FiLiA

Dr Wanda Wyporska, Executive Director of the Equality Trust, talks to FiLiA’s Public Policy Assistant Adeline about the 50th Anniversary of the Equal Pay Act, and why more work needs to be done to ensure women are being given a fair deal. Dr Wanda Wyporska, FRSA, is Executive Director at The Equality Trust, the national charity that campaigns to reduce social and economic inequality. She is a Visi...

Rebecca Mordan spoke with Sally Jackson prior to the FiLiA Conference in 2019 about her work and the amazing Greenham Women Everywhere project, which was shown at FiLiA in Bradford. After graduating from Bristol Old Vic and working in film, theatre and television, Rebecca became disillusioned by the dearth of roles and opportunities for women. A dynamic and enterprising artist, she created her own...

Esuantsiwa Jane Goldsmith is a writer, feminist activist and development consultant of English – Ghanaian heritage. In 1975 she was the first woman of colour to be elected President of Leicester University Student’s Union, in 2001 she became the first woman of colour to be elected Chair of the Fawcett Society. In 1977-9 Esua served as one of the first black volunteers to be sent on Voluntary Servi...

Laura Richards BSc, MSc. MBPsS is an award winning and world-renowned criminal behavioural analyst, investigator and advocate. On this podcast, Laura joins Gemma Aitchison in conversation about her current vital campaign to protect women and girls from male violence and abuse: that serial stalkers and domestic violence offenders will be included on a Serial Perpetrator Register. Laura explains why...

Marie Laguerre is a French feminist and author. She was assaulted on the street by a man during the summer of 2018. She posted the video of the attack online, which became viral and drew media attention. Marie used the opportunity to raise awareness about violence against women and sexism in general. The man who physically assaulted her was convicted to prison. The event also led to her being hara...

The Feminist Student Society at the University of Bristol, Women Talk Back! provides a space for women to engage in lively discussion and debate. They are in pursuit of global liberation from all forms of patriarchy. They therefore centre all women who experience misogyny, but who may also face racism, anti-lesbianism, classism and other forms of structural discrimination that arise from male domi...

Rahila Gupta is a writer, journalist and activist. She has published a number of books, short stories and poems, including Don’t Wake Me: The Ballad of Nihal Armstrong and Enslaved: The New British Slavery . Rahila has been involved with Southall Black Sisters for many years. She joins Sally Jackson in conversation about her work, the importance of stories, the significance of women organising in...

Jo Bartosch is a feminist writer and campaigner against the sex industry. She is the Founder and Director the of anti-pornography think tank Click Off . Click Off draws on feminist knowledge and aims to raise awareness about the harms of pornography, to share learning with legislators and to build a movement against pornography in the UK. Jo joins FiLiA’s Spokeswoman Gemma Aitchison in a discussio...

Sam Smethers talks to FiLiA’s Policy Assistant, Alice, about the UK Government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and the unseen impact on some of the most vulnerable women in society. The Fawcett Society is the UK’s leading charity campaigning for gender equality and women’s rights. Sam Smethers is the Chief Executive of the Fawcett Society and took up her post in 2015.  Prior to that she was th...

Saba Ismail has been advocating for women’s rights since she was a teenager, co-founding the organisation Aware Girls with her sister Gulalai. Gulalai’s work focuses on sexual violence in armed conflict, the dangers of radicalisation and the abuse of women: “We cannot have peace without gender equality, and without gender equality we cannot have peace. These two things are linked.” Because of this...

Hilla Kerner is a feminist who works with Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter, the longest standing rape crisis centre in Canada. She joins Sadia Hameed in a conversation about Cindy Gladue , a mother and Indigenous woman involved in prostitution who was killed at the age of 36. In a shocking and disturbing trial , her accused killer was acquitted of murder. Cindy Gladue's case has...

Sarah and Alice discuss the current Government consultation on pre-charge bail, and why a change in police practice is needed to protect victims-survivors of rape, domestic abuse and stalking. Sarah Learmonth is a committed advocate for women and girls. She worked for 8 years as the Communications Officer for a Rape Crisis Centre and holds an MA in Woman and Child Abuse. Her dissertation study , w...

