Woman's Hour

Lockdown anniversary, Nicola Sturgeon, Misogyny as a hate crime

03.23.2021 - By BBC Radio 4Play

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Download on the App StoreGet it on Google Play

It's exactly a year since Boris Johnson delivered the instruction to stay at home. To mark the occasion, we've assembled three women of different ages, backgrounds and circumstances to discuss their experiences of being confined for the most part in the home. Actor and author Sheila Hancock and writers Kerry Hudson and Yasmin Rahman join Emma.

The future of Nicola Sturgeon has been in the balance in recent weeks as she's faced not one but two major inquiries. Yesterday afternoon an independent inquiry by James Hamilton QC cleared the First Minister of breaching the ministerial code. But this morning a separate cross-party committee of inquiry said the Scottish government's handling of harassment complaints against Alex Salmond was "seriously flawed", that Nicola Sturgeon had misled their inquiry in her evidence and that women had been badly let down by the government. Political correspondent Alex Massie, crime writer Val McDermid and Alex Massie from the Spectator join Emma.

Last week’s announcement that the police in England and wales are going to start recording misogyny as a hate crime in the wake of the killing of Sarah Everard was heralded as a victory by many women’s rights campaigners but that reaction has been far from uniform. Many groups working in the arena of domestic abuse and violence against women actually think it could be counter productive and even make the situation worse. We talk to Dr Fiona Vera-Gray from the University of Durham who has written The Right Amount of Panic who thinks the move to change the law is a knee jerk reaction and also to Professor Louise Mallany who has worked with Nottinghamshire Police which has recorded misogyny as a hate crime since 2016

Presenter: Emma Barnett

Producer: Lucinda Montefiore

More episodes from Woman's Hour