FiLiA

"When you normalize paid rape in prostitution, it becomes confusing to an entire culture, even for [the] government, to define what consent is and what isn't, what rape is and what isn't. "

In this episode, FiLiA Volunteer Luba Fein talks to  Dr Melissa Farley and Dr Inge Kleine about the results of their latest research (also co-authored by Kerstin Neuhaus, Yoanna McDowell, Silas Schulz and Saskia Nitschmann) revealing the most hidden secrets of sex buyers and why the men agreed to disclose their secrets.

Their report on 763 sex buyers in six countries investigates the attitudes and behavior of sex buyers/punters/Freier/puteros in Germany, USA, India, UK, Scotland, Cambodia.

Dr Christine Cocchiola talks to FiLiA Trustee Sally Jackson about the impact of coercive control on children and the Mother-Child relationship and how to heal together after abuse.

Dr. Christine Marie Cocchiola, DSW, LCSW is a Coercive Control Advocate, Educator, Researcher & Survivor. She is a college professor teaching social work in the CT College System for the last 20 years and is also an adjunct instructor at NYU. Her expertise is in the areas of intimate partner violence, trauma, and child abuse, developing and presenting workshops on these topics both nationally and internationally.  Christine, a Board Member of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, has supported policy codifying coercive control and has a small private practice, primarily serving victims and survivors of coercive control.   She is the creator of the Protective Parenting Program, supporting protective mothers on their journey of healing their children.

You can find more about her work on her website or follow her on Instagram.

We are very pleased to share this interview by Raquel Rosario Sanchez with Caitlin Roper, author of “Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating” which has just been published by Spinifex Press.

“Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating” exposes the inherent misogyny in the trade in sex dolls and robots modelled on the bodies of women and girls for men’s unlimited sexual use. From doll owners enacting violence and torture on their dolls, men choosing their dolls over their wives, dolls made in the likeness of specific women and the production of child sex abuse dolls, sex dolls and robots pose a serious threat to the status of women and girls.

Caitlin Roper is an activist, writer and Campaigns Manager at Collective Shout: for a world free of sexploitation, a grassroots campaigning movement against the objectification of women and sexualisation of girls in media, advertising and popular culture.

Caitlin is an author whose work has been published in a range of mainstream media outlets including The Guardian, ABC, Huffington Post, Sydney Morning Herald and Arena magazine. She contributed a commentary chapter to Prostitution Narratives: Stories of Survival in the Sex Trade (Spinifex Press, 2016). Caitlin Roper is a founding member of Adopt Nordic WA which advocates for implementation of the Nordic model of prostitution legislation in Western Australia. She has been a speaker and organiser for Reclaim the Night Perth. She is also aco-founder of the Feminist Academy of Technology and Ethics (the FATES).

“Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating”, is available on the FiLiA Bookshop, Spinifex Press and in all excellent bookstores. You can follow the work of the grassroots campaigning organisation Collective Shout on their website and social media. You can follow Caitlin Roper’s work on her Twitter and Instagram. 

Dr Emma Katz, a leading expert in coercive control and its impact on children is interviewed by FiLiA Trustee Sally Jackson.

A must for anyone working in the field or who cares about someone it has affected, Emma describes what coercive control is like for Mothers and their children and importantly how the Mother/child relationship affects its impact and their recovery.

Dr Emma Katz is Senior Lecturer in Childhood & Youth at Liverpool Hope University and is the author of the much-anticipated monograph Coercive Control in Children’s and Mothers’ Lives (Oxford University Press, June 2022). She was a member of the Expert Advisory Panel for the HARM Network/Research England’s Domestic Abuse Policy Guidance for UK Universities (2021 Her publications are internationally acclaimed, winning awards including the Wiley Prize for best paper published in Child Abuse Review 2015–18, and the Corinna Seith Prize judged by Women Against Violence Europe (WAVE).

Coercive Control in Children's and Mothers' Lives is available to purchase from the FiLiA Book Shop.

