S5E6 Pregnant in prison: The case to stop births behind bars
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Hello, MediaStormers, and welcome to your Friday Deep Dive. Before we start, we have to talk about that Trump ad. Oh my God, like lest anybody thinks that we were advertising Trump on MediaStorm. Okay, so thank you so much to Liza, a listener based in the US, who reached out to us to tell us that after our episode on sexual abuse, ironic, there was then a advert for

For Trump, basically. A pro-Trump advert placed on a MediaStorm episode. I didn't actually know what that meant. But guys, what we're talking about is literally like Trump is going to cure cancer in a few months. Yeah. So I had to ask Liza what the nature of this advert was. And she said that what she remembers is that the advert apparently listed all of Trump's accomplishments in inverted commas and then ended by saying that Trump was going to cure cancer within the next few months.

I freaked out. I was like, how the hell did this end up on a MediaStorm episode? Yeah, we have blocks that. Yeah, we have blocks that we put in place with our, you know, podcast host platform. It seemed that this one slipped through the net. So I reached out to our host platform and asked them how this happened. And it's...

It is sneaky AF. Yeah. So they said it looks like the ad was mislabeled by the buyer and that's why it was able to get through. And just so everyone's reassured, they're doing their best to take this ad down. So this is stealth advertising. I mean, this is potentially illegal. It's definitely sinister. I think we've found our next media storm investigation. Definitely.

Okay, today's topic. We've done a couple of episodes about prisons. Back in series one, we did an episode called Does Prison Work? where we delved into the UK's tough-on-crime mantle and we discussed how incarceration is used as a political battleground fought all over the world. We also spoke about the truth about luxury prisons

Prisons are frequently criticised in the media for being too luxurious and too lenient. So we asked if that was really true by, of course, asking people who had been in prison what it's really like. And after that, last series, following headlines spotlighting prison overcrowding, we once again spoke to some of the voices missing from the mainstream, ex-prisoners themselves, to talk about how prison reform is debated in the media, if at all. So.

Separately to episodes about how prisons work or don't work, we've also covered a variety of topics on women's health, pregnancy and motherhood. And here's where today's topic intersects. Today we are talking about pregnancy in prison. How does it work? Does it work? What is it like? Should it be abolished? And does the media even care? First though, Helena, I think you should tell us how this came onto our radar.

because it's via an organisation that you are now involved in. So partly for the sake of journalistic transparency, also out of general interest, tell us about Level Up. Yes, so much of the work campaigning for No Births Behind Bars has been done by Level Up, which is an organisation campaigning for gender justice. More recently, I have been working with Level Up on a separate campaign about how to responsibly report domestic abuse in society.

the media. So this is also a little call out to say that if you are a journalist or an editor who is listening and you work in a newsroom of any kind, please get in touch with me because we are aiming to get into as many newsrooms as possible to deliver this training on responsible reporting on domestic abuse because it really, really does save lives. And actually, the co-director of Level Up, Janie Starling, who's coming on this week,

She's been on Media Storm before talking about domestic abuse in media. And my God, it was such a good discussion. So if you are interested in that topic, you can scroll down and get a sample of what Helena's going to be preaching in the newsroom. But yeah, I mean, I can understand why a lot of people would see

today's topic pregnancy in prison and think it's pretty niche. The thing is, latest Ministry of Justice figures show there were 215 pregnant women in prison in the year 2023 to 2024 and 50 births in prison.

Pregnant women in prison, by the way, face heightened risks of complications such as preterm birth and hypertension and a pregnant woman in prison is seven times more likely to experience a stillbirth

than a woman who is not incarcerated. And these births behind bars have severe consequences. In 2019 and 2020, two babies died when their mothers went into labour inside prison. In both cases, the women went into labour without medical assistance and the babies did not survive.

And just last month, harrowing stories emerged of women at HMP Bronzefield being unlawfully handcuffed to male officers during childbirth. If prison is not a safe place to be pregnant, why are women still being sentenced while expecting? Who is doing something about it? And is the media listening?

In labour and locked in a cell. Prison healthcare let me down. And I ask again, why should she not go to jail because she's a mother? Shockingly, she was the second baby to die in a women's prison in England in less than a year. She was begging for an ambulance and she was in excruciating pain. Systemic abuse of human rights. I feel like my birth was just taken away from me. Welcome to MediaStorm, the news podcast that starts with the people that are normally asked lies.

