This article first appeared in The Mail on Sunday I have spent the last few months saturated in the blood of young women. As I fall asleep I block out their screams. As I sit at my desk I avert my eyes from their mutilated bodies. But before you send
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I cannot be the only woman in the media left slack jawed at newspaper condemnation of the BBC over an alleged ‘culture of abuse’. Not that we approve of what happened in Jimmy Savile’s grubby dressing room, Rolls or caravan. No we are shocked by the easy way the tabloids
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I am going to have a rant. Sorry, but after this weekend, I need one. What is the point of offering choice when those choices are ignored? That is the question I was left asking after the local education authority refused my child – among others – a place at
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What do you get if you get a Cabinet of millionaires? A concerted attack on women. No wonder Chris Huhne’s ex appears to be so bitter. I realised this when Nick Clegg was wheeled out earlier in the week to defend government proposals to abolish Child Benefit for families where
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The Independent 23rd January 2009 Years ago, I heard a story about a group of publishers asked to recommend books for translation. The criteria were that they should be well-written, have literary merit, be commercially viable and have been recently published. One book divided the judges: a novel written from
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The Author Autumn 2008 Earlier this year as the row over Arts Council England’s (ACE) regular funding raged on there came a point when I found myself wondering in what kind of sublebrity bubble Jeremy Clarkson lives. In a rant in the Sunday Times, the TV presenter said that ACE
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judging by the current trend for ever more graphic tales of sexual abuse, just months after seeing her mother incarcerated Dana will be expected to perform an emotional striptease and deliver up every graphic detail of her abuse for public consumption.
The Independent If there were an award for the most misleading book title this year, my money would be on the poet Lavinia Greenlaw’s The Importance of Music to Girls. Because any woman – or girl – who expects the memoir to be an unholy coupling of Nick Hornby’s High
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The Daily Mail 20 April 2007 When Aneta was offered a job across the border from her Czech village, she jumped at the chance. The pretty 17-year-old was to be a nanny for a rich family. Petr, the handsome man who recruited her, promised she would travel with them to
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What Surfistinha calls “run-of-the-mill” prostitutes are women more often than not living in horrible and degraded circumstances, whose choice was taken away with their passports or the first time they smoked crack. There is nothing glamorous about the world they inhabit.
Prostitution and paedophilia have an uncomfortably close relationship. It is one publishers would do well to remember next time they publish a book glamorising the business. Belle and Bruna may be above the age of consent, but according to the Home Office (Paying the Price. 2004) the average age women become involved in prostitution is 12 – one out of every two prostitutes become involved in the trade before they are 18.
