‘They are turning him into a hero': Kneecap solidarity gig held in Dublin
Kneecap flags and logos hung from the windows in Connolly Books, which dubs itself Ireland's oldest radical bookshop, in solidarity with O hAnnaidh, Kneecap, and the people of Palestine.
Pro-Palestine supporters criticised the decision by British authorities to bring a charge against the performer instead of focusing on the Israeli government's actions against the Palestinian people.
O hAnnaidh, 27, who performs under the stage name Mo Chara, is accused of displaying a flag in support of Hezbollah at a gig in November last year.
Hundreds of Kneecap supporters greeted O hAnnaidh as he arrived at Westminster Magistrates' Court in London on Wednesday morning, alongside fellow Kneecap rappers Naoise O Caireallain and JJ O Dochartaigh.
During the hearing, his defence team argued the case should be thrown out, citing a technical error in the way the charge against him was brought.
The case has been adjourned until September 26, when the judge will rule on whether he has the jurisdiction to try the case.
At the protest session at Connolly Books on Wednesday afternoon, several artists played Irish traditional music in solidarity with the rappers and Palestine.
Musician Ru O'Shea, who performed at the demonstration, said charging O hAnnaidh had turned him into 'a hero'.
'I think it's been a huge misstep by the powers that be to go after him in the first place,' he told the PA news agency.
'I reckon that they don't have a thing on him, and I think they are turning him into a hero, and I think we need a hero.
'What's happening in Palestine right now, it's gotten to such an extreme that it's waking a lot of people up, including the British who might not have ever seen it otherwise and stayed in that bubble forever.'
O'Shea's friend John Feehan said: 'I think people are maybe starting to look up a little bit in Britain, and I think things like what's happening with Kneecap is a catalyst for people to be like 'Oh, wait a minute, what's actually happening here?'. So I hope there's momentum, but I really don't know.'
Dubliner Aoife Powell, 19, said she came out to protest because she is 'angry' at the decision to charge an artist rather than focus on what is happening to the people of Gaza.
'I'm here because it just worries me that the fact that governments are focused on artists expressing themselves rather than the actual problem, which is obviously the genocide in Gaza,' she told PA.
'It's a little bit disheartening to see there's so much pressure being put on these artists to stop saying what they truly think and to stop standing on the right side of history.
'I feel like it's a distraction from what's actually happening.
'When a government tries to silence people, they should learn that they can never silence people. I feel like the public would get more angry at that.'
Sean O'Grady is from Coleraine in Northern Ireland but has lived in Dublin for almost 70 years.
'I'm delighted with them (Kneecap), that they've done what they're doing, and they're getting plenty of publicity.
'The British government are crazy, I mean, what are they at?
'They're supplying a lot of the bombs, and a lot of the arms and ammunition to Israel to do what they're doing. So they should be ashamed of themselves instead of bringing in these people (to court) for stupid reasons.
'It's getting good publicity over there for the cause of the Palestinians.'
Dubliner Dermot Nolan said he attended his first Palestine protest in 1967, and while he remembers horrific events such as the Vietnam War, the scale of death and injuries in Gaza is the worst he has ever lived through.
'I'm here because it's important to for two reasons – first of all, to show our intolerance of the genocide and slaughter that's being carried out by the US, Nato and Israel.
'The second reason is the question of civil rights. We're protesting about the indictment of a member of the Irish group Kneecap.
