Woman's Hour - Women obsessed with women, Hannah Arendt, CPS challenge

Episode Date: June 13, 2019

With the second series of the BBC's Killing Eve underway, Villanelle and Eve continue their obsession with each other. We discuss why the obsession women have for other women has become such a familiar dramatic theme – from Mrs Danvers in Rebecca, to Notes on a Scandal - with writer, Joanna Briscoe and journalist, Sirin Kale. We examine what is behind the resurgence in popularity of twentieth century political thinker, Hannah Arendt and The Origins of Totalitarianism with Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge. Why do so many feel her writing chimes with contemporary politics? And we look at why a number of women’s groups are planning to launch a legal action against the Crown Prosecution Service, saying it’s failing to prosecute cases of rape. We hear from Rachel Krys, one of the founders of End Violence Against women, and two women whose cases were dropped. Presenter: Jenni Murray Producer: Ruth Watts

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

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to Thursday's edition of the Woman's Hour podcast. The second series of Killing Eve is up and running as Villanelle and Eve continue their obsession with each other. Why is that such a familiar dramatic theme? Take Rebecca, The Favourite, or Notes on a Scandal as other examples. The resurgence in popularity of Hannah Arendt and the origins of totalitarianism. How much does her writing chime with contemporary politics? And the serial, the fourth episode of A Woman on the Edge of Time. Now you may have heard in the news that a number of women's groups

are planning to launch a legal action against the Crown Prosecution Service, saying it's failing to prosecute cases of rape. They say the prosecution rate has virtually collapsed, with only one in every 25 cases getting to court, and they argue that a previous approach to continuing with the prosecution, known as merit-based, has been dropped by the CPS. The End Violence Against Women Coalition has gathered together 21 women who made reports to the police. The alleged crimes were thoroughly investigated. The police passed the details on to the CPS, but no further progress was made.

Earlier, I spoke to Rachel Criss, one of the founders of End Violence Against Women, and two women we've called Gina and Beth. First, Beth described what led her to make her report to the police. What led me to bring this case about was in 2016, I had been raped and somebody had tried to kill police. What led me to bring this case about was in 2016 I had been raped and somebody had tried to kill me. Five months previous to that I'd also been date raped and it brought back a lot of intrusive memories but the important thing about the March rape was that I vowed on that day to gather the courage together to actually talk about these experiences. Because I knew that if I didn't, I was headed towards even more chaos.

So through that process, I started talking to my GP. I started getting some support. And that led me to talk about my childhood. And so that led me to talk about my father. And I felt that when I was strong enough, I'd go to the police. I told my mum briefly, not in much detail. I said, you know, I know we've talked about this for years. We never talked properly about it.

We'd laughed about it. We'd coped with it. We didn't know that our experiences were abnormal until we'd had enough of normal life. And we ended up going forward. Over two years the police gathered over 50 witness statements from teachers, counsellors, social services etc etc, friends, family members, even a brother of my father and that led them to bring about 44 charges of things ranging from actual bodily harm, rape, sexual assault, all kinds of child cruelty, etc, etc. Gina, what was the case that you wanted to bring to court? So similarly, I didn't actually want to bring anything to court, which I think is important to say. I was reporting a rape that happened in 2016 to me.

And within reporting that, I mentioned again similarly that I perhaps didn't respond immediately because I was quite used to that style of treatment. So the police pressed me on what I meant by that and I said well actually eight years ago which is nearly 12 years ago now I was with an abusive ex-partner who would beat and rape me on a near daily basis and through my fears and kind of my recovery from that, I think I've learned to be quite strong is probably police then encouraged me to report what had happened eight years earlier and try to convict the suspect, my ex-abusive partner. And they convinced me that we would have good grounds and that we would have enough evidence. Again, I supplied them with a list of 21 witnesses.

I actually believe that only four of those were ever even interviewed. I had medical evidence in the form of doctor's notes, counselling notes where I had complained about the abusive partner at the time of and for the following five years afterwards suffering injuries and I mean having a list of prescriptions that would, again, provide evidence to this. I later found out that those medical notes weren't, for some reason, used in my evidence. What was the reason for the case being dropped? They haven't given me one, in all honesty. How did they deliver the news to you then?