"A lot of the messages around domestic abuse is that you just leave, right? So you just walk out that door and everything's fine. Well, that really couldn’t be further from the truth."

FiLiA Trustee Sally Jackson talks to Natalie Page, founder of #thecourtsaid, a campaign to challenge the mishandling of domestic abuse within the family courts. 

Natalie discusses the problems faced by Mothers navigating their way through a process that is not fit for purpose and shares some of the options available and the work that she and other women are doing to provide safety to Mums and their children going through the system.

In 2021, Natalie was awarded the Centre for Women’s Justice and Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize for her work preventing violence against women and children. She has founded a not-for-profit called Survivor Family Network, focused on furthering the rights of mothers and children in family court. Besides all her campaigning work, Natalie continues to work behind the scenes to support other mothers going through the family courts after domestic abuse  Web: thecourtsaid.org and survivorfamilynetwork.com

"It was shocking. I felt a great sense of betrayal by the Police. How could they possibly do that to me? What right have they got? I've paid my taxes all my life and they spent that paying a man to come to sleep with me and deceive me. They were playing with our lives because they thought they could get away with anything so they just had a good time while doing it."

FiLiA Spokeswoman Raquel Rosario Sánchez speaks with Belinda, Alison and Helen Steel - co-authors of Deep Deception: The story of the Spycops network by the women who uncovered the shocking truth- who share their experiences of being deceived by the State, the process of writing their powerful book and how they found the courage to move forward.

These five women were targeted by the UK Police, through men who deceived them into intimate relationships in order to get access to their activist networks. 

At the time they were targeted, Belinda was a 24-year-old non-activist who worked as an accounts assistant with the Central Electricity Generating Board. Helen Steel was a 22-year-old gardener and environmental and social justice activist with London Greenpeace. She later became one half of ‘the McLibel Two’ in a gargantuan fight against the McDonalds corporation. Alison was 29 years old at the time and was an English and Media Studies teacher and political activist with the Colin Roach Centre.

Deep Deception is not a book about men. This is a book about women who found a tremendous source of strength within themselves, and with each other. It is a book about women who are fighting an institutional form of misogyny: the infiltration of policemen in activist groups and what happens when the State decides to deliberately target women. 

This could have been a book about women whose lives were destroyed and who were left with no trust in each other or in justice. Instead, Deep Deception is an inspirational story of fortitude, truth and dignity.

You can purchase Deep Deception: The story of the spycop network, by the women who uncovered the shocking truth from the FiLiA Book Shop. Please learn more about the women’s stories at the Police Out of Our Lives website. You can also read more about the Spycops scandal on the website built by the women who were targeted by the Police. 

At the moment, there is a public inquiry about the Spycops scandal. You can learn more about the inquiry on its website which started hearing evidence in late 2020.

"I didn't know what personal persecution felt like before. I could imagine, of course. But there is something very physical about those experiences of being hounded or being piled on by a mob that feels very visceral."

Rosie Kay talks to FiLiA's Raquel Rosario Sánchez about how she came to be forced out of the dance company that she founded after bullying from inside the organisation and a targeted campaign to ruin her reputation. The controversy arose from opinions, expressed inside her own home, that biological sex is real, material to dance and that these conversations must be had openly and without abuse.   

She will not go quietly. On the contrary, she has decided to push back bolder and louder than ever before.

Rosie Kay is an experienced choreographer and accomplished dance professional. She graduated from the London Contemporary Dance School in 1998, founded the Rosie Kay Dance Company in Birmingham in 2004. Her productions have been acclaimed for their creativity and their sensitive treatment of topics such as sexual violence, conspiracy theories and military intervention.

Since leaving the Rosie Kay Dance Company Rosie has launched a new dance company called K2Co, which is preparing to delve into the sex and gender debate, exploring it through dance. “K2CO will create, produce and tour three new works over three years as a ‘Trilogy of Sex’ exploring themes and ideas around sex, identity, technology, bodies, women’s history and literature,” the company states in its mission statement.