'It is a sign of creeping authoritarianism which is happening in all the western countries and most clearly in Britain.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
The thong bikini boom: why the skimpiest swimwear is back
There are plenty of places where no one would bat an eyelid at the sight of a thong bikini; on a beach in Brazil or around the Love Island fire pit, visible butt cheeks are practically de rigueur. But my first sighting this year was not while surfing in Australia or sunbathing in the Caribbean, but at an open-water swimming spot, on a rainy day in Scotland. I should not have been surprised. Tiny swimwear is huge news this summer. It is no longer confined to sunny climes, but cropping up everywhere from lidos to leisure centres – and lochs, apparently. The trickle down from catwalks and influencers to holidaymakers and shoppers is notable. A search for 'thong bikini' on Asos yields 187 results, ranging from high-leg styles, to side-tie, to tanga (somewhere between a thong and a standard brief), while high-street outlets including H&M, Calzedonia and Zara all have thong bikini bottoms in their collections. And, as with any trend, there are plenty of celebrity forerunners, including gymnast Simone Biles, model Heidi Klum, actor Sofía Vergara and singer Nicole Scherzinger. Rapper Lizzo is a longtime fan. 'I won't lie, it was nerve-racking initially,' says Victoria, 29, who wore a thong bikini for the first time on a recent solo trip to Naples. As for many new converts, part of the appeal lay in the fact that she would be able to avoid the significant tan lines created by fuller coverage swimwear. 'I saw thong bikinis everywhere and wished I could wear one. But then I thought about it and was like, it's just a bum. Men wear those teeny-tiny trunks where you see everything, so why can't I wear this? Plus, it was really comfy.' The itsy-bitsy bikini revolution may have come to the fore this summer, but it has been rumbling for some time. In 2023, the New York Times declared that 'more women are adopting the 'less is more' philosophy' when it comes to beachwear; the same year, fashion site Who What Wear called thong bikinis the 'controversial swimwear trend you'll see on every beach this summer'. In 2024, New Zealand site The Spinoff asked: 'Why is every bikini bottom a thong now?' 'I think we've moved into another age of body consciousness – a much more expressive moment,' says Shaun Cole, associate professor in fashion at the University of Southampton. 'People are saying: 'It's my body and I can show it off in ways that I choose to, and if that involves wearing clothing that is sometimes deemed socially unacceptable then I'm going to do that.'' Gen Z, in particular, are less inclined to restrict themselves to clothes deemed to be 'flattering' – a term that has fallen spectacularly out of favour. Thong bikinis, once the preserve of those who conformed to a particular body type, are now being manufactured in a more inclusive range of sizes and marketed more diversely. 'Women of all shapes and sizes are leaning into bolder cuts with real confidence as part of a wider cultural shift towards body positivity and self-expression, which is great to see,' says Aliya Wilkinson, founder of luxury swimwear label Ôsalé. Her brand doesn't yet offer thong styles, but she plans to introduce them in the future. 'In the west, fashion has long found ways to augment the butt, to make it look bigger and put emphasis on this part of the female body,' says Roberta Sassatelli, professor of sociology at the University of Bologna and co-author of Body and Gender. 'This is perhaps because the butt is deemed to be very sensual but is not related to reproduction. Because it is totally related to pleasure, it feels more liberated.' The trend is reflected in the popularity of potentially dangerous cosmetic procedures, such as Brazilian butt lifts. Sculpting the perfect behind has also become something of a fitness obsession. In 2018, sports writer Anna Kessel noted that 'the emphasis on a firm, or 'juicy', bottom has now overtaken the flat stomach as the fitness holy grail in mainstream women's health magazines', with an increasing number of gym classes dedicated exclusively to the posterior. Seven years later, could it be that gym-goers are keen to display the results? 'I think the popularity of thong bikinis exists at the convergence of a focus on building glutes in the gym, a kind of exhibitionist creep in which the butt is one of the last frontiers that had remained mostly covered in public, and a greater cultural acceptance of a range of different body types,' says historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, author of Fit Nation. 'The low-slung jeans of the early 2000s were certainly correlated with the age when flat abs workouts were all the rage.' Cole suggests there may be another reason why more people are choosing to wear less. 'It could be linked to what's been called the 'pornification' of culture and style,' he says, citing an idea put forward by fashion historian Pamela Church Gibson. '[It is] modelled on a style that has come out of pornography – at the points where pornography stars are dressed – which involves garments such as tiny bikinis or thong-style underwear. There's an acceptance of that style without people really realising where it originated. The popularity of shows such as Love Island, where people are there to show off their bodies as a way of attracting a partner, again ties to that pornification of style.' After years of falling audience figures, Love Island is also experiencing a boom this summer: increased numbers tuned in to watch the UK and US versions, with the New York Times attributing the popularity of the latter to its ability to offer reprieve during 'times of societal and economic hardship'. As dress and design historian Amber Butchart put it when curating Splash!, a recent exhibition on swimming and style at the Design Museum in London: 'Swimwear's close relationship with the body means it reflects changing attitudes to modesty, morality and public display. From the 18th century, bathing machines were used to protect sea dippers from prying eyes. But throughout the 20th century, a number of boundary-pushing designs challenged previous ideas of decency while also courting controversy. For the last century, what we wear while swimming has been used as an excuse to police bodies.' While it is predominantly women who are opting for poolside thongs today, this wasn't always the case. The earliest iteration of the style is thought to be the ancient loincloth, worn by men. Modern thongs are said to have been adopted in 1939, when the mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia, ordered that showgirls must cover themselves rather than perform nude at the city's World's Fair. When it comes to swimwear specifically, Austrian-American Rudi Gernreich – the fashion designer behind the monokini, or 'topless bikini' – is most often credited with creating the thong bikini, in response to Los Angeles city council banning public nudity, including naked sunbathing, in 1974. The thong bikini has prompted similar bans more recently. In January, a council in Greater Sydney, Australia, banned thong and (even skimpier) G-string bikinis at its public pools. A number of women have also been arrested for wearing thong bikinis in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where the style is banned. In the UK, Greenwich Leisure Ltd, which operates 240 leisure centres under the brand Better, requires swimmers to wear 'full-coverage bikinis', which a spokesperson previously indicated did imply 'that thongs wouldn't be acceptable'. But even when thong styles are not prohibited, many bikini-wearers remain nervous. 'I do own one, but it's only been worn once, when my partner and I had a private villa in Portugal,' says Rebecca, 33. Even then, she says, she felt a little too exposed. 'I don't understand why someone would wear one on a family holiday, for example. Thong bikinis feel quite sexualised, so to me it seems inappropriate. Give me high-waisted bikini bottoms that cover your cheeks any day.' For Sassatelli, the reason thong bikinis are in vogue is not so surprising. 'The thong has never gone away completely,' she says. 'But for people who are in their teens and 20s, they haven't really been 'in fashion'. Once [the fashion industry] has forgotten something, then it can be recuperated – and it makes for a little sense of novelty.'
