FiLiA

FiLiA speaks with Lina Al-Hathloul, the sister of Loujain Al-Hathloul, a women's rights campaigner from Saudi Arabia who has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia as punishment for her campaigning for women's rights. Loujain's campaigning work for women’s civil rights includes advocating for an end to the male guardianship system, for women’s right to drive, for women’s right to political...

Simone Watson is a Survivor activist. She is the director of Nordic Model Australia Coalition and a former human rights delegate for Amnesty International. Simone entered prostitution in a legal brothel in Melbourne in her 20’s, she found the world of legalised prostitution to be anything but ‘safe’ and left. Find the Nordic Model Australia Coalition on their Website and Facebook

Speak Up for Women is a non-partisan organisation that exists to protect and advance the rights and interests of women and girls in New Zealand, in law, policy, and society, based on the shared material reality of being members of the female sex. They support respectful, evidence-based dialogue and freedom of speech. They support the rights of transgender people to live their lives free from viole...

Valérie Pelletier (aka Legal Tender) is a militant abolitionist radical feminist from Montréal, Quebec in Canada. She is a survivor of prostitution, now a public speaker, a conceptual artist. a vlogger, a singer (jazz, country etc.) and the happy mother of 4 cat children. She is also involved at CAFES (Collectif d'Aide aux Femmes Exploitées Sexuellement). Contact via email Page as a militant...

Afsana Lachaux is a policy specialist and an award-winning women’s rights campaigner on access to justice and violence against women and girls. This podcast interview highlights Afsana's legal struggle to obtain contact with her son Louis and the pitfalls of Sharia law in Dubai for women. Afsana writes about why a British court ordered her to pay her ex-husbands £94K legal bill here . She con...

Fair Play for Women is a campaigning and consultancy group which raises awareness, provides evidence and analysis, and supports policy-makers to protect the rights of women and girls in the UK. Their aim is to facilitate the much-needed factual discussion about the need for sex-based policies for women and to provide policy makers with the guidance they need for evidence-based policy making that i...

Cherry Smiley is a feminist campaigner, artist, and researcher from the Nlaka'pamux (Thompson) and Diné (Navajo) Nations. She has worked as an anti-violence worker in rape crisis centres and transition houses for battered women and their children, as the assistant coordinator for drop-in anti-violence groups for Indigenous girls, and as a project manager for a national native women’s organiza...

Mary Stolinski is not only a survivor of the sex trade but also a radical feminist thinker. She analyzes her personal story in the light of feminist and Marxist theories, and explains how a liberal, capitalist and misogynist society sacrifices women to the sex trade. Mary refutes the prevailing liberal beliefs about the sex trade and gender ideology.

Dr. Linda Blade is a Sport Performance Professional with a PhD in Kinesiology from Simon Fraser University, in Canada. She is a track and field coach and the current President of Athletics Alberta (Alberta Association for Track & Field, Cross-Country and Road Running). Dr. Linda Blade has worked for 25 years as a Sport Performance Professional coach in Edmonton teaching fundamental biomotor sk...

Sharron Davies MBE, is a professional Olympian swimmer from England. She learned to swim at six years old, to train by eight and began obtaining public recognition in international competitions by eleven years old. Aged thirteen, she represented Great Britain in the Olympic Games of 1976. The height of her sporting career came in the year 1980, when she won the silver medal at the Olympic Games he...

We’ve reached a small milestone in our team: 100 episodes of the FiLiA podcast. To celebrate this very special episode, I spoke with a few of the amazing women who bring life and magic to FiLiA - Lisa-Marie, Julian, Sally, Kruti and Raquel. Their reflections, insights and discussion can be heard here, covering the three charitable aims of FiLiA: building sisterhood and solidarity, amplifying the v...

Angelika Chaffey discusses You My Sister, new charity set up to support survivors of the sex trade - whose work is heavily informed by exited women. You My Sister’s first project was to create a unique mental health recovery programme specifically tailored for women who have exited any branch of the porn/sex trade. This has been created and will be delivered with survivors and is a hugely powerful...

