fascinated by true crime? Well, Dr Gemma Flynn is a criminologist at Edinburgh University, Jackie Hames is a former police officer and presenter of Crime Watch, and Julia Davis is the editor of Crime Monthly magazine. She told Jane why she decided to launch the magazine. Myself and my assistant editor on one of my other magazines were constantly talking about the true crime programmes that we watched and the podcasts we listened to and the features we read and we were absolutely fascinated by them. We'd debate them, play the armchair sleuths and then we realised everybody else was as well and actually anecdotally at first we realised it had become a big thing

and it's always been a big thing it's always been a big thing but now obviously we have so many tv channels and we have so many different types of media where we can consume anything including true crime so i think the advent of net Netflix and the great big crime shows on there, like Making a Murderer and The Keepers, that really sparked off something, and some really big podcasts, actually. I've got to emphasise that Crime Monthly is a women's magazine. That's right. It's not general interest. It's women's. Why?

Well, again, it sort of started out anecdotally. Like, we work with mainly women, and we realised we were all listening to and watching true crime. And so we did some research into it, and we found that it is predominantly women that are consuming true crime. Can I ask, do we, as women women consume true crime with female victims on the whole or are we not bothered? I wouldn't particularly say that but perhaps there is a slant thinking about it. I think it's the whole thing about facing your fears. I think that women

have sort of grown up with the idea of a threat of violence. The whole, you know, walking down a street at night with you know somebody walking behind you a dark car park we've always had to think of these things okay the facts are that women are yes more likely to be the victim of violent crime perpetrated by an intimate partner or that's true relative but men are overwhelmingly more likely to be the victims of violent crime yeah yeah i think i mean a lot of it's perceived isn't it so jemma what do you think tell us why are women apparently more interested than men in true crime i'm very very interested in the the point that you just make there that we actually aren't as vulnerable to violent crime,

but we are interested in this. And you talk a little bit about the perception that we feel about fear of crime. Partly this is something which is created and encouraged by these representations of violent crime and true crime

sort of magazines and movies and books and things. There's some really, really compelling research from about 10 years ago, actually about the show Crime Watch, in which some researchers looked at the ways in which women felt after they had viewed Crime Watch episodes where there was an overt focus on stranger danger, random attacks of sexual violence and murder against women. It was found statistically that there was much more emphasis on the programme on these particular crimes than the statistical picture of violence actually represented.

We've got Jackie here, so let's ask her, were you conscious of that? It was of huge significance, really, the whole issue of fear of crime. And the whole production team were very sensitive to the fact that depicting these crimes and reconstructing them could raise fear of crime around them. The difficulty you've got is that the type of crime that women are victims of and the type of crime that men are victims of and invariably it tends to as you say, a partner or a stranger attack, although the chances of that are still very, very small, infinitesimally small, actually. Thank goodness for that. Which is why we can still reel off all those names.

Yes. But in fact, you know, as you say, young men involved in a fight, whether knives are used or a gang-type crime, are very difficult to put together as a reconstruction and invariably there isn't an e-fit or something that you can show. So we could only feature crimes when there was a story, when there was something to show, some evidential idea. I'm glad you said that because this is telly. Exactly. Crime Watch, hugely successful show, it's telly.

You've got to have the pictures, You've got to have the pictures. You've got to have the story. And we know as well from newspapers, it's certainly true of newspapers, that tragically, if a young blonde woman is murdered in the UK, chances are, depending on what else is going on in the world, that story will dominate news bulletins for days. Young black lad, no.

Absolutely right. And there is a big debate still, even in this day and age, to be had around that. The producer guidelines around Crime Watch were very, very strict in the way that they were shown, the way that the reconstructions were put together.