You were expecting you would go to court. Oh, yeah. And three years worth of collecting evidence later, they sent me a one page, I would say copy and paste style letter, which basically said that they didn't feel they had enough evidence for a jury to be confident in their conviction. And this was from the Crown Prosecution Service, not the police? Yeah, this is from a lawyer at the Crown Prosecution Service, not the police? Yeah, this is from a lawyer at the Crown Prosecution Service. Beth, what about you? How did you find out that your case wouldn't go forward? So after the trial date had been set, and similarly it was years in the making, I got a call from the police officer in charge in April, and he said, I can't believe I have to deliver this news to you, but I was called in for a meeting with the CPS last week and they told me they're dropping the charges I said to them what

the heck are you doing this guy's definitely done it look at our evidence and they he felt that they weren't listening and that a decision had been made by powers above I'd been then offered in a letter similarly copy and paste a right to review I looked into what a right to review means. And I saw that a right to review is the CPS. People who'd made that decision review their own decision. So it's really kind of bogus. And so I went into a meeting with them. And the reason a police officer told me that they'd said that they dropped the case

was because in earlier age interventions we hadn't disclosed so a very consequence of child abuse was something that was used against us then when we came to the meeting as well it was said to me that because I'd had so much sexual violence that I was talking about because there were other people as there often is in our childhood who'd been abusive that would make us less of credible witnesses which again for me is a consequence of child abuse or sexual violence being used against us what's been the emotional cost to you of the whole process it has been a great emotional cost growing up as a kid in total isolation with no one to turn to,

being told that you're on the outside of the world, trust no one, to gradually learn to trust. The emotional cost has been great, but this is really, this was a real kick in the teeth, and it's taken us a while to kind of regroup from. Gina, what's been the emotional cost for you? Well, I strongly believe that this process has re-traumatized me and it's brought back memories flashbacks in the form of both

nightmares and just very vivid flashbacks on a daily basis that are interfering with my working life and my ability to cope it's brought back depression anxiety and everything linked to an abusive relationship to then have that almost now facing a second trauma which is to be told that all of this is is meaningless and is not believed yet again and I really struggle to see how the bigger picture of what this is going to affect in other girls that are going to go through this process and how anybody is supposed to have any faith in the system whatsoever and even want to attempt to report to the police.

Why are you prepared, after all you've been through, to go through judicial review if it happens? I don't see that I have an option really. My ex-partner is still out there and potentially still abusing. But also, I don't live a day without the flashbacks. It's not that I can forget about this. And also, I've spent the last three years gathering evidence. It's almost now that I feel like I'm in a position where I have to push back against the CPS because and do you mind if I just quote one of the because eventually I did go through a review process and I did get a little bit more of it and I did extract a little bit

more of a reason from them one of the reasons that they dropped my case and this is a quote from the CPS you stated that you had been raped every day sometimes more than once a day you stated that you would cry and say that it hurt you also reported bleeding and said that you went to the doctors the suspect denied that he had raped you and that he could not recall you going to the doctors it's disgusting but you had evidence from the doctor if that doesn't make everybody listening very angry and wouldn't make anybody feel like they have to say something, I don't know what would.

Beth, what about you? Why are you prepared to go through with the judicial review, as I say again, if it happened? I think because I know how lonely it is to be facing these things, how much... To grow up in abuse similarly you know I've been in abusive relationships because before I knew what normal was or what love was I thought this was the version I know that what how awful that process is and I feel a responsibility to leave things a little bit better than I found them. So I do believe in the power of us coming together as well.

This is such an isolating process and it's incredible to have the Centre for Women's Justice and the End Violence Against Women Coalition representing this pattern on behalf of us because when we go to them as individuals and say, we just fobbed off with... I had the CPS lawyer crying when I went for my right to review when I said, what are you going to do?

You basically said to him, go on, keep going with it. Well, thank you both. We're joined by Rachel Chris, who's one of the founders of End Violence Against Women. Rachel, why have you decided to go ahead and seek this judicial review? Well, we haven't decided this lightly. In fact, we've spent many years trying to explain to the CPS what's going wrong we're hearing stories like Gina's and

Beth's every day in fact since we launched this piece of work on Monday we've had countless phone calls from women in very similar situations and we're extremely sad that all of our efforts to really get through to the CPS, the impact on the change in approach to rape and serious sexual assault that we know has happened since around 2017, is having such a devastating effect on women's lives and on women's access to justice. And this is our last straw, really. We've got no other option other than to challenge them in this way. Now, the Crown Prosecution Service has repeatedly denied that its approach has changed.