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
‘Pregnant, homeless, what now?' The search for a safe place to abandon a baby
When Romina discovered she was pregnant in 2021, she was 39 years old and homeless, without a euro to her name. She did what many a lonely and frightened woman has done throughout history, on learning that she was going to have a baby, and pretended she wasn't. 'If you don't think about it, it doesn't exist – something like that,' she told me, more than three years on. By the time she noticed the changes in her body, she had been homeless for nearly seven years. Before that, she had lived a comfortable, secure life in The Hague, with a man she had fallen passionately in love with. But the man had become controlling, she said, preventing her from working or seeing her friends, spying on her and eventually threatening her if she left him. She left him anyway, one night around Christmas 2014, and so opened a very dark chapter in a life that, to hear Romina, had already known its fair share of darkness – her parents' divorce when she was three; years of sexual abuse at the hands of a stepfather; her mother's many suicide attempts, the last of which, in 2009, succeeded; estrangement from her two half-siblings; and separation from her two sons (one of whom was just a toddler) after she entered into that last, abusive relationship, leaving them with their fathers. Her ex had political clout locally, so Romina felt that the only way to prevent him from tracking her down was to disappear into the city's shadow world. The first night on the streets was the worst, she said. It was raining and cold. She didn't have enough money for a hotel, and the little she had, she knew she had to keep for food, so she walked, and cried. When she finally slept, after three wakeful days and nights, it was in a parking garage. For a woman alone, it can be a toss-up as to which is riskier, staying inside a homeless shelter or on the street, and except in winter, Romina preferred to take her chances outside. 'It's strange,' she said, 'but only six months were very hard, because you still have hope and you know a better life. After six months you don't know it any more, your brain goes into survival mode.' In her mind, all her ties of family and friendship fell away. Her sole preoccupations were finding food and a safe place to sleep. Romina and I spoke via a video call, because she was still nervous about revealing her whereabouts. Her laugh is full-throated and her English excellent, given that she told me she learned it from Netflix. She has a mass of blond curls and was wearing red lipstick and had a tattoo the length of her forearm. She looked younger than her 42 years. She had two lifelines during those years, she said: an old school friend who let her wash and use the internet at his place when his girlfriend was at work, and Tinder, the dating app. She would have sex with men in exchange for a bed for the night. She was aware that sounded like sex work, but said she only chose men she found attractive. With one of those men the relationship was 'Netflix and chill'. They always used a condom, but she got pregnant anyway. By the time it became impossible for her to deny her condition, the relationship was petering out, so she decided not to tell the man. She tapped a query into Google – 'pregnant, homeless, what now?' – and up came a name she'd never seen before, Beschermde Wieg, which is Dutch for 'protected cradle'. It was the name of a foundation that ran a number of 'baby rooms' across the Netherlands, places where you could give up your baby anonymously, relinquishing – without judgment – any role in that baby's life along with any straightforward way for him or her to find you. In the moment, the anonymous option appealed to Romina. She fired off an inquiry, since the foundation also offered anonymous advice. That was how she entered into contact with the women who, by providing information and unflagging support, would help her turn her life around. She broke off from our conversation to reassure her son, now three, who was clamouring for her attention in the background. Like the vast majority of expectant parents who have enquired about baby rooms in the 11 years that they have operated in the Netherlands, Romina ended up keeping her child. The founders and staff of Beschermde Wieg insist that their rooms offer a caring alternative to the more controversial baby windows – also known as baby hatches, life windows or safe haven boxes – where a person simply deposits a baby in a secure vault, often in the wall of a public building, and walks away. To the dismay of many, this modern incarnation of the medieval foundling wheel has made a comeback since the turn of the millennium, proliferating in countries rich and poor. Beschermde Wieg believes there are enough new parents in crisis – including victims of rape or incest, fugitives and the extremely young – that it's vital the option exists of giving up your baby anonymously. As Romina attempted to express her gratitude to the foundation, her English temporarily deserted her. Then she found the words. At the moment when her pregnancy forced her to act, she said, she trusted no one and had nothing to give. Without Beschermde Wieg, either she would have abandoned her child somewhere less safe, or she would be dead. 