There was no music. I don't know about the later years, but it wasn't stylised, was it? It wasn't stylised. The use of weapons, the use of violence was very minimal because it wasn't necessary to show that. And what we were trying to do was solve the crime. It's all very well, people like me,

and I was thinking about this before doing this programme, I was a bit snooty about this subject matter. I thought, I'm not interested in this kind of thing. And then I realised just how interested I was based on my consumption of podcasts in particular, actually, lately. Gemma, I put it to you that as a criminologist is why I'm very interested in the fact that women still have very, very heightened levels of fear of crime, despite the fact that crime is low. Certainly, it's still very, very, very much the case that men are overwhelmingly much more likely to be attacked violently, they're much more likely to be murdered. You know, if you looked at the data, really, women should be walking men home. You know, there's just a huge,

huge, huge misconception around all of this. I'm glad you said that. Because the last thing I want is to make women listening to this more fearful than they need to be. And the truth is, your chances of being attacked, thank God, are really, really small. In your experience, honestly, why do you think women indulge their interest in true crime? I think that there is something self-perpetuating about this that basically, you know, as you've all mentioned, yeah, we are subject to certain feelings of fear of crime, which are, you know, in turn created by some of these products. But there is that impulse, isn't there, if you feel fearful to kind of face this stuff, to look it in the eye and really understand what's happening with it. There are lots of classic pieces of criminological work which suggest that our drive to look at crime is really all about understanding, you know, the moral limits of our society and understanding our own fears. But the thing that really, really interests me is that these are in turn kind of created by these products so it can be a bit of a cycle. Dr Gemma Flynn, Jackie Hames and Julia

Davis and Miranda emailed to say we're interested in true crime because it's a safe way of looking at the darkest parts of our own humanity and Laura Laura said, many years ago, I heard about some research that said that women fear crime disproportionately because of the unwanted attention we get from some men from a very young age. We learn in a very insidious, drip-by-drip way that we are vulnerable. Now, we have become much more conscious in recent years

of the extent of mental illness and the impact it can have. But what do you do if your partner becomes depressed or anxious and the person you thought you knew becomes someone quite different? How can you support them and what can the person who's suffering expect from you. Watina Dahili spoke to Linda Gask, who's had 30 years of experience as a psychiatrist in the NHS. Pauna Bell is a writer who's written about her late husband's struggles. Alan Phillips and his wife joined the discussion. Alan has suffered severe depression in the past. And Nicole Crystal Crensell is one of the founders of the Black Girl Festival.

She's been open about her problems with anxiety. For me and my partner it's a challenge but it's one that I think we have found a way to work around because I was really honest with my anxiety from the start from the beginning of my relationship and I think for me it was to kind of explain some behavioural changes or mood changes and attitude changes and to make sure that they weren't relayed upon as it's because of you. So it was really important from the get-go to really talk about my anxiety with my partner so he was able to understand what was going on in my head really. How soon did you have that conversation into your relationship? It was pretty soon. It was in the getting to know you stage.

It was that layer of removal where we were trying to really understand each other and the way that we work. This is before we decided to move in together. This was really in the early stages. And I think for most relationships, I guess, when you start a friendship first, that's where this person can get to really know who you are and that's where we kind of really talked about my anxiety yeah how did he respond he was really proud that I was able to share such an important thing with him and it didn't actually jeopardize anything in fact it kind of brought us closer in terms of our intimacy yeah like we've just been talking about your husband Rob was honest you. But did you understand what it meant when he told you he was suffering from depression?

Not at all. I mean, he told me about four weeks into our relationship, which, you know, is fairly early. It was problematic because on the one hand, yes, you know, he was open and honest about it. And I really commended him for doing that. But these things are so layered, right? Despite the fact that he knew he struggled with chronic depression, you know, had real difficulty with it, especially in his 20s. I don't think he fully grasped how, for example, something like depression would impact getting married, having kids. And certainly when he told me, I had no understanding, no context of depression, you know, as far as I knew, no one in my family who I now subsequently know have had depression, no one really talked about it. When did it become clear to you that this was a big problem? In our first year of being married, you know, you have this expectation of what that year should be like. And I could just see him getting gradually, gradually more ill, more withdrawn, you know, really seem to be struggling with it. And I think that it was a few months of just experiencing that and also him not really being able to articulate, you know, what was going on. It wasn't like we had a in-depth chat about how his depression was affecting him and so on. It was all the, I'm fine, I'm fine, don't worry about me, I'm fine. But a few months into that, I thought,

oh, this is a lifelong thing. This isn't something that he's had at one point and it's going to go away. Or if he takes tablets, you know, it's going to fix it. I was like, oh, this is, we're in it for the long haul now and we need to figure out how this is going to impact us and more importantly impact him who was supporting you no one really um i didn't really know that i needed support i know that that sounds really naive but it was something that i felt that as a married couple we should be able to tackle together i as his spouse should have been able to support him through this because again i just didn't have a well-rounded understanding of how formidable an illness like depression could be, especially, you know, to the level that he had it. So a lot of it was muddling through,