Here's what they said to us. Decisions whether or not to prosecute are based on whether our legal tests are met, no other reason, and we always seek to prosecute where there is sufficient evidence to do so. What evidence do you have that it has changed? Well we have substantial evidence that there has been a change in approach. The CPS more than 10 years ago did make a concerted effort to look at these what are often very difficult cases to get to court. They're often cases where there's been

rape within relationships, there's grooming cases, and these have always been difficult. And they worked very hard to develop an approach to decision making around charging that would mean they could look very carefully at the evidence and ignore what we know are really dangerous prejudices and rape myths that are held really by a lot of people and in particular by juries. And they knew that they were second guessing jury decision making. And that was preventing them bringing charges on cases. And we've had some really impressive progress.

I think you'll agree that the convictions of the Rotherham grooming gangs, for example, are an example of where if you take the merits basedbased approach you look really closely at the evidence and at the abuser rather than just how a jury might perceive the victim in the case then you can bring these cases. We are aware that there has been a training programme throughout the CPS in 2017 that was really going against bringing this merits-based approach. Prosecutors were being coached to drop that and just look at the code test and really make a decision. Is there more than a 50% chance of conviction? We think that they were using what they perceived to be the prejudices of juries to make those decisions. And we've got really strong evidence from the stats. From about 2014, we saw an increase both in the number of people reporting rape to the police

and in the number of rapes going through to court that increase really turned around in 2017 where we started to see a drop off so now instead of a one in five chance of a report of rape ending up in a being heard in a court it's now a one in 25 chance how sure are you it's the cps that you should be focusing on so many women are coming forward the police have had severe cuts is it the cps or the police you need to be looking at i think there's certainly challenges across the whole criminal justice system but what we know is that these training courses have happened in the CPS. And we're hearing from sources within the system that the merits-based approach has been dropped. If you look at the CPS website, you'll find no mention of the merits-based approach.

When a couple of years ago, it was really all over the guidance that prosecutors who were specialising in rape were given. There was a lot of training given within the CPS up to 2017 to teach them how to take what is the kind of human rights approach to bringing rape cases. All of that got dropped, and that is a substantive change. We think the change within the CPS has created a sort of feedback loop, because the police officers who are getting these reports and building these cases now know that the threshold has increased and that it's going to be much harder for their case to result in a charging decision. So they're bringing fewer cases through to the CPS now because they know that they're very unlikely to get through. You're beginning a very

long process. What outcome are you really hoping for? It is a long process and it's expensive and it's extremely risky for small women's organisations like ours. But what we really want is we want them to go back to taking an approach to making charging decisions on rape that is fair, that is compliant with the Human Rights Act. We need women to have confidence that when they make a complaint of rape, they will be listened to, they will be taken seriously, and every endeavour will be taken to bring it to court, so a jury and a judge can decide, rather than a faceless bureaucrat to decide. We want the CPS to reinstate the merits-based approach, and we want them to review the cases that have been dropped in the last two years because as we've heard today refusing women justice has another impact on them it is re-traumatizing women and it's sending the really strong message to abusive

abusers that they can act with impunity and that's not good for anybody. How confident are you that the judicial review will go ahead? I'm very confident that we've got very strong evidence that there has been a change in approach, that that change in approach was unlawful, that they didn't consult properly with stakeholders and they're not meeting their duties under the Human Rights Act. So it will go ahead. We've been crowdfunding to fund the judicial review and we've reached our first target. We're determined that we will not let them get away with really denying women justice and we will go ahead with it. I was talking to Rachel, Chris, Gina and Beth and we would like to hear from you if your case was

dropped please get in touch with us through the website. Now still to come in today's programme, as the second series of Killing Eve gets underway to what extent does it fit a pattern of women being obsessed with women. The favourite, Rebecca and Notes on a Scandal, seem to fit the same pattern. And the serial, the fourth episode of A Woman

on the Edge of Time. Now we'll also soon know who will be the next occupant of number 10 and if you have any questions you'd like to put to the new Prime Minister you can join a live election hostings on BBC One on Tuesday the 18th of June.