You can read her first-person essay ‘My body will not be erased’, which she wrote for UnHerd. And you can donate to her legal fees to help her move forward.

Learn more about K2Co Dance Company on their new website. Rosie can also be found on Twitter at @RosieKayK2CO.

FiLiA Spokeswoman Raquel Rosario Sánchez speaks to author and activist Melinda Tankard Reist about pornography’s desensitisation of male sexuality and its traumatic effect on women and girls. Hear also about Melinda's work with children and teenagers in schools, her campaigning work with Collective Shout, and the way forward out of a culture of sexualised violence against women and girls.

Melinda Tankard Reist is an author, speaker, campaigner, and advocate for women and girls. She is best known for her work addressing sexualisation, objectification, the harms of pornography, sexual exploitation, trafficking, and violence against women. She has recently been appointed Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Culture and Ethics, Notre Dame University, Sydney. 

She is the Founder and Movement Director of the campaigning organisation Collective Shout. She is the editor of six books including Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls (Spinifex Press, 2009), Big Porn Inc: Exposing the harms of the global pornography industry (Spinifex Press, 2011, co-edited with Dr Abigail Bray), Prostitution Narratives: Stories of survival in the sex trade and Broken Bonds: Surrogate mothers speak out (Spinifex Press, 2019, co-edited with Jennifer Lahl and Renate Klein).

Recently, Melinda published He Chose Porn Over Me, a collection of essays written by 25 women who share their stories of broken relationships and enduring abuse by porn-obsessed male partners.

He Chose Porn Over Me was launched in early August 2022 during a global event hosted by Collective Shout. The book is available from the FiLiA Bookshop and at bookstores worldwide and via its publisher Spinifex.

You can learn more about Melinda’s work against a culture of sexualisation and objectification of women and girls on her website.  You can learn more about the campaigning work of Collective Shout on their website. 

Melinda can also be found on social media such as Twitter and Instagram.

"It's a double taboo - as a society, we don't talk about money and we don't talk about abuse. So when we are talking about economic abuse, there are quite a few barriers."

FiLiA Trustee Sally Jackson chats to Nicola Sharp-Jeffs  OBE about Economic Abuse and why it has been recognised in the Domestic Abuse Act (2021) for the first time. Nicola has led the way in understanding its impact but also importantly working alongside survivors, improving the responses to the many women who are subjected to it. Her new book examines how far we have come, and the work yet to do.

Nicola is the founder and CEO of Surviving Economic Abuse and an Emeritus research fellow at Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit Awards and the Author of Understanding and Responding to Economic Abuse.

LinkedIn: @Surviving-Economic-Abuse

Buy Nicola's book from the FiLiA Bookshop.

In this episode of the FiLiA Podcast, FiLiA spokeswoman, Raquel Rosario Sánchez, talks to Stephanie Davies-Arai, the Founder and Director of Transgender Trend about her campaigning work to protect children from unnecessary medicalisation and sexist stereotypes.

She created the organisation after speaking with a group of parents based in the UK, who were concerned about the current trend to diagnose ‘gender non-conforming’ children as transgender. On June 1st, 2022 she was included in the Queen’s Birthday Honours and received a British Empire Medal for “services to children” as a recognition of her vital work.

Stephanie is a communication skills trainer and the author of Communicating with Kids. She has worked with parents and teachers for over twenty years, including eight years at a primary school in East Sussex in various roles including parent governor. She is an experienced speaker on parenting, feminism and ‘transgender’ children. She has spoken at events around the UK, including in the House of Commons and the House of Lords and has been interviewed across the media, including Good Morning Britain, BBC Woman’s Hour, The Today programme and Newsnight.

You can learn more about Stephanie Davis-Arai and her ground-breaking work on behalf of children on her personal website and about Transgender Trend on their website. You can support their work by donating to the organisation.

You can follow Stephanie on social media at @CWKnews and @Transgendertrd.