FiLiA

Activist, journalist, a founding leader of the Women’s Equality Party and described as a ‘modern-day suffragette’. Sophie Walker worked as an international news agency journalist for nearly twenty years and is also an ambassador for the National Autistic Society, campaigning for better support and understanding of autism, particularly in women and girls. Sophie was also one of the Women alongside Claire Heuchan and Cordelia Fines who opened the FiLiA2017 Conference.

The paperback version of her book Five Rules For Rebellion has just come out and explains how we can ‘convert our confusion and impatience into a powerful force for change.’

Listen to Sophie speak to each of those Five Rules and join the Rebellion!

In this episode of the FiLiA podcast, Fiona MacKensie, from the campaign group ‘We Can’t Consent to This’ talks to Gemma Aitchison about her campaign to make the government ban the so called ‘rough sex defence’. Now set to become law in England and Wales, those accused of murder and assault will no longer be able to claim that the victim consented to their death or injury as part of rough sex or a sex game gone wrong.

60 UK women have been killed by men who claimed a sex game had gone wrong, and in the last five years, the defence was successful in seven of the 17 killings of a woman which reached trial, with the man being found not guilty or receiving a manslaughter conviction.

The campaign is now moving to Northern Ireland where the Northern Ireland Justice Minister Naomi Long has opened a consultation to adopt a new law, expressly forbidding the use of “consent” defences to charges of violence for ABH and above.

Esther, a sex trade survivor from London, talks to FiLiA’s Luba Fein and explains why prostitution cannot be separated from abuse and exploitation. She became involved with activism against the sex trade because of what was happening to women still involved in prostitution, the structural discrimination which puts huge obstacles in the way of their attempts to exit, the hypocrisy of those who are apologists for the sex trade, and the clear targeting of ever-younger girls with messages sanitising it and normalising the sexualised violence which is ubiquitous in online porn.

On this episode of the FiLiA Podcast, Joan Smith talks to FiLiA’s Sally Jackson about the many ways in which our patriarchal system fails Women who have been subjected to violence from men.

Joan Smith is a novelist, journalist and human rights activist. She began writing about violence against women after covering the murders carried out by Peter Sutcliffe in the north of England, which she described in her book Misogynies. She is also the author of the Loretta Lawson crime novels, two of which were filmed by the BBC. She is a former Chair of the English PEN Writers in Prison Committee and has been Co-chair of the Mayor of London’s VAWG Board since 2013.

Her latest book is Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists.

Follow Joan on Twitter at @pollblonde

In this episode of the FiLiA Podcast, Luba Fein talks to Caroline Pugh-Roberts, a survivor of eight years of human trafficking. Caroline now works full time exclusively with trafficked persons through the Salvation Army and is an expert on human trafficking who is often called upon to testify as such in trials. She has spoken to and educated over 20 thousand people and is an international speaker. Caroline teaches about HT at the Canadian Police College and has trained the RCMP on the psychology of HT victims.

Caroline has received the Queens Diamond Jubilee medal, the Hope award and the John Robinson award for her work in this area.