I'm Helena Wadia. And I'm Matilda Mallinson. This week's MediaStorm. Pregnant in prison. The case to stop births behind bars. Welcome to the MediaStorm studio. Our first guest is the co-director of Level Up, the feminist community campaigning for gender justice in the UK.

She is a writer, media strategist and campaigner on a mission to end imprisonment of pregnant women and mothers. Welcome to the studio once again, Janie Starling. Hi, hello. And our second guest is a co-founder of Level Up's No Pregnancy in Prison campaign. She has lived experience of the issue as she was first sent to prison when six months pregnant and gave birth whilst held on remand.

She's using a pseudonym to protect her privacy and we're so thankful to her for joining us to share her experience and expertise. Welcome to the studio, Anna. Hi, thanks for having me. So to start, Janie, can you just explain the issue that we're here to discuss and tell us how and why the Level Up campaign started?

Prison will never be a safe place to be pregnant. We know that pregnant women in prison are seven times more likely to suffer a stillbirth, twice as likely to give birth prematurely and

Tragically, three babies have died in the last five years inside the women's prison estate. Now, the campaign started six years ago now, after the deaths of two babies inside women's prisons. One was the death of baby Ayesha Cleary at HMP Bronzefield in 2019.

where her mother, Rhianna Cleary, was left to give birth inside her cell at night. Her calls for help on the buzzer system had been ignored and she was left to bite through her baby's umbilical cord. Oh my God, God. Her baby died. A matter of months later, Louise Powell, in H&P style in Cheshire, went into labour prematurely on a prison toilet. Again, her calls for help

went unheard and her baby was born breech which meant its feet came out first. Breech babies are a high risk birth. They need to be managed really, really carefully. She didn't get the medical care that she needed. She was in agony for hours. And again, by the time paramedics arrived, it was too late to resuscitate her baby.

The deaths of these two babies were shocking in their own right, but what was more shocking was that the only thing the government had to offer in response was to, quote unquote, improve healthcare for women in prison. And it just seemed really clear that if...

The case wasn't obvious enough that prison by very design will never be a safe place to be pregnant and any healthcare improvements that are written on paper just simply don't happen in practice. If that was ever going to be obvious, it was going to be when two babies had died. So Level Up started about launching a campaign to shift the needle away from this healthcare reform inside prison to just keeping pregnant women out. And

The launch of the campaign was in 2021 after the prison ombudsman actually did a report into the death of the first baby and ruled that every pregnancy in prison is categorised as high risk by virtue of the fact a woman is held behind locked doors for significant periods of time. Now, in that statement is an admission that the very design of a prison will never be safe.

And what it meant was if every pregnancy in prison is high risk, when a court sentences a woman to prison, they sentence her to a high risk pregnancy. Now, we just think that's completely untenable. And so since 2021, we have been fighting for pregnant women to be kept out of prison. That says it really well. If you sentence a pregnant woman to prison, you sentence her to a high risk pregnancy.

Just for context, can you outline how does the UK's policy on pregnancy in prison compare to other countries? Is this done elsewhere the same way? So there are several countries that have laws that

severely curtail the use of imprisonment for pregnant women. Costa Rica, for example, uses home detention curfew and house arrest. Brazil has a practice, there's a Supreme Court ruling that says that pregnant women and mothers of children, I think up to eight years old, can't be held in prison before their trial, so on remand or in pre-trial detention. So there's much better practice in other areas of the world and actually England is behind.

Anna, I wonder if you can tell us a bit about your story. So you were pregnant when you were first sent to prison. Can you describe that feeling and tell us a bit more about those experiences? First time I'd ever been arrested. First time I'd ever been involved with the criminal justice system.

I was six months pregnant. I was arrested, taken to the police station. From there, I was charged, told that I was going to court the next day. It wasn't even mentioned in court that I was pregnant, even though I was visibly pregnant, I was six months pregnant. I just had a temporary solicitor, a duty solicitor. He didn't even mention...