and a lot of it was doing it alone. Alan, you are here with your wife, Karen. You've come through this. What was the trigger for your depression, first of all, and how did you deal with it as a couple? For me, I never thought I had it. trigger for your depression first of all and how did you deal with it as a couple for me i never thought i had it i mean mine was caused by an incident when i was three and a half and my mum nearly died and there was tons of blood everywhere and i was unable to go next door and get a neighbor

and um at three and a half because i couldn't reach the door knocker so that was quite traumatic but i just put that to one side and just carried on with my life and it was only in 2014 when I went to the doctors and said I've got a bad back because there was nothing wrong with my brain because when I was going through it I felt bad but I felt that's just how life was. Karen how difficult was it to get through to Alan? It was incredibly difficult Alan didn't realise he was unwell and I didn't realise he was unwell. And actually, that was very difficult for me. There was an extreme amount of guilt when he was getting better, actually, that I never recognised he was unwell because we live together and you feel you should know. But you don't because you're living, you're getting on with your daily life and when he actually I

call it his crash in 2014 when he just stopped doing everything that was so unlike him and then I knew there was something wrong and then you start to look at the behavior and it the behavior over the past few years was irrational and becoming more and more irrational. So that's when you sort of think, no, actually, we seriously need to do something. And it was difficult to get him there. And even when we were in the doctor's surgery, to get him to speak about his actual symptoms rather than a gloss, again, really, really difficult.

What pressure did that put on your relationship? There was a lot of pressure on our relationship because then i became a carer but i didn't know i was a carer because i wasn't a personal carer and what poorness said really resonated with me about you just muddle along because you do karen would sort of say she was brilliant she was absolutely fantastic but every now and again would say is it me and then i'd fly off the handle storm off out the house because it's like nothing to do with you but i didn't know what it was i had no idea that i was unwell linda that must be the natural reaction for a lot of people who's who are suffering or

their partners suffering to look inwardly and to blame themselves it's very difficult for partners i think that there may be things going on between you there may be problems that you need to sort out I think that's where it's really important that when when people are getting help for depression or related mental health problems like that that your partner is included as much as possible because they need support as well. Nicole what do you do in your relationship now what do you need from your other half when you're having anxiety mental health problems? What's interesting is that although I was really conscious of what was going on with myself I think there is this danger for many relationships to kind

of rely on your partner to kind of be that earpiece and I made the decision that I actually didn't want to just relay everything and unpack everything because they would put so much strain in our relationship because I would then be expecting him to answer all the questions that I couldn't answer so I recently decided to go to therapy and to really talk to a professional about the things that I was battling and that meant that took the strain off our relationship and it meant that I wasn't always sitting down with him expecting him to respond to me like a therapist would. Poonam did you feel the pressure to to fix Rob to fix your partner? I think it's just when you're in a relationship and you really love the other person you know they're the most important person in your life you just desperately want them

to be well it's not necessarily a question of fixing whatever it is it's just that you don't want them to be going through this awful thing that you have no control over and the word gloss has been used you know and I would say yeah okay it may sound like Rob was in control of what his treatment and so on by actively going to the doctor he wasn't at all I mean it was up to a point like in terms of getting like proper help or talking to me about how it affected him we only had a genuine conversation such as I literally I can't go to the supermarket I can't open my post I can't do the things that I would have just assumed and had he had no problem with and understanding the level at which let's say an illness like depression could be affecting a

person that shared the same bed as me who I really should have known all of that stuff about it can make you feel incredibly helpless and he took his own life he did yeah so he um he passed away in 2015 I think that a huge part of what contributed to that was that he had a dual diagnosis so he also was struggling with addiction so it wasn't just depression that he was dealing with I think things had just gotten to a point for him where number one the depression made him feel like he just didn't really want to be here anymore it was just so hard to cope with. Pornobel, Nicole Crystal Crensell, Linda Gask and Karen and Alan Phillips and someone who didn't want us to use a name sent an email. My children are seven and four. My husband's on and off dark days manifested themselves in terrible depression

and anxiety after the birth of our first child due to his own childhood trauma. Being a partner to someone with severe depression is hard enough, but doing it with small children is the most terrible, difficult, painful experience. You're essentially a lone parent, but without anybody understanding that. And with a grown adult to care for as well. You're trying to protect your partner from the children's noise and energy, and your children from your partner's withdrawal, self-harm and anger. And some of you got in touch to say that you felt discussions around mental health from your partner's withdrawal, self-harm and anger. And some of you got in touch to say that you felt discussions around mental health are too often focused on depression and anxiety.

