Thought for the Day

Good morning.

The monks’ simple message was that it’s possible to be different, and their choice to step out of their monastic retreat into the world was just as significant. By embodying mindfulness and peace so publicly, without being overtly political, they symbolised an alternative to the challenges facing American society. I think the response showed how deeply people yearn for that alternative, and that’s another source of hope in these difficult times.

Good morning. How do you feel about mind control? New research from a laboratory in Zurich suggests it may be possible to make people less selfish – by sending electrical currents through their brains. Forty-four volunteers were asked to divide money between themselves and an anonymous partner. Remarkably, when certain neural pathways at the front and back of the head were stimulated, participants gave more away.

14 FEB 26

13 FEB 26

12 FEB 26

Good Morning,

In the rushed attempt to reckon with the Epstein files and what they mean, it’s become hard to hear from and easy to forget the women who were actually the victims of his crimes.

But if we are serious about understanding the forces that lie behind a network in which women and girls were trafficked for sex, we’d surely do well to start with the witness of their victims.

Whenever these women have spoken, it is striking how eloquent they are, not just about what has happened to them, but also about the huge challenge of bringing the perpetrators of these crimes to justice.

Many of them point to the heroism of Virginia Giuffre who, against massive intimidation and, according to other survivors, the cost of her life, helped to start the process that brought these crimes to light.

In her memoir - Nobody’s Girl – she wrote, ‘I hope for a world in which predators are punished, not protected, victims are treated with compassion, not shamed; and powerful people face the same consequences as anyone else.’

I read her book whilst researching a story for an opera about modern slavery. As part of my research, I interviewed a woman who had been trafficked for sex alongside the policewoman who had rescued her from the trafficking gang.

‘Not once in 30 years of law enforcement,’ the policewoman said, ‘did I meet a pimp or sex trafficker who expressed remorse. They see women as product in a business transaction.’

Her words chimed with Giuffre’s insight that we live in a culture that ‘tells girls their primary worth is to appeal to men,’ mere objects to discard once used. Their humanity redacted.

Virginia Giuffre wanted to live in a world where victims were treated with compassion; not compassion as sympathy, but as a radical form of criticism, that says, ‘this hurt is to be taken seriously; it’s not normal; and we have to act.’

At his execution, he entered into that hurt and even came to embody it. On the cross his silence is eloquence. He redacts himself and becomes the Victim God; a witness to, and reckoning with, corrupt and controlling power.

One common theme is the total lack of remorse and sense of entitlement.

Good Morning.

Here lies a quiet, but powerful, antidote to the horror Rabbi Gryn was forced to experience, when tyrants replaced god, dictating who must live or die.

09 FEB 26

07 FEB 26

Good morning.

When we talk about justice, we picture punishment, verdicts delivered, sentences pronounced, the drama of a courtroom.

We talk less about what justice is for, what kind of life it is meant to make possible.

I’ve been thinking about that because I’ve just finished jury service.

For days I sat with eleven strangers, reminded how fragile justice is, how much it depends on ordinary people listening carefully, trying to hold someone else’s story without breaking it.

That experience drew me back to Rose Heilbron, a woman from Liverpool and one of the great figures of British legal history.

My own family comes from that same stretch of Liverpool, and I imagine what it meant for girls like my mother to see someone who sounded a little like them taking her seat in the Old Bailey.

Her career was marked by remarkable firsts: among the first women appointed King’s Counsel, the first to lead a murder prosecution, the first woman judge at the Old Bailey.

By simply being there, she changed who Britain believed could speak with authority.

Her most lasting contribution came in the 1970s when she chaired a committee on the treatment of women reporting rape and sexual assault. It argued that complainants’ identities should be protected and their sexual history not used to discredit them.

Behind those reforms lay a conviction: justice cannot function if it humiliates the wounded. A system that deters the vulnerable from coming forward manufactures silence.

That conviction feels close this week. Recently released court documents in the United States again exposed how wealth and influence enabled the abuse of women and girls, perpetrators and collaborators protected with a vigour the victims’ could only dream of.

Rose Heilbron’s work lived inside that teaching. She understood that a courtroom should be a place where shame changes sides, where those exposed are finally covered, and those who abused power stand in the light.

Perhaps that is what justice is for: not the last word of a story, but the first breath after a long holding of breath –a fragile peace in which the vulnerable are believed, and the rest of us are changed by having listened.

Because a society is judged not only by how it punishes the guilty, but by how carefully it guards those who risk everything to speak.