In 2013, Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah’s nine-year-old daughter, Ella, died from a catastrophic asthma attack. Her death transformed her mum into a formidable campaigner. First, she fought to find out what had killed Ella - why had her previously healthy little girl suddenly developed breathing problems so bad they would become fatal?

The answer lay very close to home - Ella, Rosamund and her siblings lived just off the busy South Circular Road, and the air pollution levels were dangerously high. Rosamund’s fight led to Ella becoming the first person in the world to have air pollution listed as a cause of death on her death certificate. Now Rosamund is one of the world’s leading campaigners to clean up dirty air globally.

In this episode, she’s joined by a very special guest: Anna’s mum, Rachel Sinfield. Rachel’s son, Kit, also died from an unexpected asthma attack, and she’s inspired by Rosamund’s work.

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Christmas Day, 1992. Sarajevo, Bosnia. War is ranging - Serb forces surround the city. For nearly four years, its people have endured daily shelling and sniper attacks, cut off from the rest of the world in the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare. More than 11,000 people were killed. 1600 of them were children.

And in the main hospital, a baby is born: Lejla Damon. Her mother didn’t want anything to do with her - if she held her, she said, she would strangle her.

Lejla was born of sexual violence used as a weapon of war. Her birth mother had been raped, repeatedly, by Serb soldiers in a concentration camp. And Lejla was just too closely linked to her attackers for her to bear.

Lejla was adopted by a British couple, and grew up in London. She felt alone in her earliest life experiences. But in adulthood, she’s found her Bosnian identity, and become an advocate for the countless other ‘invisible’ children around the world born of sexual violence used as a weapon of war.

The Girlfriends: Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHeartPodcasts.

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It’s the 1990s in San Francisco, and Antonia Crane is a dancer at the legendary peep show, the Lusty Lady. In the dressing room and the mirrored ‘Fishbowl’ where the dancers perform in six inch heels, a revolution is brewing.

The dancers are sick of putting up with workplace injustices, or customers filming them without their consent. And they’re about to take on the system and fight to become one of the first unionised strip clubs in the United States.

Antonia Crane is an author, activist, sex worker and PhD candidate at USC. You can read more about her life in her memoir, ‘Spent’.

The other books mentioned in this episode are ‘Unequal Desires: Race and Erotic Capital in the Stripping Industry,’ by Professor Siobhan Brooks, another Lusty Lady alum; and ‘The Ethical Stripper’ by Stacey Clare. Antonia also recommends 'Neon Girls: A Stripper's Education in Protest and Power' by Dr. Jennifer Worley.

The Girlfriends: Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHeartPodcasts.

For more from Novel visit Novel.Audio

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.