So we're keen to talk to women with other serious mental health diagnoses. How does it feel to be you and what do you need us to know? Do get in touch with us through the website for a series that we're planning for May. Still to come on today's programme, Biased, the new science of race and inequality. Jennifer Eberhard explains unconscious bias. Josie Rourke on her years as artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse and why she's chosen Sweet Charity for her swan song and the most delicious soup ever. Alyssa Timoshkina cooks the perfect borscht.

This week marks the sixth anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh. More than a thousand workers in the garment industry died in that disaster. Half of them were women. Fashion Revolution Week was invented to coincide with the anniversary. The campaign was begun to persuade us to be more aware of the source of what we wear. They hope we'll take a photo, put it onto social media, name the brand and ask, who made my clothes? There's also a focus on sustainability and what impact fast fashion might have on the planet. Dr Bernice Pan is the creative director of Deploy, a specialist design house. Alice Wilby teaches a sustainable fashion course at Central St. Martins. What does she mean

by sustainable fashion? The first thing I always tell people when I talk to them about sustainable fashion is to stop buying. Go right back to your wardrobe, see what you've got, do an inventory, understand what you've got because I think it's like 30% of the clothes that we have in our wardrobe aren't being worn. We are buying, I think it's sort of like double the amount of clothes that we were buying just 15 years ago. Those are either not being worn or being disposed of. So slowing things down, I would say. Bernice, I know you're keen to design in a sustainable way, but telling buyers to stop buying can't be good news for someone who's designing and selling clothes. You're right. But how we actually design and make and supply customers is the critical question. For example, we are a carbon smart certified company where we source only environmentally certified fabrics from suppliers and we then really think about design in terms of how to use the same amount

of fabric or even far less amount of fabric to create something that's multifunctional, that fits better, that serves women's lifestyle in a much more versatile way. Alice, how do you persuade people not to just follow fashion shamelessly because there's so much pressure in the magazines and in the shops and maybe keep recycling or buy things that are more sustainable? And repair, reuse, recycle, take care of our clothes. We've lost contact with and the understanding of how our clothes are made, where they come from, and when we don't understand where things come from and how they're made,

and especially when they're cheap, you can buy a dress for the same price as a drink and a sandwich at lunchtime or a round of drinks in a pub at night. So we've lost contact with how clothes are made. So people don't value them as much. Clothing as keepsake. Exactly. Clothing as keepsake. And this has only been in the last sort of 15 to 20 years that we've had this influx of cheap fast fashion that is clouding people's judgment and causing these problems. Traditionally, clothing has been something that was relatively expensive. It took a lot of time, energy and skill to make.

When things were made, you would have that suit or that dress in your wardrobe for the rest of your life. How expensive would your Rippable jacket be? So this Eco Denim jacket is, well, this is actually about eight years old now, seven years old. It retails for about £2,900. And all our garments are made in London. As I said, not only using sustainable fabrics, but top quality fabrics. And we use the best tailoring craftsmanship, a lot of very British old school craftsmanship that is seen in menswear. But those craftsmanship not only make the garments beautiful inside out,

they're really done in a certain way to increase longevity. But how many young people are going to be able to afford £298 for a jacket? Most kids can't afford that. But at the same time, they need to understand that they can't afford to keep buying £5 dresses that are made from synthetic fabrics that aren't going to biodegrade,

that are disposed of really quickly, often end up in landfill, or are going to second-hand and can't be sold by by second hand shops because the quality of the clothing is so poor so it's a false economy and i think our kids need to understand that there has been a discussion i know at the environmental audit committee of the possibility of legislation yes i think that's so important how would that help if we think, you know, estate car tax or congestion charges even has changed the way we think about our daily lifestyle and our daily requirements, it is something that changes both consumers' behaviour as well as an industry. And I think

this is a critical moment where we really need to think about this, what I call fashion reformation, because really this whole crisis has come to a head. And it really requires consumers, us as individuals, businesses and governments to work together. And it can be tax, it can be a different thing. For example, I have this wild idea of proposing that for every thousand garment that a retailer produces, they have to disassemble 2,000 garments to actually upcycle. They have the workforce. They have the manpower. Why can't we do that? Alice, the Great British Saying Bee was a hugely popular programme on television. And I wondered, how is education taking on this question?