In that, I was pregnant, or even trying to fight for bail, it was very poor. Went into custody. Yeah, I was given the option to either go into a cell by myself, a single cell, because I was pregnant, or I could be padded up with somebody. I chose to go with my co-defendant because ultimately I knew I was going to end up

going into labour whilst I was in prison. So I thought that was the safest option because obviously, as you can imagine, you're behind a locked door and you've got no support. So yeah, I went in, stayed there for the three months until I went into labour and had my son. How was your labour experience? Obviously, it was my first son, so I didn't really know what was going to happen. It's a labour, it's unpredictable. You don't know how fast or slow it's going to be.

Started getting some pains in my back early hours of the morning. Got up, started pacing up and down the cell. It was a bit like, obviously it's a very confined area as well. Got to about 5.30 in the morning, pressed the cell bell, told them I think I might be starting labour. That was ignored. They said somebody would be with me soon. They didn't.

Between the hours of 5.30 and 7.30, the cell bell was pressed four times. At 7.30, my door was unlocked by the officers that had changed over from the night staff. And when I said to that officer, oh, I'm pretty sure I'm in labour or my labour's starting, she looked very shocked. She pulled me out of the cell, put me in a communal area and told me I had to wait for the prison nurse. I had to wait for her to come. It was the morning, she was doing mid-rounds, she was busy and stuff. I then had to further wait for the...

prison to find two staff to escort me and they'd called an ambulance. I then had to wait for the ambulance to be security cleared to come into the prison for me to then go into the back of it before it could leave. I'd been told previously by a governor that I wouldn't be handcuffed when I was in labour. There was one female officer, she then cuffed me to her and I questioned it. She told me be grateful she's put me on long cuffs and not short cuffs so there was a chain between the cuffs rather than wrist to wrist and

So she kind of set the tone for how I knew her attitude was going to be and it just made it very uncomfortable. I actually feel so disgusted, disturbed hearing that. Sorry, I have never heard this story or this, you know, this happens before. Yeah.

so you're getting my immediate my immediate reaction I mean I don't have a child I've never been pregnant and you know part of the reason for that is because of how scary it is giving birth in itself is so scary let alone doing it

in prison or having to go through that, having to be handcuffed, having to wait. A lot of those experiences you just described was a lot of waiting. It is literally. When you go into that situation, yours and your unborn baby's fate is in somebody else's hands. You have no control over it.

Once you're in that position and you're in that prison environment, there's physically nothing you can do. I've had another child now on the outside, so I can compare the two situations. I had missed hospital appointments. I had a situation where I had reduced fetal movements.

they didn't get me out to the hospital until the next day. So, and it's like, that's an emergency situation. Anybody else in the community would take themselves to the hospital and get themselves checked out. But when you're there, your hands are literally tied. Like I said, your fate is literally in somebody else's hands. And it's not just your labour, right? During pregnancy, there's all this focus on nutrition and getting the right

Would you get special consideration for being pregnant? Would you get different food to other people? No, the policy is that you're meant to get extra and if you're hungry, you're meant to be accommodated for.

doesn't happen. Policy and procedure are very far apart. I think people expect when you go into prison and you're pregnant that you're cared for. The actual true story of it is it's no different. Your healthcare's worse, your nutrition's worse. You're worse off in that situation because you literally have no responsibility over your own care. After you gave birth, you were granted bail for three months until your trial and then once you were sentenced, you were returned to prison and you

you were separated from your baby. Now, I'm sure any parents listening can't even imagine being separated from their child. How long was that for and...

you know can you begin to describe that feeling and when were you reunited? Court kept getting adjourned so as you can imagine every time I was saying goodbye to my son didn't know what was going to happen I didn't know how long I was going to be away for so I didn't know if I would be able to have him back with me on an MBU if I was leaving him for good so that was emotional I had to do that three times and say goodbye to him got to

got sentenced when I set foot in reception I said I need to speak to the lady from the mother and baby unit I was bugging absolutely everybody and eventually five weeks later I sat mother and baby board and I did end up getting accepted to go back onto that mother and baby unit at that prison but it was it's just like no one no one rushes to do anything and I'm just like okay I've got my son on the outside and I don't think anyone's really understanding this

So he was coming on visits because my mum was taking care of him at the time. I had to say to my mum, I'm just going to have to stop bringing him because I was crying, he was crying. Because by that time, obviously, we had a bond. He knew who I was. And I said, just upsetting everybody. Like, until I know what's going on, we're just going to have to stop the visits. So I did that. But then luckily, a couple of weeks later, I got the board and was able to have him back. OK, yeah.