The candidates for Conservative Leader will enter into debate shaped by your questions. We'd like you to submit them in advance and if your question is chosen you'll be able to put it to the candidates live from your local BBC studio. So email haveyoursay at bbc.co.uk with your question and don't forget to include your name and your contact number if you're interested in joining in. Now on Late Night Woman's Hour

this week Emma Barnett's guests are Miranda Sawyer and Sally Hughes and they're discussing arguments not the kind that blow up and blow over but the ones that go on and on. I don't mean bickering, bickering is quite sweet. Bickering can be about anything really you know it can be like what you're about to have for tea you know the fact that you've got to go to your mother-in-law's you know something you know just it's just general chit-chat bickering, really. And we know this also because if you look at bickering in kind of films, bickering is often presented as the kind of precursor to a romance, right? Long-term disputes are different and they are harder to deal with.

And what they are about is things that you just fundamentally disagree on. And it might be, you know, I know of people who say, for instance, have got different political views and they don't want to talk about that. But it's even more fundamental than that. It's things like money, how you bring your kids up. It can be also things like who does what around the house. That's an absolute classic one. But there's also a really great one, which is taste. So taste around your house.

So obviously I have brilliant taste. I have excellent taste. I know exactly how to decorate our house. But unfortunately, my husband has different tastes. His taste is quite nice. It's not as good as mine. But, you know, what can you do about it? And what happens is we end up in this kind of status.

So we both agree that something kind of needs to be done. Like we need to get, I don't know shutters or curtains or we need to get a different rug or that carpet's a bit horrible and we can't agree so nothing gets done so you just sit there with a kind of horrible carpet that actually you both hate and i've ages ago i put something about this up on facebook and somebody put up that they actually had no curtains or any form of like blinds or anything in their sitting room for three years because they couldn't agree. Yes. So basically, one half of the relationship wanted Venetian blinds, which is just a terrible idea. And the other half of the relationship wants some form of shutters, which I think is fine. But anyway, they couldn't agree had nothing and then another friend said the only way that her friends could resolve this incredible dispute which was a similar dispute around what you had on your windows

was they went to John Lewis and they both chose the most ugly curtains that they could find because they knew they would both hate them equally and they used those. Miranda continued to talk about friendship how do you handle it when a close friend suddenly doesn't want to be your friend anymore? We emailed for him back and then she just didn't want to talk to me anymore. And it was really weird. It was really, really odd. How did it make you feel? Really angry at the beginning.

I think that's quite common. So I was really, really cross and I thought, well, should I phone her? But then it seems like I'm taking it to her. So if she doesn't want to be with my friend, then I can't really be her friend. So then it's just a process of unravelling. And that's quite weird as well. So what happened was eventually she blocked me on Facebook.

And so then you, but we have mutual friends. So you hear about things. So it's quite, it is quite difficult. But also there's an element of honesty around it so I think that because perhaps this issue had been danced around and I hadn't really acknowledged it it's out in the open now it's done and so what that means is you have to just deal with the situation as it is and acknowledge that it's painful and it's really tricky and there is fallout from that but you cannot force someone to be friends with you. You just can't.

And Late Night Woman's Hour is out every week and you can find it by subscribing to BBC Sounds. The name of Hannah Arendt had rather gone out of fashion until recently. There was a spike in the sales of her best known book, The Origins of Totalitarianism,

in 2016, and she's often quoted, particularly in discussions about fake news, which she's said to have been the first to identify. So why has this German Jew who escaped the Nazis in 1941 become such a popular political thinker 44 years after her death? Well, Dr. Michele Haroni is the editor of the Journal of Holocaust Research and the author of Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Total Domination. She joins us from Israel. Lindsay Stonebridge is Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at Birmingham University. Lindsay, what do we know of her early life and its influence on her political thinking?

Yes, I mean, Hannah Arendt was a woman who lived in dark times and thought and wrote about dark times, always from the position of an outsider. She was a woman. She was a Jew. She was a refugee. She was a pariah. She was born in Germany, 1906, the only child of left-wing, doting parents. She was much loved, very precocious, very, very, very smart.