To go back to the Environmental Audit Committee, this is one of the recommendations that they made, that actually we bring education in schools. We bring sewing and making and mending back into schools because kids aren't learning it. And that, again, when they're buying all of the cheap clothing, it's another few steps away, divorced away from what's actually happening.

And if we could educate kids in school to understand how to make a garment, it's incredibly hard to make a garment. A lot of people, especially younger generations, struggle to fix a hem or sew on a button and those were skills that I was certainly taught in school. They're skills that, you know, my mother used to make clothes for us.

My grandmother used to make clothes for my mother. My mother had clothes made. It was part of the daily discourse and that to bring that legislation back into schools would be incredibly, incredibly beneficial and it would help the children understand that buying all of these cheap clothes,

it's a false economy. There are a lot of recommendations. I would suggest that people go and have a look at the Environmental Audit Committee because there is a shorter bridged version. You don't have to read through 70 pages. wedding dress. I still have the dress and the jacket that went with it and they're used for angels costumes in nativity plays. 26 years ago my daughter, unable to get into my dress to her surprise, made her dress with her brother's help. It's since been used for an East German bride and both our dresses are available for borrowing. I do so agree that youngsters, boys and girls, should be taught elementary sewing.

And Emma said, But those prices are prohibitive. Get real, ladies. Make them affordable to normal, caring, working people. And Alison said, I used to make all my clothes when I was younger. The problem now is there's no way to buy material. Now, I doubt any of us would confess to being racist, but how aware are we of the way we might treat people of colour differently from the way we treat other people who look like us and have the same cultural background? It's maybe not intended and we'd be horrified if it were pointed out to us, but

unconscious bias is not uncommon. Jennifer Eberhardt is Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and her book is called Biased, The New Science of Race and Inequality. How would you define unconscious bias? It can be defined as the beliefs and the feelings that we have about social groups that can influence our decision-making and our behavior, even when we're not aware of it. You tell a story in the beginning of your book about one of your three sons when he was five years old and on a plane. What happened? He was just looking all around and excited about,

you know, you know, flying with mommy and he sees a guy and he says, hey, that guy looks like daddy. Now, I look at the guy and I notice he's the only black guy on the plane. And before I could have this conversation, you know, with my son about how not all black people look alike, he looks up and he says, I hope he doesn't rob the plane. And I said, what? You know, and he said it again. I hope he doesn't rob the plane. And I'm like, you know, daddy wouldn't rob a plane. Why would you say that? And he looked at me with this really sad face. And he said, I don't know why I said that. I don't know why I was thinking that. And this is what you research. Why would a five year old say something like that,

given, especially in your case, you study this for a living? Well, they're out in the world just as we are and just absorbing you know what's out there in the social environment and so they pick it up and don't know that they've picked it up so you kind of as a child too your your whole purpose is to try to understand what goes with what and what correlates with what and you see people out in the world you're trying to figure out what, you know, sort of how people see them. And so they look to us to figure out, you know, how to feel about other people. But this is, you know, we call it unconscious racial bias. This is subtle messaging.

It's not that somebody is saying, you know, all black people are criminals or somebody is going to rob a plane. So where is that coming from? Yes, it's coming from multiple places. It's coming even from, you know, I have another son who was telling me in first grade, asking me whether black people were seen in a different way from white people. And when I asked him why he would think that he says, well, we were in the grocery store. And there was a black guy who came into the grocery store. And I noticed people kind of stepped away from him and gave them a lot of room. And when he stood in line, his was the shortest line. And so he's seeing how we move through the world and, you know, trying to put together like, what does that mean? You know, what does that mean about how black people are seen? And he, in his mind, thought, well, maybe it has to do with fear, you know, that gets attached to black people in a different way. There's a lot in your book that makes for pretty depressing reading, if I'm honest.

