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Woman's Hour

Female wildlife rangers; Miscarriage cards; Life after prison in Iran; Boric acid; Nude photos online

Woman's Hour

BBC

Society & Culture

4.13K Ratings

🗓️ 22 June 2021

⏱️ 59 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Wednesday will be the first ever World Female Ranger Day, celebrating the work of female rangers around the world who do an important but ultimately dangerous job protecting wildlife from poachers. The emphasis this year is on the work of female rangers in Africa where there are approximately 3,500 female rangers in teams in 18 countries all over the continent working to protect endangered wildlife. One of those women is Collet Ngobeni of the all-female team The Black Mambas in South Africa. Emma also speaks to Holly Budge, the founder of the charity How Many Elephants.

Miscarriage is a unique type of grief - occurring in one in four pregnancies - and yet it still often goes unacknowledged. Women usually wait 12 weeks before announcing a pregnancy so if they experience miscarriage early on it can be an extremely distressing and lonely experience. For women who do choose to share the news and then discover they have miscarried, it means having to inform family and friends who may find it difficult to know the right thing to say. National Director Ruth Bender Atik talks about a new series of cards launched by The Miscarriage Association to specifically acknowledge the sadness of miscarriage and give people an opportunity to acknowledge it in a sensitive way. She is joined by Gemma Rundell who designed empathy cards that she wished were available after she had three miscarriages.

Under-18s who want nude pictures or videos of themselves removed from the internet can now report the images through an online tool - being billed as a world first. The new service comes from the Internet Watch Foundation and Childline and aims to help children who have been groomed, or whose partners have posted photos of them online without their consent. In recent years, the Foundation says it has noticed more and more of these types of images that have been created by children themselves. In the first three months of this year, 38,000 self-generated images were reported. Emma speaks to Susie Hargreaves, the head of the Internet Watch Foundation.

Boric acid is a white powder that can do everything from getting stains out of clothes and stopping your fridge smelling, to killing ants and cockroaches. But if you look for boric acid on social media, there's another use - as a vaginal pessary to supposedly treat thrush-like infections and bacterial vaginosis. Bacterial vaginosis is common, isn't considered a sexually transmitted infection, and isn't typically serious. But Dr Jen Gunter, a Canadian-American gynaecologist and author of the Vagina Bible says she's seen an increase in the use of boric acid vaginal pessaries among her patients over the past few years, paralleling what she calls an ‘explosion’ of new over the counter boric acid products and heavy marketing from celebrities, influencers, naturopaths, and functional medicine providers.

Ana Diamond spent 200 days in prison in solitary confinement at the age of 19, after travelling from home in the UK to visit her grandmother in Iran. She was held in a tiny windowless cell in Evin prison, Tehran, in the same block as the Iranian British charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. The guards interrogated and taunted her saying the only place she would ever graduate from was Evin prison. But this weekend she has been celebrating having scored a first from Kings College and receiving a scholarship to study for a postgraduate degree at Oxford University. Emma talks to Ana about moving forward after such a traumatic and life changing experience.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

0:04.6

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

0:08.4

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable

0:14.3

experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC

0:20.4

makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

0:24.6

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

0:29.7

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.

0:36.0

BBC Sounds, Music Radio Podcasts.

0:41.0

Hello I'm Emma Barnet and welcome to Womensa from BBC. podcasts. gone on sale, miscarriage cards, pregnancy loss cards or as some call them empathy

0:55.1

cards in a bid to help those who don't know what to say or do but want to do

0:59.5

something and hopefully help those going through the miscarriage.

1:03.0

I'm going to be talking to the director of the Miscarriage Association

1:06.0

and also a creator of these cards, a woman who had three miscarriages of her own.

1:10.0

But what do you make of the idea of cards to mark this moment? Would you ever send

1:15.8

one to a friend or want to receive one? That's one of our discussions today and I would

1:20.3

really welcome your take on it. Would it have provided a form of validation,

1:25.2

recognition, perhaps provided a way for those in your life to do something? Or could you not

1:30.9

imagine putting them up on the window sill or the mantelpiece?

1:34.0

Maybe it might have made you or someone in your life feel worse, not better.

1:39.0

We've already put this message out on social media at BBC Woman's Hour. Many of you taking opportunity

1:44.3

to get in touch please continue to do so. You can also text Women's Hour on 84844

1:49.1

or email us via our website. A message here from Kess says no, no, horrible to think that they could

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