And her family life made her at home in the world, at home in the world of ideas and love. Outside, not so good. She was precocious. She was clever. She was a rebel. I mean, she led a school rebellion against a teacher. She encountered two tragedies in her only life, the death of her father from syphilis and his madness and anti-Semitism in the school play. So she started off with an inside-outsider perspective. That all changed in the 30s. She was very, very clever. She was precocious in terms of her reading of philosophy.

She was taught by great people like Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers and Husserl. In 1933, she started researching anti-Semitic propaganda and was arrested by the Gestapo and then had to flee Germany. Michael, it was in 1933 that she fled Nazi Germany for France. What impact did that experience of actually fleeing have on her? Hello, first of all. I think... Hello, Michal? Michal, I don't know if you can hear me.

We can't hear you. We're going to struggle to get you back, and I'll come back, Lindsay, to you until we make the line to Israel work again. You said she was a refugee, but how did she think of herself? Did she think of herself as a refugee? Just before she died, she said to one of her former students she didn't think the real story of Jewish refugees had yet been told.

Up until a point, yes, I mean, she was the first person to really understand what it meant to be a refugee. This wasn't just an unfortunate crisis. This was a crisis in the way we thought about living together, a crisis in the nation state. She fought for that. She thought hard about it. But in the later part of her life, she pulled back from recognising herself in that position. And it wasn't until later, I think, that she began to think, yeah, that kind of pariah status, I mean, she's always a pariah thinker, had a deeper significance,

which of course we're seeing now. Now, the origins of totalitarianism, this is the book that suddenly enjoyed the spike in 2016. It was written in 1951. What did you say the conditions were which led to totalitarianism? Well, yes, and stop me if this sounds familiar. There were five key conditions. One, racism, the racism that comes from the history of imperialism and colonialism. Two, economic expansion for expansion's sake,

that kind of sense of markets running away with themselves. Third thing, an alliance between what she called the mob, the crowd, and the elite. Not the liberal elite, but the super, super elite. Then there was a decline of what she called the nation state, the decline of common interest, decline of common conversation, which also helped. And finally, anti-Semitism. Those different elements came together. They crystallize into the conditions of totalitarianism. And what kind of politics did she see as resisting totalitarianism? Well, she was very much believed in a political community of people who could be and discuss in the world.

So thinking is key to everything Arendt says. She was the thinking person, but she didn't think thinking was there to master the world. Thinking was a way of being with others in the world. So that's what she modelled, her idea of a perfect, not perfect, but a political community that might resist that. That has its pitfalls when you live in very, very dark times and the world is coming off its axis. I think we have Israel back again. So let's try.

Mikael, hello, can you hear me now? Yes, I'm here. Okay. Now, she attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann and coined the phrase, the banality of evil evil and I think it was a phrase that at the time caused a lot of controversy. Why? Yes that's true. She was in the trial as a reporter of the New Yorker magazine from New York and in her first first book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, the subtitle of the book was a report on the banality of evil. And one of the reasons why it was so controversial

was that she didn't really explain what she meant by the banality of evil. Oh dear, we are having terrible trouble with this line, aren't we? Lindsay, maybe you can pick up where Michael left off. Why was the banality of evil so controversial? It was controversial, yes, and is still controversial. And Michael can speak to that probably better than I can. But I think when the first trial of Nazis happened, the Nuremberg trial,

she was saying there's no law, there's no way we can grasp this evil. This evil is new. We haven't seen this in the world before. When she finally went to Jerusalem to look at what she said, look at this living nightmare in the face. There was this guy with a cold,

talking cliches, self-important. And she looked at him and she thought, well, clearly evil, really evil things have happened here, but you don't look like a figure of a demonic kind of evilness. I think she was wrong about Eichmann. I think he was more actually calculating and vicious than she let on. But she was onto something really interesting, which is how can we, by doing banal acts, create real evil? What is the kind of thoughtlessness that means we can create the conditions for evil? And that's a real political question, because a lot of people don't think, I'm going to go and do nasty things to refugees.

They actually think, some people do think that, but not many, they actually think, I'm going to administer this problem. That produces evil. But the banality is with the kind of talk and administration and the thinking that goes on. That's what she was picking up on. It's a terrific point. You see what Michal says about this, but it didn't go down well at the time. Unfortunately, we're not going to be able to reestablish the line to Israel, which is really, really disappointing. When you said Michal would be able to tell us how she's regarded in Israel today, which is really, really disappointing. When you said Michal would

be able to tell us how she's regarded in Israel today, how is she regarded there? Much better than she was, I think, more recently. It was her reporting on the trial upset a lot of people, not only in Israel, but also in New York. She was considered insensitive. She was considered, her tone was wrong. Arendt was a really good ironist. People have a real problem with women being ironic. We're supposed to be sort of genuine. She's not a great empath.