In terms of your research into, I mean, even just people applying for jobs, people whitening their CVs. Yes, that's a big thing for college students. And so there are researchers who looked at this with both African American and Asian students who were undergraduates who were just about to graduate and go on the job market. And a lot of them feared that their race would be held against them. And so they tried to whiten their resumes just to get into the door to get an interview. How? How did they whiten their resumes just to get into the door to get an interview. How? How did they whiten their resumes? Well, they would change their names to sort of anglicize their names. And then I think for Asian students, they would say that they liked extracurricular activities that were more, that they associated with as being more white, like snowboarding and, you know, those kinds of things, because they felt they'd have a problem with people thinking that they could fit in culturally, that they could be relatable,

sort of one of the gang, in a way. And despite doing that, statistically, they're still less likely to get the job over somebody white. Well, if they whiten the name, whiten themselves in a way, right, change their interest and so forth, and, you know forth in a direction that they think would be more acceptable to whites, they actually do have an advantage. And tell me about facial recognition, because you've also written in the book about segregated neighborhoods. You were brought up in a black area and then moved to a white neighborhood. Right.

And you talk about how you had no practice in recognizing white faces. That's right. Yeah. So I had a really tough time. I was worried when I moved to the neighborhood that I wouldn't have friends and that I didn't know if I would feel that I belonged and all of those kinds of things. But the students were super friendly and they welcomed me. But I still had problems making friends because I could not tell their faces and it's interesting because when I get mistaken for other Asian broadcasters and you know I joke girl do we all look the same to you all white people look the same well they did they did but but now they don't because I was in an all-black neighborhood when I was a kid and now

I'm in a multicultural space and so I my brain has had lots of practice at recognising white faces. And so now I'm fine. And there's science behind that. There's science behind it. Decades and decades of science behind it, as it turns out. You've also looked at gender in the workplace. Oh, yes, we've looked at sort of gender issues in terms of the same kind of thing with the resumes, for example. So, you know, women are less likely to get callbacks than men are. And we've looked at sort of gender in terms of even orchestras. There's a really interesting study looking at women in orchestras in the U.S. and they just weren't being hired. And there were all these stereotypes about who they were and how they couldn't play and they didn't have what it took and so forth. And the industry actually instituted

this blind auditioning. So everyone would audition behind a dark curtain so you couldn't see the person's identity. And when they instituted that, the number of women in orchestra shot way up. And you also very quickly write that the colourblind approach of not picking up on colour could impede our move towards inequality. Well, yeah, so there is some research on that, right? That, you know, if we just don't see colour at all, like if we try to ignore colour, then, you know, that's the best thing, that that's what we want to do. And that's how you achieve racial equality in particular. But the research shows that that's not always true. Like sometimes when you try to teach your children, for example, to ignore color,

they also ignore the discrimination that could come with color. And so you're actually teaching them to do the opposite, to actually ignore inequality rather than combat it. Professor Jennifer Eberhardt. For four years, Josie Rook was Artistic Director of London's Bush Theatre. She then took over the Donmar Warehouse in 2012, becoming one of the first women to run a major London venue. After nearly eight years, she's stood down, presenting Sweet Charity with Anne-Marie Duff in the title role as her swan song. Why such an iconic musical?

I've always loved the show. The music is incredible, but what it has at its heart is this wonderful part for Anne-Marie Duff. And what Anne-Marie has, amongst many other qualities, is an extraordinarily courageous spirit as a collaborator, as a woman. And she did something she'd never done before, which was to leap into musical theatre. She'd never sung or danced before, had she?

How did you persuade her to do it? Well, we did a very serious French play, a tragedy, at the Donmar at the beginning of my time there. And we went for lunch afterwards and I said, look, what do you want to do next? You're wonderful. And she said, I've never done an American comedy musical. And I think one of the things about Anne-Marie is on stage, she tends to play these tragic figures in very serious drama. And above and beyond anything else, she's a wickedly funny woman. She's one of the funniest people I've ever met in a rehearsal room.

