Women and prison, Abuse in swinging, Fiction and murdered women, Cyclist Lizzie Deignan
Woman's Hour
BBC
4.1 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 27 July 2026
⏱️ 58 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
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Summary
The new Reform police and crime commissioner for Norfolk, former detective Colin Sutton, has said that releasing women from prison ‘would be a kind of a radical, outside-the-box way of creating more prison space’. He joins Nuala McGovern along with Andrea Coomber, the chief executive of The Howard League for Penal Reform.
We follow up with BBC Journalist Catrin Nye whose podcast, Swingers, highlighted the story of Ruth, a woman who said she had been pressured into having sex with over 100 strangers. Since its release, 50 women have come forward with their own stories. Catrin tells us the latest.
Author Wendy Jones recently observed that seven of the top ten fiction paperback novels on the Sunday Times bestsellers list featured a woman who had been murdered. Nuala talks to authors Saima Mir and Lesley McEvoy about why dead women are a central theme in fiction, and why those books are so popular.
A new cycling app "Sofa to Saddle" wants to get one million more Brits peddling by 2028. Olympian and world medallist cyclist Lizzie Deignan and Cicely Lloyd, from Brighton’s Multicultural Women’s Cycle Club, discuss how the barriers to more women cycling can be overcome.
Presenter: Nuala McGovern Producer: Melanie Abbott
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast that takes history seriously. |
| 0:12.6 | And we are back for a 12th series. |
| 0:14.5 | Everyone in that film is wearing their own pants. |
| 0:17.8 | We're joined by comedians like Kyle Smith Bino and Desiree Birch. |
| 0:21.2 | Can't see how this would go wrong. We'll meet many medieval saints. Motivational speaker saint |
| 0:27.5 | with like a sort of Madonna head mic on. We're doing a history of underwear. Plus, there's |
| 0:32.7 | loads more. You're dead to me. Listen first on BBC Sounds. Hello, this is Newell O'Magherin, and you're listening to The Woman's Hour podcast. |
| 0:40.8 | Hello and welcome to the programme. It's good to be back with you this morning. And a question, should we let women out of jail to solve prison overcrowding in England and Wales? |
| 0:51.9 | Well, we'll hear more about that proposal put forward by a |
| 0:54.8 | reform politician. Also this hour, 50 more women have told the BBC they were pressured or coerced |
| 1:00.9 | by their partners into having sex with strangers. They got in contact following an investigation by |
| 1:06.5 | Katrin Nye, which told the story of a woman who said she had been pressured into having sex with more than 100 people she did not know. |
| 1:14.2 | Well, Catherine will be back with us in the studio to tell us how that story and investigation has evolved. |
| 1:21.0 | The Olympic cyclist, Lizzie Dynan, will be with us this hour. |
| 1:24.6 | She is working to get more women cycling. |
| 1:27.2 | So whether this could be |
| 1:28.6 | your first time getting on a bike or it has been years since you cycled, we'll hear about the plan |
| 1:33.2 | that Lizzie has for you. And also today, the author Wendy Jones in the Financial Times over |
| 1:39.1 | the weekend, said the ubiquity of violence against women in popular fiction has largely gone unnoticed, but that it should alarm us. |
| 1:47.9 | So this hour, we thought we'd put Wendy's observation to two crime writers. |
| 1:52.5 | We do know many of the books on the bestseller list that Wendy mentions are written by women, about women, and bought and read also by women. |
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