Now, Level Up for a long time was campaigning for changes in sentencing guidelines. I think right now we need a positive moment. So you've had some success in that.

area right can you tell us about that success? Yeah we have so we had to tackle sentencing and the use of remand but we had to do sentencing first so we targeted the sentencing council who are a group of expert judges and some academics who oversee the sentencing guidelines that are used in all courts across England and Wales and we were shocked we were looking at the pro

processes in courts and we couldn't see anywhere that there was any guide for judges to even consider a pregnancy when they were making decisions on whether to send a woman to custody. Now, that's absolutely appalling. So we thought, well, the first thing we have to do is make sure that courts are considering this and they recognise that it's a high risk environment for a pregnant woman. So we launched an open letter to the Sentencing Council in 2022 and it was signed by, you know, the Royal College of Midwifery.

the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, British Association for Perinatal Medicine. It was very, very clear there was just broad consensus across all healthcare and maternity experts that it was simply unsafe and we needed a new sentencing framework to take that into consideration. So years on, the Sentencing Council have listened. They've run two consultations on new sentencing measures for perinatalism.

pregnant women. And then more recently, they announced much more wide-ranging measures in their new imposition of custodial and community sentences guideline, which essentially now says all pregnancies in prison are high risk and

courts must avoid the use of custody for pregnant women which is massive it's like landmark change not only that but they go into detail on pregnancy as a factor that indicates it's appropriate to suspend a sentence which means that when a woman is facing a prison term the judge has the discretion to suspend it if the sentence is less than two years which means that you don't go to prison and unless you commit a further offence you will stay out of prison it's just been honestly women helping women helping women helping women get them out and have

the baby safely. Well done. Huge wins. Yeah, huge wins. Would that, out of curiosity, do you think have made a difference to your experience, Anna? Yeah, 100%. 100% because when you are sentencing these women, you're just adding to their trauma and their cycle and then you're putting these children in these unnecessary, unsafe environments. Like, a lot of these women, they're non-violent offenders. I don't even like calling them offenders. But their offences are non-violent. So,

they don't really pose a risk to the community. There's no reason why you can't take these women, pick them up and just put them in a

community set in and let them do their sentence that way there are other things that they can look at. Yeah you know what let's talk about that we'll turn to the media now and one of the media's key rebuttals to this issue and indeed you know one of society's key rebuttals to this issue has been well you know what if a pregnant person has done something really bad like surely they should be in prison and I'm sure there are some listeners even you know who are listening to this conversation and thinking well you know if somebody has done something bad why shouldn't they face justice just because they're

they're pregnant. As an example of this, as a media rebuttal, we want to play a clip of you, Janie, on LBC, being interviewed by or debating with or being interrupted by, it's hard to say, Nick Ferrari. Oh, Nick. For those who don't know, Nick Ferrari is the presenter of LBC's Breakfast Show and he's known for his conservative views.

They only go behind bars if it's a fairly major crime, Janie. Are you suggesting they don't go behind bars for that? I'm sorry to correct you, but the majority of women are in prison. The most prevalent offence is shoplifting. Have you looked at the latest stats on actually what women are in prison for? I haven't, no. I have no idea, no. You need to correct that. You really can't say anything... Well, I assure you, it won't be the first... It won't be one case of shoplifting. It will be a pattern of repeat behaviour. It won't be they've nicked a few lamb chops. Let's be honest with each other.

It will be the reality that we're living in a positive... No, it'll be the reality of a repeat offender. And I ask again, why should she not go to jail because she's a mother? We need to look at the reality of what prison creates. They'll have probably done it about 20 times. Look at the lens of punishment. They should go to five bars. Crime...