So to give her the opportunity to work on that material and also to take a daring leap felt like a fitting end to my time at the Donmar. Now, it is a big musical in a small space. The Donmar is not very big, with a large cast. So how complicated was the staging? Yeah, the compression of those big shows into that small room is a gigantic logistical puzzle and you need an amazing team to help you work that out. I worked with the choreographer Wayne McGregor

who I collaborated with on the movie as well and actually one of the things that allowed me to jump into it was knowing that I had this amazing mind and another artist just to work out the geometry of that space. But that's what's a great thing about the the Donmar I think you know I've done that I mean the production I did before that was um measure for measure with just a bench so you can distill the epic into that room and it is revealing I think at that proximity it's such a small theatre now what impact would you say the

last eight years at the Donmar have had on you? You know, I'm a bit knackered. You know, these are big jobs. You know, they kind of get up early, go to bed late. They can, I think, nibble away at your personal life and your family life a little bit. Between the Bush and the Donmar, I've been an autistic director for 12 years now and it feels like time, I hope not in a selfish or an indulgent way,

just to see what my work is like as an artist when I've got a bit more room and a bit more breathing space. You know, I kind of walked in this morning, there were almost no emails coming through on my phone. It's a very strange feeling actually to let your shoulders drop and to start to consider that. How much of the work of the artistic director goes far beyond the artistic in that there's fundraising to be done

and lots of things that are not just about putting productions on. No, I think the below the waterline stuff is quite profound and it's everything really from fundraising, very key at the Donmar because, you know, only 8% or 9% of the Donmar's money is public and everything else is raised, either philanthropically or via corporate support. And, you know, there's a complicated conversation from all points of view how do you find the amazing

philanthropists to give how do you make sure that the right people are giving which is a big question in the arts at the moment the right institutions and partnerships and it's been a gigantic part of the job also at the bush before you know the mission there really i mean the arts council gave us a deadline which is you've got three years to find a new home. And it was three years of my life that were a bit like a kind of building, seeking and fundraising action film, running around Shepherd's Bush trying to find somewhere to make that work. So that's a big part of the job, you know. How much have you led what really does feel at the moment like a big change in the representation of women in the theatre in recent years. Yeah, the all-female Shakespeare trilogy that was very near the start of my time running the

with my great friend Kate Pakenham, Phyllida Lloyd's extraordinary work there. It's easy to forget now that's something that's happening more frequently, what a big cultural impact that had at the time. You know, I remember waking up the next morning and reading a reviewer really quoting Samuel Johnson saying you know this is like watching a dog walk on its hind legs uh you know extraordinary stuff that you just basically wouldn't get away with now you know we did have people at quite senior levels within the leadership of the Donmar, concerned about fundraising. You know, a board member said to us, that was very good, but you won't do another one, will you?

And actually, my response to it, Kate's response, Phyllida's response, and this is, I think, in a big way, what artistic direction is, is to say, actually, it's a trilogy. Like, it's not going away. We're going to make a cultural purchase with it from a venue that does have, because of its London space, because of its space in the heart of Covent Garden, the ability to make a big cultural impact and, you know, get into print when you're doing stuff like that. Now, you did mention a film in which Adrian Lester took part.

First feature film, which was screened earlier this year. Why were you fascinated by Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I? Because I think it's a bit like with actually the work I'm alluding to with Phyllida's work in an all-female trilogy or my work on Sweet Charity. I think as much as it's our responsibility as artists to push forward and find and tell new stories, it's our responsibility as women to go backwards as directors into history and look at those stories, actually particularly within period drama and in that period on film

that have principally been told by men. And for me, there was an incredible opportunity not only to work with Saoirse Ronan, who was attached to that film, but also to try to look at the story of Mary and Elizabeth from a woman's perspective and a woman's gaze. That was a big deal. But you brought them together, as did Schiller,

when there is no historical evidence that they ever met. We are sure they never met. Why did you want to do it? Well, there's a few reasons. One, it would be strange not to dramatically. You'd wind up dramatising a lot of letters in between their correspondence. The other reason, and I feel like in a very interesting moment, as someone who has spent a lot of time during her career as a director,

an artistic director, telling stories from the present day. So, you know, I've put Edward Snowden in plays and done plays about Occupy at St Paul's and spoken about the current Labour Party and looked at climate change in my work. There is always a responsibility, I think, on the part of the artist, not simply to go, this is a reproduction of the facts,