Lock up your boys, there's a new Sheila Jeffreys book in town: Trigger Warning . Her ideas are so triggering, we had to warn our listeners! Godlessness forbid you heard about women's liberation or other frivolous ideas without mental preparation. In this FiLiA podcast, you'll learn about Sheila Jeffreys's life as an activist and her opinions on religion (hint: it's a patri...

Louise Godbold shares her experience and knowledge on how trauma can affect us, what happens in the brain and how that might show in our behaviour and body. Lou shares examples from her work with fellow trauma survivors, and personally as a Weinstein survivor to help us deal with our trauma or support those we care about. For this podcast, she joins FiLiA’s Sally Jackson in discussion. Lou is Dire...

Harriet Wistrich is founder and director of the Centre for Womens Justice 2016, a multi partner organisation aimed at bringing cases holding the state to account in relation to violence against women and girls. She is also a solicitor of many years experience, winner of the Liberty Human Rights Lawyer of the Year award 2014 and Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year 2018. She also a founder of the campaign...

Audrey Ludwig is a discrimination solicitor who, unusually, puts her head above the parapet on social media. She tweets openly as @AudreySuffolk about her subject. As part of Audrey’s commitment to public legal education, she gives her general opinion where she thinks people have got rights under Equality law. More recently, she has done so with regards to the heated gender identity/trans rights v...

We spoke to lesbians living in block 13 of Kakuma refugee camp Kelly, Eva, Keryn, Juliet, Seema, Latifah, Ann-Marie, Brenda and Regina. Escaping violence and lesbophobia in their home country, these women are sent by UNHCR to Kakuma refugee camp. As they are seeking asylum due to their sexuality they are put in the LGBT Block 13. This identifies them to other refugees in the camp and they suffer o...

Serenity Rose is heading a London-based survivor-led campaign, together with The Public Interest Law Centre , aimed at receiving justice, social change and acknowledgement of the harms done to women previously denied access to safety when applying for housing assistance after fleeing abuse and violence against women & girls. After the landmark amendment to the Domestic Abuse Bill, women now ha...

"There is no choice in oppression. There is no choice in exploitation. There is no choice in being a secondary citizen to men in this country, given that every six hours or every five hours there is a rape happening in India. I think it is fair to say that there is absolutely no choice in being a woman in India at all." Vaishnavi Sundar is a self-taught filmmaker, writer, and grassroots...

"I think decriminalization sounds good to some people because they only think about prostituted people. And of course, people in prostitution should never be criminalized. What they don't seem to realize is that full decriminalization also means decriminalizing sex buyers, pimps, brothel owners et cetera." Tegan Larin is a member of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women Austral...

Dr Heather Brunskell-Evans is an academic, philosopher, social theorist and feminist activist. She specialises in analysing the politics of the body. Heather’s most recent book Transgender and Body Politics is published by Spinifex Press later in 2020. Heather is a passionate advocate for women’s sex based rights and co-writer of the Women’s Declaration of Human Rights . Heather has co-edited two...

Dr Kathomi Gatwiri is an award-winning researcher and teacher. She is based at Southern Cross University on the Gold Coast Queensland where she teaches in the School of Arts and Social Science across a range of subjects. She completed her PhD with a thesis (and subsequent book) on ‘African womanhood, health, sexuality and incontinent bodies: A case of Kenyan Women living with vaginal fistula’. She...

Daisy is a perpetually exhausted autist and chronically ill home-educating mother of seven. She is an English literature student and a working-class radical feminist. She can sometimes be found writing things on Medium, but most of her activism takes place on social media platforms. Daisy joins FiLiA’s spokeswoman Gemma Aitchison for a discussion about class, how women are kept in poverty and impa...

Zara is a survivor of childhood sexual exploitation and abuse, trafficking and domestic violence. After experiencing twelve years of systematic sanctioned homelessness she turned her passions towards campaigning for better safeguarding, housing and equality for survivors of abuse. Zara is an advocate for women’s independence, freedom and personal empowerment of choice through the means of fundamen...

On the 8th anniversary of the UK signing the Istanbul Convention, Director of IC Change Robyn Boosey talks to FiLiA’s Policy Assistant, Adeline, about why ratifying the Convention could be so life-changing for many women in the UK. Robyn Boosey is the co-director of the IC Change campaign, and Manager of the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne's Preventing Violence Against Women Program. She was pr...