We can look at diverting funding from prisons into communities so people get the support they need for poverty, trauma, drug use, mental health, domestic abuse. That is grounded in evidence. But the same could be said for men. That's the point, isn't it? The same could be said for men if they've had an abusive background, which is horrific for them. But that doesn't mean you're going to go to jail if you're a repeat criminal, does it? What I'm talking about is actually resourcing communities to address these drivers of...

at the point, at the root, where they are first a problem. Prison, by the time people are being sent to prison, you're just compounding the deprivation. All right, well, let's all have them walk in the streets then and there won't be a lamb chopped who found insane. Can I just say, I found it so obscure because this was at like 7.50am and this man would not shut up about lamb chops. Really bizarre.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, my favourite part is when you say, I'm sorry to correct you without a hint of being sorry. I was not sorry. And then you just hit him with the stats. He didn't even let you talk. Of course he didn't. No, I mean, the interrupting is also next level. Of course he didn't. I have to say, I think people won't even, because of the style of his interview, those stats didn't even get the moment to come through.

and basically completely falsify what he was saying. Right, well, let's do it now. So you mentioned there in that clip of the tiny part that we could hear you, shoplifting. So can you explain to us, you know, what women are usually in prison for and also how you tackle this question when it comes up? So what prison represents in the public imagination...

as opposed to what prison is in reality are two vastly different things. Because the stats show year on year on year, the vast majority of women in prison are for short sentences. The last stats were 50% of women in prison are there for less than six months. And the most prevalent offence, predictably, is shop theft.

And it doesn't take a genius to recognise that that is something that is environmentally created by the society that we are living in. And I think often, you know, the criminal justice system blames individuals for the failures in our society to support people, to make sure that everyone can earn a decent living wage, to make sure that everybody has, you know, safe and secure housing. And the evidence has been there for decades.

20 years now so there was a landmark government report in 2007 called the Causton report and

and just found the same things that people see now, which is that the majority of women in prison are mothers, there is so much trauma and poverty and deprivation and substance use and domestic abuse that are driving women into the criminal justice system. And ultimately, prison just compounds the deprivation. You know, in theory, when you send someone to prison, you remove their liberty for a set period of time and then they're released back out in the community. In practice, what happens is women,

Even if you're there for two, three months, you lose your home. If you have children and there's no family to take care of them, your children will go into care, sometimes irreversibly. If you had a job, that job is gone. And what happens is you find women then being released, homeless, completely traumatised because their children have been removed from them, which is arguably...

the most severe punishment you could ever inflict on anyone it's barbaric you know side note not only is that awful for the mother but also produces so much intergenerational trauma for children and then when you look at the reality that women are going there for often crimes of survival survival in a society that is becoming increasingly difficult to survive and

It's so clear that the fault lays with government. It's so clear that, you know, when we remove our welfare safety net, our criminal net expands because that's all that is left for people. Yeah. This is...

the vast majority of cases that you are talking about. And most women have committed nonviolent offenses. However, your campaign is no baths behind bars. I'm sure that lots of media make the case for, you know, oh, nonviolent, manipulated domestic abuse victims, you know, shouldn't be in prison. I am curious, though, why you are also advocating for women who have committed serious crimes, as much of a minority as they are,

and are pregnant, do you believe that they should not be in prison while pregnant? And how do you make that case in the media? It is a difficult line to take because when it comes to prison, everyone's first question is, well, what's she done? Well, why is she there? There's this immediate barrier because they don't want to have empathy because criminalised women are seen as separate. But ultimately, if we say that prison is...

high risk for some women not others we undermine our own argument you just can't say that the risks are universal to all women and their children and I think even in the most extreme cases which are so so rare and few and far between and I feel you know

reluctant to have to address it, but you have to. There are options for a sentence, for example, to be deferred so a woman can give birth safely. And that is something that has happened in the US. That's something that other countries do. It's not controversial. Some of the longest sentences are for non-violent crimes.

you'll find that the women who are serving 18 year sentences are there for class A drugs imports and often they've been trafficked. So we don't want to get into the weeds of criminal justice policy. We want to keep the focus on that bond between mother and baby, on reproductive justice and on making sure that, you know, even when you look at the stats, the vast, vast majority of women, I'm talking like 75%, three and four women are there for less than four years.

Even if we can get them out, that's a massive improvement. For too long, the argument has been, you know, hypotheticals outweighing the lived realities of women in prison. We can talk about pregnant murderers roaming in the streets, or we can talk about the fact that three babies have died inside custody in the last five years. And that is simply untenable. We have to stick with the material reality of women's experiences.

and keep them safe. Thank you for addressing that. Thank you. I think a lot of people had a very closed mind and thought we were just saying, like, don't punish people if they've committed a crime and just let them off scot-free, but that's not what we were saying at all. Like, our whole main aim was punish people in a different way. There's community alternatives. The answer can't always be prison because it just doesn't work and it doesn't even work for people that aren't pregnant. It's just trauma. There's cycles. People go in and out.