but this is a poetic representation of the essential truth at the heart of these characters. And the space and right of artists to do that is incredibly important in the time through which we're living. Josie Rourke and Sweet Charity continues at the Donmar until the 8th of June. There was a time when the idea of a Russian recipe book seemed almost unthinkable. If you went to Moscow, you couldn't find a decent restaurant. Even the hotel was short of anything remotely edible. And the people, of course, queued for ages to buy the most basic provisions. Alisa Timoshkina came to this country

from Siberia in 1999 when she was 15. She's the author of Salt and Thyme, Recipes from a Russian Kitchen, and she cooked the most delicious soup ever. It's called borscht. The basis of mine is beetroot. There are recipes for borscht that don't have any beetroot, but I love it. For me, that's the kind of the meat of it because my borscht that don't have any beetroot but I love it for me that's the kind of the meat of it because my borscht is actually vegetarian so to me beetroot is my meat in the borscht what else goes in there what else we have red peppers which is actually my mum's kind of technique we have red kraut we have red onions and then also... Red kraut. Red kraut, yes. Sauerkraut made with red cabbage.

Okay, got it. And baked red kidney beans. So the main thing in my recipe that's quite different from the traditional one is that I make a broth. So I cook borscht traditionally, making a rich broth with all the vegetables in it. But then actually what I personally don't like about the traditional borscht traditionally, making a rich broth with all the vegetables in it. But then actually what I personally don't like about the traditional borscht is that you have to eat all these discolored vegetables that have lost their texture and shape. So I get rid of those vegetables and instead roast all the key ingredients that go into it.

So I have here separately, so the beans are actually roasted with a bit of smoked paprika, so they have a nice crunch and a bit of smokiness to them. The red onion is roasted with a bit of brown sugar, so it has a nice caramelization, but also a bit of sweetness.

And the beetroot is roasted with pomegranate molasses, which is so not traditional, but I just love that combination and it really brings out the sweetness and the kind of tartness. I hope we're heating up some ready-made here because if we don't get to taste this I'm going to be absolutely extremely upset it sounds absolutely wonderful. What was Russia's cuisine

before the revolution? Oh it's very interesting I have a cookbook that dates back into the pre-revolutionary years it's a very famous cookbook by Elena Malachovets. And the most fascinating thing to me was that the food was very class-based. So they're actually recipes that are ranked according to class. And obviously the upper classes, they had very French-inspired, French-influenced cuisine because lots of the aristocracy actually hired French chefs to cook for them and it was the lower working classes and the peasants who had this tradition of authentic Russian food which was very simple very little of meat a lot of fermented vegetables and a lot of grains. Siberia is cold

we know that and there are certain indigenous people who live in that area. I notice you've got a dish called, I think it's stroganina? Yes. Which is raw fish, which sounds very much like Japanese cuisine. Where does that come from? So in the book I actually refer to it as a Siberian sashimi just to make it accessible to people. It comes from the northern parts of

Siberia because I mean, Siberia itself is huge. So regional cooking is also very prominent there. And it does come from the indigenous groups, but further from the north. And they actually use this technique for eating deer as well. But fish is something that I find a bit more palatable and it's actually it might kind of seem counterintuitive to get fresh fish and then freeze it and eat it but it's the most beautiful sensation of kind of shaving the frozen fish and then having it with different condiments like horseradish salt red onion and then it kind of melts in your mouth and it's absolutely glorious. Now I can smell the port cooking. We won't be having vodka with it, although I know if we were in Russia,

we would be having vodka with it. But I presume we're going to put some sort of cream on it, some sort of herbs on it when we serve it up. So we had some fresh dill and sour cream. It is absolutely gorgeous, that sweetness that comes through. And also the beans just give it that extra bit of

texture. And that was a lovely lunch. Alisa Timoshkina and her book is Salt and Time. Now do join Jane on Monday morning at two minutes past ten. She'll be talking to Jingjing Li about her debut novel, How We Disappeared. It's based partly on her own family history. She's written about one woman's survival in occupied Singapore

and the quest of a child to solve a family mystery. That's Monday with Jane from me for today. Enjoy the rest of the weekend. Bye-bye. 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's 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.