The teenage girls preparing for war
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 17 November 2025
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From this year, 18 year-old Danish women will have to take part in a conscription lottery and face potentially being called up for an 11 month military service. The country is just one of many in Europe aiming to improve military resilience in response to the growing threat from Russia. But what does it mean to the teenagers caught up on the front line of this debate?
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Guest: Katie Gatens, commissioning editor of news review, The Sunday Times.
Host: Luke Jones.
Producer: Edith Rousselot.
Further Reading: Denmark's drive to conscript teenage girls: "We're pretty scared"
Photo: Getty Images.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From The Times and Sunday Times, this is The Story. I'm Luke Jones. |
| 0:10.8 | When you're 17, you're most likely to be concerned with university applications, job prospects, who's going out with who? |
| 0:25.9 | Not war. |
| 0:29.1 | I spoke to a 17-year-old girl last week, and along with all of her female friends, |
| 0:35.0 | the hot topic of conversation right now is, will they all be called up to join |
| 0:41.0 | the military? Most of them, all of them actually were like, I don't want that because it's like |
| 0:48.0 | slowing down my plans and for my future. |
| 1:03.0 | From this year, 18-year-old women in Denmark can now join men in being drafted into the military for 11 months. It's not the only European country thinking about military readiness with tensions rising in the East. |
| 1:09.0 | Last week, Germany decided to call up all 18-year-old men |
| 1:12.5 | for a military medical examination and create a mechanism for emergency conscription, |
| 1:18.4 | if not enough volunteers come forward. For a new generation, growing into adulthood, |
| 1:23.8 | this all has incredibly real-life consequences. |
| 1:29.6 | The fact that you lose your own self-control over your life and your future and your maybe dreams and plans. |
| 1:39.4 | The story today, the teenage girls preparing for war. |
| 1:51.9 | My name is Katie Gaiton's. I'm a journalist for The Sunday Times. |
| 1:55.5 | Are you looking at Denmark much? And what got you on to this? |
| 1:57.8 | Yeah, well, I actually saw a report. |
| 2:03.6 | Just a news article when the law changed back in the summer. And I thought it was really interesting. One of the reasons that prompted this change in law is obviously the |
| 2:09.6 | war with Ukraine and the sort of threat of Russia. And I think that we've seen that more and more |
| 2:16.5 | over the past couple of months with, |
| 2:18.4 | you know, drones shutting down airports that are suspected to be Russian. We don't know for |
| 2:23.4 | sure that they were Russian drones, but in September, Copenhagen Airport was shut for several |
... |
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