So if you can break that and give people a chance, like why not? And it saves government money, which they seem to like to waste it. Hi, MediaStormers. Before we return, if you're a keen MediaStorm listener, we know you'll love the news meeting from Tortoise. Like us, they try to understand what's behind the headlines, which is so important as the news cycle becomes increasingly chaotic.

Why do some stories dominate while others barely get a look in? Every Monday and Friday, three journalists battle it out to try and convince the editor that their chosen story should lead the news. And once a month, you'll get the chance to see the competition live and in person in Tortoise's London newsroom. Catch up on the latest episode by searching for The News Meeting wherever you get your podcasts. ♪

Anna, I wonder what have your experiences been like speaking to the press on this issue? I've had a mixed bag of experiences, to be honest. Obviously, I do a lot of the work anonymous and that's my choice because my son's still young. He doesn't want to prison, but he doesn't know he was born there. And that's obviously a conversation I have to have with him later. You know, I've had an experience where I asked to be anonymous. They was meant to blur my image, but they didn't. They put it out and...

and somebody had recognised me. I had another experience where I did a radio interview. It was pre-recorded and then he started it, which I didn't hear this bit until it went out. And he said, "Oh, I've asked Anna to disclose her crime and she's refused to." And all he had said to me in the conversation before pressing record was, "Would you be happy to disclose your crime?" I said, "My crime was non-violent and I really feel like it's irrelevant to the topic."

And he was like, okay. And then he started the interview with that. So I felt a bit blindsided by that. But apart from that, people have been quite positive. And I think a lot of the shock was as well. I think people never really understood that pregnant women were sent to prison and it was overlooked. When we first started the campaign, there's definitely been a turnaround for,

for people's point of view. I wonder, Janie, when do you think the media started taking notice of this issue? Was there a surge in coverage at any point? Or was it a bit of a slow burn? Or was there a turning point? We have forced them

to take notice of this. Obviously, there have been key junctures, for example, when the prison ombudsman issued the report, when there was an inquest into one of the baby's deaths, when kind of legal processes have caught the media attention and kind of been on the weekly news cycle. But repeatedly over the last few years, Level Up has found the hooks and made the hooks. So what we've done is, you know,

FOI requests to find out the rates of stillbirths and premature births and the rates of gestational diabetes. Most recently, we found that pregnant women in prison are three times more likely to suffer gestational diabetes. And obviously, they do not get the support that they need. FOI is freedom of information. Yeah. And, you know, we've used that data to get journalists to take interest because obviously,

journalists want something that's new that's hooked to something so we'll either get the stats or we'll do mother and baby protests around Mother's Day we actually have one coming up outside the Ministry of Justice on Friday the 28th of March it's our fourth Mother's Day mum and baby protest and obviously they're very cute but they are

are a very carefully curated media strategy because when you put lots of very cute mums and babies outside the Ministry of Justice, it's like catnip for journalists because they are adorable. They don't look like any protest you've ever seen. We're just there with a parachute and a yellow banner playing reggae nursery rhymes.

And then journalists come, take pictures, report on it. And obviously, every time they report on a mum and baby protest outside the MOJ, they go to the MOJ for right of reply. And they say, hey, all these protesters are saying that you shouldn't be putting pregnant women in prison. And so the Ministry of Justice media office then have to come out with a line that obviously goes into their clippings and their meetings every single week. And for the last four years, I think

This will be our 12th mum and baby protest. We've done them outside the prisons where babies died. We've done them outside the Royal Courts of Justice. We've done them outside the Ministry of Justice. And every time we do and we get media attention, every time we get media attention, there has to be a right of reply. There's been a steady drip feed of,

both in the public, because it's the public who are reading the papers, and then also behind the scenes to stakeholders so they can see that there is public interest and huge public sympathy. We commissioned polling that found the majority of people do not want to see pregnant women or mothers in prison where a community alternative is available. Now, that's hugely persuasive to a judiciary who are, frankly, scared of public opinion because of the way the media has produced so much moral panic.

around crime. Really interesting to hear the behind the scenes of, you know, making the news media listen to you. That's really helpful. Thank you. But also, you know, it's not just the news media. It is also pop culture.