She's not very empathetic. She sounded cruel. It sounded, when you hadn't read the book, like she was dismissing the Holocaust as a banal act. She wasn't at all. She was trying to get her head round what it was that made that happen. And she brought up the fact that

the thing about totalitarianism, the thing about that kind of evil, is it implicates everybody. So she talked about collusion as well. For all those reasons, she was considered a pariah, not just a pariah to Israel. Now, feminist scholars, I think, were among the first to call for a reappraisal of her work after her death. Why did she not think of herself as a feminist? That's a very interesting question. She was once asked that question by a student and she answered enigmatically, vive la différence.

And the other quote I like, she was asked, she was made, I think it was the first woman professor, I think it was Columbia, and she was asked, how does it feel to be a woman professor? And she turned around and she said, well, I'm quite happy with it because I've been a woman now for a long time. I don't think that gender was the thing that drove her. Friendship drove her.

Sexuality drove her. She was very interested in men, but the kind of way she thought through politics was definitely a politics of difference, but not one where sexual difference was the main driver. Now, as I mentioned, this huge spike in sales of the book after the election of Donald Trump, what notes of caution might be found in her work

on the rise of populism? Well, a lot. I mean, people started reading Arendt again because the shouty men were back. But I think what's really interesting, often misunderstood, Arendt knew, everyone knows that politicians lie. There's always been fake news.

There's always been lying in politics. The thing that she said in Origins, which I think is significant to now as well as then, is not the lying. It's when the lying has got to a point that we can't call out the truth. Why is that dangerous? Because we get lost at that point.

We can't actually have a fight about what's true or what's not. We get lost at that point. We get alienated. There's a rootlessness that makes people vulnerable, lonely, and therefore prey to kinds of fascism and nationalist identification. That's the problem with fake news. Professor Lindy Stonebridge, thank you very much, and thank you for picking up despite our loss of Israel.

Thank you very much for being with us this morning. Now, if you're a fan of Killing Eve, you'll have been there on Saturday night to see Villanelle, the elegant psychopath, recovering from the stab wound she suffered at the end of the first series at the hands of Eve, the MI6 agent tasked with bringing her to justice. But it's much more complicated than that. The two women are clearly obsessed with each other with something of an erotic charge between them. I think about you all the time. I think about what you're wearing and what you're doing and who you're doing it with. I think about what friends you have.

I think about what you eat before you work or what shampoo you use, what happened in your family. I think about your eyes and your mouth and what you feel when you your family. I think about your eyes and your mouth and what you feel when you kill someone. I think about what you have for breakfast. I just want to know everything. I think about you too. And

it's not an unfamiliar theme. Mrs. Danvers is obsessed with Rebecca. In The Favourite, the Queen, the Duchess and the young Baroness have equally strong feelings. And in Notes on a Scandal, an older teacher, Barbara, is preoccupied with the beautiful young Sheba. Why do we like to watch women in such circumstances? Well, Joanna Briscoe is a novelist. Shirin Kale is a freelance journalist. Shireen, how convinced are you by the obsession which we've just heard between Villanelle and Eve?

I'm very convinced by it. And I think that the reason the audiences have reacted so superbly to Killing Eve season one and season two, perhaps not to the same extent, is because it's just so incredibly satisfying to watch the dynamic between Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh on screen. They have such incredible chemistry. Emerald Fennell, the writer of season two, has said that it's very clear for her that it is definitely a sexual obsession. And I think to see that incredible sparky dynamic

between those two women on screen is something that we so often don't see represented in film or on TV. And that we so often don't see about presenters in film or on TV and that's why audiences are just drinking it up. Joanna, what do you make of it? I absolutely loved season one where I thought it was fascinating, this cat and mouse

game and it was subtle and you had a growing awareness that it was a real fixation. I'm finding this season a bit on the nose. We're a bit early into it, aren't we? I've seen the whole thing. Oh, you binge-watched it. So, it is addictive, I have to say. Having said that, I've

watched the whole thing. I've binge-watched but and it's amazing. The acting is incredible. I find it a little bit Eve, you're obsessed with her. It's a little bit stated sometimes but it's a fascinating subject, one I deeply love. Now, The Favourite, Shirin, had three women in obsessive relationships.

