Join us as we explore sexual liberation for all within an established realm that only benefits some. We love Michaela Coel and would love for you to listen even if you haven’t watched the TV show. Trigger warnings for rape, trauma and assault. We are not experts so please reach out to the below resources if you are seeking help/advice.

UK

AUS

Themes addressed in the series

Trauma/Consent

Women

Arabella: Prior to being raped, I never took much notice of being a woman. I was busy being black and poor.

LGBT

Over the past two decades, sexual and gender-based violence against women and girls in conflict situations has received increasing attention [1], leading to a marked progress in research and the development of interventions to identify survivors and support their health and protection needs. At the same time, however, the health of men, boys, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) and other non-binary people exposed to sexual violence in conflict has been insufficiently addressed by research and the UN policy agenda

Ending/Revenge fantasies

the study points to the significance of feelings of injustice as an internal mechanism for evoking a desire for revenge and associated fantasies, which may endow the victim with a sense of control after the trauma. Although the natural tendency to seek revenge and revenge fantasies tend to be regarded in the literature as a negative component while the concept of forgiveness is seen as a positive step towards healing (Hargrave and Anderson, 2013; Tener and Eisikovits, 2017) along with the conversion of anger and resentment toward the perpetrator or the self into positive feelings such as compassion and empathy (McCullough et al., 2013), when practitioners develop intervention programs for individuals, who have experienced various traumatic events they may benefit by viewing the role of feelings of injustice, the desire for revenge and fantasies of revenge as necessary ingredients for healing prior to forgiveness.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6520653/

Reporting assault

Support group

89% of trials end in exoneration

Lonliness (Ben)

Nearly half of Americans always or sometimes feel alone (46%) or left out (47%). Fully 54% said they always or sometimes feel that no one knows them well. Loneliness isn’t just a U.S. phenomenon. In a nationwide survey released in October from the BBC, a third of Britons said that they often or very often feel lonely. Nearly half of Britons over 65 consider the television or a pet their main source of company. In Japan, there are more than half a million people under 40 who haven’t left their house or interacted with anyone for at least six months. In Canada, the share of solo households is now 28%. Across the European Union, it’s 34%.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2019/05/03/millennials-and-the-loneliness-epidemic/?sh=2e775f4b7676

Happy Animals

2008: According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), indigenous (also known as “old-growth”) forests in Africa are being cut down at a rate of more than 4 mn hectares per year — twice the world’s deforestation average. According to the FAO, losses totalled more than 10 per cent of the continent’s total forest cover between 1980 and 1995 alone. https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/january-2008/saving-africa%E2%80%99s-forests-%E2%80%98lungs-world%E2%80%99

WWF: Between 1990 and 2000, approximately 91,000 km2 of forests were lost in Central Africa, an area about three times the size of Belgium.

WWF: Between 2000 and 2012, East Africa lost around 6 million hectares of forest. WWF projects that the region will lose 12 million hectares between 2010 and 2030 if current trends continue.

https://wwf.panda.org/discover/our_focus/forests_practice/deforestation_fronts2/deforestation_in_the_congo_basin/

Technology