And earlier this year, EastEnders ran a storyline which featured a pregnant character, the iconic Sonia Fowler, in prison. Now, okay, as someone who's watched EastEnders since they were 10 years old, I'll just give everyone like a little rundown of the storyline, what happened. Okay, so Rhys and Sonia were a couple. They wanted to have a baby, but they needed to go through the IVF route. After stealing his comatose ex-wife's money to pay for the IVF, Rhys gets further and further into debt.

So, like the sneaky psychopath he is, he ends up killing his comatose ex-wife to get the life insurance. However, turns out Sonia's DNA is on the pillow used to kill his ex-wife because she visited her earlier that day because she's like a lovely person. And then Sonia gets framed and goes to prison while pregnant. Could happen to anyone. Very realistic stuff.

Don't worry, guys, Sonia is now out of prison and Rhys got killed by a bathtub on the live 40th anniversary episode. Really had that coming. That's justice. Yeah. So, you know, when Sonia was in prison on the show, there were some very powerful scenes when, for example, her family came to visit her in prison and she talked about what she was going through. First of all, Anna, how did it feel to watch that or to see that?

I'll be honest, I didn't watch. I'm not an Extenders fan, but obviously I have read things about it. And I think my main thing was, it's a lovely storyline to bring attention to the situation, but...

why did they have to put her in for murder? You know, like it's like they've gone for a violent offence and it's like, it doesn't depict the true situation that we're trying to talk about. So I'm like, it undermines it. Okay, that's so interesting. Yeah. Obviously, you know, right of reply, she was innocent. But Janie, you know,

Sonia actually quoted some level up statistics on the show that is watched by millions of people. I mean, that's got to be a win, right? Huge win. And I think also, obviously, when you asked me the question before about the news media, that's been one facet of our campaign. But

Another key part of this campaign over the last five years has been more in the magazines and features space. And that's where really the hearts and minds work has been done. Because even if you haven't had experience of the prison system, everybody has some relationship to pregnancy, to motherhood, to parenthood, to children. And it's that universal value that really connects people. And I think that's

That has been what has contributed to the EastEnders storyline. It's not necessarily been the stats. Of course, the stats have been important, but it's the way that those stats have then been grounded in so much empathy and compassion and solidarity for women's experiences, right?

that has landed up, you know, with EastEnders portraying this in a very careful and sensitive way, barring the fact that they used murder, because I agree. It's just not representative. But then are the soaps... Yeah. Are the soaps...

How many people get killed by a bathtub, you know? Other times, exactly. But I think what was really powerful was the way that, you know, that stat came up because Sonia was terrified of giving birth in prison. And that has only come about because of stories like Anna's again and again featuring in the

the media and people recognising that it is a reality for so many pregnant women inside the prison system that they are terrified of giving birth inside prison and the reality that babies have died. I have no doubt that Anna's testimony and the testimonies of all other

other women brave enough to share this hellish experiences has changed minds. You cannot not be affected by it. Rihanna Cleary, the mum whose baby died at Bronzefield, after the inquest into her baby's death, at the end of it, she went on Channel 4 and she gave a statement. And in her statement, she just said, the way prisons are run is about power and control. They will never be caring places. And I just thought,

That sums it up really. Like the very design of a prison just means it will not be a caring place. And we need to stop entertaining the delusion that a prison could ever be safe for anyone, let alone a pregnant woman. So let's look a bit towards the future now. What's next now you have achieved the changes to the sentencing guidelines? Bail, babes! That's the name of the new campaign. Bail, babes! Oh yeah, bail for babes!

Babies! That could be quite good. Yeah, no bus behind bars and bail for babies. Yeah, so obviously we've achieved sentencing guideline change. Now we need to look at the number of pregnant women who are being held before their trial or sentencing. We need to make sure that the considerations that are

court now has to make at the point of sentencing are also made when you know women are coming through from police stations and the court is deciding whether to keep them at home on bail or send them into custody and we will always say keep them at home on bail

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