What did you think of the way they were portrayed in that film? What I loved about The Favourite, and I adored it as a film, was yes it's about female obsession but it's also about sexual intrigue and it's about power I think so often when we think about representing women on film it's often well intentioned but we frame them in very positive lights it's about female solidarity and friendship and there's this uh feminist kind of discourse which says that women should support other women and don't get wrong, I absolutely believe that they should. But women are just as capable of being horrible and cruel and mean and nasty and backstabbing and treacherous as men. And to see The Favourite and to see that power struggle between those three women play out in such a magnificent way on film

and to see these women be conniving and treacherous and devious, I adored it because it was a side of the female lust for power that is so often not represented. How true is that, that suddenly we're, you know, after sisterhood and everybody helping each other, how important is it that we have these kind of relationships where maybe women are not quite so perfect anymore? I think it is important.

I think to some extent that's always been represented, but somewhat in a more dodgy way in the past, you know, women catfight. Whereas actually I think now we can accept that, of course, female relationships aren't always perfect and it's not all about solidarity. And I think the particular subject that we're discussing actually often is to do with an imbalance of power. And I think, you know, the woman who becomes obsessed with another one is often lacking something in herself and is finding another woman absolutely fascinating because,

as occurs in many novels, that the object of the gaze is more daring and the one watching and being obsessed is on the sidelines and really absorbing the energy from someone else. And I think this is all a totally fascinating subject. What other literary examples would you put in this category? I mentioned Rebecca. Yes, which is an arch obsession novel. Well, from very early, The Bostonians by Henry James has one woman obsessed with another in the guise of politics. They're all the French novels, Colette and Violette Le Duc and Evelyn Maillard, where they're usually set in school

and it's usually someone younger who becomes obsessed. Sarah Waters does it wonderfully in Affinity, The Paying Guests. There's many, many. The Woman Upstairs by Claire Massoud is another example of it. I think it's about identity and one's own identity. And it's not necessarily about the object in the way that the gazer thinks it is. How would you, Shirin, describe the obsessive relationship at the core of Elena Veranti's Neapolitan novels, which were so popular when they were first published? I think it goes back to what you were saying just now about a woman looking at another

woman and seeing in that woman something that she lacks in herself. I think in the Neapolitan novels, what you have is Lila and Lanoue, and Lanoue is much more timid. She plays by the rules. She's very smart, conscientious and hardworking. And then she sees in Lila this absolute force of nature who is willing to transgress, who is the person who leads her down the tunnel, who is the person who will stand up to the you know the solara brothers and you i think actually a lot of it plays into the ways in which women internalize social conditioning so you project onto this other woman because this other woman represents the kind of courageous energy that you yourself lack you yourself feel unable to realize all the things that you would like to do but then you see

this woman who does all these things and doesn't seem to care and it's this absolute free spirit and so I think that really plays out in Elena Ferrante's novels and also just the very complicated ways in which women can have intense friendships with other women to an extent that I think many people don't really understand the sort of the sisterly nature of it, but also the kind of competition and that incredible bond, I think, is a really powerful thing. Joanna, I mean, these obsessive relationships have been, to some extent, at the heart of your work. Sleep With Me features a woman who inspires obsession in others and then is obsessed with one of the other characters.

Why was it such an appealing theme for you? I think in youth I had been obsessed. I'll come out with that. Not in a kind of stalker way, but in a, you know, in a very, and often it is about youth, this theme. There are a lot of young protagonists, actually Sally Rooney to some extent, who experience this. So I'd had that. And then it was just something that I thought, actually Sally Rooney to some extent, who experienced this.

So I'd had that. And then it was just something that I thought, there's a kind of outsider element coming in, which I'm fascinated by. And I realise I've done it again in my next novel in a very different way. But it is an obsession with someone, what we're talking about, someone who has something you don't. And I think that can also tip into a relationship that turns toxic.