Raquel Rosario Sánchez is a writer, campaigner and researcher from the Dominican Republic. She became Spokeswoman for FiLiA on 25 November 2019, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Today, we are delighted to broadcast our first podcast with her. Raquel specialises in ending male violence against girls and women. She is a featured writer at Dominican newspaper El Ca...

Simi Kamal is head of grants at the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund. She is a geographer, social development specialist, and women’s rights advocate with over 30 years’ experience in water sector, poverty alleviation, inclusive development, and gender equality. She is author or co-author of more than 400 papers, articles, book chapters, handbooks, and modules published and presented worldwide. S...

Recording from the Violence Against Lesbians Panel at the FiLiA Conference in 2019.  Featuring: Susan Hawthorne - Unnoticed, Unrecorded, Unremembered: Inscribing the Torture of Lesbians   Hilary McCollum - Voicing Violence Against Lesbians Counsuelo Rivera Fuentes - My Experiences of Pain in Torture and Imprisonment in Dictatorial Chile Angela C Wild - Lesbians at Ground Zero: Lesbians and the Cot...

Recording from the Sunday Closing Session of the FiLiA 2019 Conference. Featuring a number of women speaking , including: Sharena Lee Satti , author and passionate poet from Bradford, who speaks openly about her past and encourages others to find their voice through art and self-expression. Megan Armitage , 19-year old university student and great-granddaughter of Bradford suffragette Lilian Armit...

"Gay conversion is still thriving in the 21st century. The conversion therapy of today is the prescription of cross-sex hormones, mastectomies, and hysterectomies as treatment for girls and women who do not conform." This is a recording of the panel on the invention of transgender children from the FiLiA Conference in October 2019 . Featuring: Charlie Evans , who founded the Detransition...

In the UK, as the coronavirus pandemic rages, we are seeing the effects of years of over-medicalisation of birth. The NHS has decided that the best use of its midwives would be to close all midwifery-led units, strip back their home birth services and redeploy all midwives to the obstetric units. This is a huge blow, but it is just the start. This move made it so that healthy women had to scrap th...

Meera Khanna is a feminist, social activist, writer, and poet, and the trustee and executive vice president of Guild for Service , an NGO focused on empowering marginalized women and children across India. She joins FiLiA in conversation as a member of the Every Woman Treaty Working Group, a campaign for a global treaty to end violence against women and girls. She has 20 years of experience workin...

Susan Bewley is a feminist and Professor Emeritus in Obstetrics & Women’s Health at King’s College London. She qualified as a doctor in 1982 and was the first woman to subspecialise in maternal-fetal medicine in the UK. Susan became consultant & Clinical Director at Guy’s & St Thomas’ Hospitals. She was a Sexual Offences Examiner & job-share clinical lead at The Havens Sexual Assau...

"Consciousness-raising is enough to spark movements any place you do it. It’s the foundation of everything." Kathleen Barry is a feminist, sociologist and internationally recognised human rights activist. She is a Professor Emerita and the author of five books, including the landmark work Female Sexual Slavery published in 1979. Kathleen has been a close friend of FiLiA for a number of y...

Sam Walshe speaks about the impact of being exploited into street prostitution as a teenager and having disclosable criminal records.  She participated in a legal case brought by three women (including Fiona Broadfoot ) formerly involved in prostitution, which challenged the Government’s Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) Regulations. After an unhappy childhood marred with violence and sexual ab...

Bev Jackson set up the LGB Alliance together with Kate Harris in October 2019. LGB Alliance is a lesbian-led organization for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals that emphasizes the importance of biological sex, not gender identity, when talking about sexual orientation. The best ways to support LGB Alliance are to follow it on Twitter at @AllianceLGB (and get all your friends to follow it as well!),...

Manu Schon is a sociologist and radical feminist blogger for the Blog “Die Störenfriedas.” She is an anti-prostitution activist, co-founder of Abolition 2014  and LINKE – for a world without prostitution. Manu runs (together with others) SEX INDUSTRY KILLS – documenting homicides and attempted homicides in prostitution. In this podcast, she is joined in conversation with Heather Brunskell-Evans to...

In this podcast, Susan Hawthorne speaks to FiLiA about her work in researching violence against lesbians. Susan joined the Women's Liberation Movement in 1973, the Collective of Melbourne's Rape Crisis Centre in 1974 and has been involved in many different areas including as an aerialist in the Performing Older Women's Circus, organising writers festivals and feminist conferences. S...