The Girlfriends: Spotlight

When Morrell Andrews’s attacker was convicted of her sexual assault, she thought her fight was over. But it was just beginning. Because in Canada, where Morrell lives, ‘Publication Bans’ were enshrined in law. These bans meant that no one, including the survivor themselves, is allowed to publicly name the victim of a sexual offense. Effectively, if Morrell talked about her story in the press, or on her own social ...

On Valentine's Day 2000, Carolyn Moor's life changed forever when a hit-and-run accident killed her husband Chad. She was left a widow in her 30s - and with two young daughters to raise alone. And she discovered that when you’re a young widow, there’s not very much support - especially not the sort of support you need to get through the long years of grief-stricken child rearing. So, Carolyn founded The Modern Widows Cl...

In 2013, Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah’s nine-year-old daughter, Ella, died from a catastrophic asthma attack. Her death transformed her mum into a formidable campaigner. First, she fought to find out what had killed Ella - why had her previously healthy little girl suddenly developed breathing problems so bad they would become fatal? 

The answer lay very close to home - Ella, Rosamund and her siblings lived just off the bu...

Christmas Day, 1992. Sarajevo, Bosnia. War is ranging - Serb forces surround the city. For nearly four years, its people have endured daily shelling and sniper attacks, cut off from the rest of the world in the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare. More than 11,000 people were killed. 1600 of them were children. 

And in the main hospital, a baby is born: Lejla Damon. Her mother didn’t want anything to do wit...

It’s the 1990s in San Francisco, and Antonia Crane is a dancer at the legendary peep show, the Lusty Lady. In the dressing room and the mirrored ‘Fishbowl’ where the dancers perform in six inch heels, a revolution is brewing. 

The dancers are sick of putting up with workplace injustices, or customers filming them without their consent. And they’re about to take on the system and fight to become one of t...

When the Taliban captured Herat City in August 2021, Tooba Sarwari had just one thing on her mind: cricket. Would she ever be able to play her beloved sport again? And more pressing, would the Taliban find the evidence of her and her team mates’ sporting achievements? If they did, it would surely spell the end for them and their families.

This is the story of how Tooba, and the other members of the Afghan Women’s Cricke...

Germany. Spring 1945. The writing is on the wall for the Nazis. And thousands of women are marching along dirt roads. If they stop walking, they’ll be shot. Their route is lined with piles of corpses. It’s a death march.

Among these women are The Nine. Nine young women, all members of the French resistance, who have formed an extraordinary bond of friendship and support in the concentration camp in which they’ve b...

Jacquie Davis joined the police when she was just 18 years old. She was fearless and ambitious, but she quickly realised her career progression was limited by her gender and education. Everything changed when she was recruited into The Circuit - a secretive network of freelance security professionals. 

As one of the only women in her field, Jacquie’s career as a bodyguard would take her to incredible places - from high-r...

When Visaka Dharmadasa’s soldier son was kidnapped by the fearsome Tamil Tigers in the midst of Sri Lanka’s bitter civil war, she couldn’t find anyone who could help find him - or the 608 other soldiers who had been taken the same night. So Visaka transformed herself, first into a fighter against the bureaucracy of the Sri Lankan government and the Red Cross, and then into a fearsome peace activist. 

Defying ...

When you’ve suffered childhood trauma, endured alcohol abuse, been through awful bereavements, how can you heal? For Silvia Vasquez-Lavado the answer was to climb to the top of the world - and then take other traumatised women and girls with her.

Silvia is the first Peruvian woman to summit Mount Everest and the first openly gay woman to complete the Seven Summits, the tallest mountain on each continent.

The Girlfriends: Spot...

Lois Gibson has a rare gift: A gift for accurately drawing people she’s never seen before, from fragmented descriptions from traumatised witnesses. And that gift is incredibly useful to the Houston Police Department. 

Lois is the world’s most successful forensic artist. Over 40 years, on more than 5089 cases, she’s worked with victims and witnesses to painstakingly piece together a likeness of a suspect. And ...

Miss saHHara was born to be a beauty pageant queen. As a child at home in Nigeria she would wrap herself in a mosquito net and sashay along a make-believe cat walk, delivering inspirational speeches to an imagined audience. 

But when she grew up and started to compete, she found that not only was she rejected from all the mainstream pageants she tried to enter, even trans beauty pageants seemed to celebrate all the cliched cis...

Phyllis Omido is just a few months into a new job, when her infant son starts to get sick. Fevers, dehydration, hospitalisation - Phyllis is scared. Then the doctors give her some shocking news: Her son has lead poisoning. The metal smelting plant where Phyllis works, just outside Mombassa, Kenya, is leeching toxic chemicals into the water of the nearby river. And her son isn’t the only one who’s unwell: she believes th...

When Jasvinder Sanghera was just 15 years old, her mum told her that she was going to be married to a man she had never met. Jasvinder’s older sisters had been through similar things. But instead of going along with the way things had always been in her family and community, Jasvinder escaped.

And then, she helped thousands of other women and girls to do the same.

Related resources

Karma Nirvana - https://karmanirvana.org.uk/...

When Nadya Tolokonnikova saw her country Russia change under President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime, she knew she had to do something. 

She started the iconic ski-mask-wearing art protest collective Pussy Riot. On February 21st, 2012, they performed their anti-Putin protest song, Punk Prayer, in a Moscow church, launching Nadya into overnight activist fame… and a prison labour camp.

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As a trans woman, Eilís Ní Fhlannagáin didn’t have much faith in mainstream health care. So when she wanted gender affirming surgery to remove her testicles, she turned to her best friend and trainee doctor Willow, and asked her to perform the operation in her living room…

From this humble beginning, Eilís and Willow built a whole clinic dedicated to trans women - in a tractor barn in the rural Pacific North West.

Rel...

Madison Conradis had her life turned upside down when someone began posting naked photos of her online. Soon, the abuse intensified with anonymous messages and calls to her family, friends and even her boss…

The police didn’t seem to care, so Madison turned to her twin sister Christine for help. Together, they transformed into online sleuths, tracking the harasser across the country to get justice for Madison and other...

Rose Brady’s job running Baltimore County’s SVU was a frustrating one. The sexual violence crimes she and her team were investigating were just the tip of the iceberg. Her department was sitting on thousands of unsolved rape cases, dating back decades - with little hope of ever finding the perpetrators.

That was until Rose made an incredible discovery: At a local hospital, a diligent forensic pathologist had kept in sto...

From the moment she heard a guitar being played in an empty classroom at her convent school in the Philippines in 1961, June Millington knew what she wanted to do with her life: rock and roll. 

So when a girl called up June and her sister and asked if they wanted to start a band, the answer was hell yeah. 

They went on to become Fanny, the first all-female rock band to release an album with a major record label. June and ...