Actually, the film All About Eve, very obsessive, and then it becomes competitive. So that's an element of it as well. And I think it's just something I love looking at a female through the female gaze. Often in the past, authors have hidden behind the male gaze, like Willa Cather, they've had to, whereas we don't have to. But to what extent are these obsessions almost always erotic? I think that's a really complicated one. I think straight women can become obsessed with other women. I think, you know, in All About Eve, this is happening. She's also, what we were talking about, the energy level is there.

She's taking Villanelle's daring and energy. But there must be something homoerotic in a lot of it. I think it's about possession, and whether it's sexual possession or intellectual, emotional possession, it all grades into each other in a way. I think, yes, it is very much about sexual and erotic energy between two people um i would also say though that in popular culture

the word obsessed has slightly lost its meaning you know if you speak to a generation of teen girls they'll say they're obsessed with rihanna i don't think that that's the same level of erotic fixation that we're talking about here and i think perhaps that word is slightly degraded from that original meaning but yes I think it's really important to recognize that when two women are playing off each other in this very sparky kind of almost nuclear fission type way there's always some sort of erotic charge there in my opinion of very sort of fundamental level. It has become very popular now and I do wonder are we a bit disappointed that sisterhood might be going out of popularity and dangerous obsession is in? I don't think that they're necessarily mutually exclusive I think feminism is evolving and growing in very interesting ways as well as there's always

a backlash and I think we can incorporate this into it. So I don't think it's necessarily a contradiction. And I'm excited by seeing this. Also, it means there can be two female leads on screen, which never really used to happen. I was talking to Joanna Briscoe and Shirin Kale. We had lots of response from you on the proposed legal action against the Crown Prosecution Service in cases where rape was not pursued to the court. Nick said, incredibly brave and powerful testimony from two women who've suffered horrific abuse and have been let down by the CPS.

Please listen again if you missed it. Appallingly dismissive treatment. Terrible. Helen said, good thing I was needing bread while listening to the Women's Hour discussion of the inadequacies of the CPS with regard to rape prosecution. At least I could divert my anger to useful purpose. Tess said, I'm listening to this feature and devastated for the women featured and the injustice they've had to face. I'm wondering if one of the large problems is the attitudes of a jury likely to be misinformed about rape and sexual abuse. Wouldn't it be a good idea for any jury sitting on cases of sexual abuse to receive packs of information on the subject. And someone who

didn't want to use her name said, I'm listening to your piece on the poor women who had their cases dropped by the CPS, crying my eyes out as I have gone through something similar. An abusive, coercive, controlling ex-partner brutally raped me and i had doctors and counseling evidence and another of his partner's corroboration as evidence and it was dropped i am so angry on hannah arendt lisa said arendt offers important tools for the analysis of our world. Just one example. She noted that totalitarian dictators use repetition of lies and falsehoods as a weapon to erase the truth. If a lie, no matter how ridiculous, is repeated often enough, for example, a global Jewish conspiracy, it will be believed.

She was also very sceptical about human rights, noting that by the time someone has to depend on their human rights, it is too late. Human rights cannot offer protection in the absence of a state. And then on women obsessed with women and killing Eve, Stephen said, Very good discussion about killing Eve. Strange, though, that you completely ignored

the psychopathology, the murder, violence, treachery, destruction and crime, as if these are a trivial backdrop to obsession. Now, do join Jane tomorrow when she'll be discussing Twitter abuse

and why women keep using social media even though there is so much abuse. Join Jane tomorrow just after two minutes past ten, if you can. Until then, from all of us, bye-bye. I'm Simon Mundy, host of Don't Tell Me The Score, the podcast that uses sport to explore life's bigger questions, covering topics like resilience, tribalism, and fear with people like this.

We keep talking about fear, and to me, I always want to bring it back to, are you actually in danger? That's Alex Honnold, star of the Oscar-winning film Free Solo, in which he climbed a 3,000-foot sheer cliff without ropes. So, I mean, a lot of those, you know, social anxiety things, and certainly I've had a lot of issues with talking to attractive people in my life. I'm like, oh no, like I could never do that. And it certainly feels like you're going to die,

but realistically you're not going to die. And that's all practice too. Have a listen to Don't Tell Me The Score, full of useful everyday tips from incredible people on BBC Sounds. I'm Sarah Trelevan, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered.

There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this?

From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now.