'They saved us,' she said, simply. Infant abandonment and infanticide – which are often mentioned in the same breath – are not subjects that most people like to think about. Even Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist and professor emerita at the University of California, Davis, who studied them for years in the context of her wider interest in child-rearing, finds them hard topics to discuss now that she is a mother and a grandmother. Though typically rare, abandonment is documented as far back as records go. There's plenty of evidence it predates history, too, and even the emergence of home sapiens. Hrdy has argued that men and women are strategists hardwired to enhance their reproductive success. A pregnancy carried to term is a huge investment of resources, and usually the rational choice is to nurture and protect that investment. Very occasionally, however, circumstances arise that make the rational choice to write it off – as painful as that might be. Those circumstances include economic policies that separate new mothers from their support networks, and social conventions such as an extreme preference for sons. In her 1999 book, Mother Nature, Hrdy quotes a chilling note penned by a Roman soldier to his wife in the first century BC: 'If you are delivered of child … if it is a boy keep it, if a girl discard it.' No country collects data systematically on abandonment, making it difficult to see what is driving it at a granular level. Newborn babies abandoned or killed before their existence is officially registered may, tragically, pass under the radar. We do know that abandonment reflects changes in the socioeconomic context. Today, abortion bans and crackdowns on illegal immigration are among the factors pushing it up. In the past it was principally lack of access to maternal care, stigmatising of single mothers, and poverty. Lorraine Sherr, a psychologist at University College London who studies abandonment, calls it a 'lightning rod' for society's ills, because it's in childbirth – when humans are at their most vulnerable – that the strains show first and most dramatically. So many dead babies – more girls than boys – were being fished out of the Tiber by 1198 that a Roman church had a rotating cylinder fitted into its wall. A person could place a baby in the cylinder on the street side and rotate it into the building – abandoning the child anonymously. By 1400, foundling wheels were to be seen all over Europe. You can still see one at the Innocenti, a hospital turned museum in Florence, where the wheel is covered by a grille that was supposed to prevent people from shoving in older children. Indeed, Innocenti, along with Esposito ('exposed' in English, as in 'left out'), were once surnames commonly given to foundlings. By the late 18th century, abandonment rates in many European capitals had peaked, shockingly, at about one in four births, and Hrdy has written of 'epidemics of foundlings'. Misuse was suspected – birth parents presenting themselves as foster parents to collect monetary compensation, for example – and the windows began to be phased out, to be replaced in some countries by consignment offices where you were required to identify yourself. Maternity care and social services slowly improved. Methods of contraception other than abstinence became available from the 19th century, and legal abortion from the 20th – though, of course, not everywhere. Then in the late 1990s – for reasons including the decriminalisation of abandonment, and academic and media interest in the topic – the baby window was back on the scene. The typical baby window is a vault in the wall of a building – sometimes a hospital or clinic, sometimes a fire station or religious-run institution. Inside is a cradle and occasionally also writing materials in case the person depositing the baby wants to leave a note. They slide up a window, place the baby in the temperature-controlled interior and close the window again. They then have a few minutes to leave or change their mind, before the window locks and an alarm sounds inside the building. Today, baby windows can be found throughout the world, though they are concentrated in regions where access to contraception and abortion is restricted. The US and Germany are outliers, with about 300 and 100 respectively. Most countries have many fewer, and the UK and France have none (the UK doesn't allow women to give birth anonymously, France does). In 2024, a woman named Toyin Odumala, who was herself abandoned as a child, launched a petition calling for baby windows to be introduced in the UK, in light of the highly publicised case of three siblings abandoned a few years apart in the same area of east London. Sister Ancilla runs the home for mothers and babies on a quiet residential street in Krakow, Poland. Financed by a Catholic charity, the Family Accompaniment Foundation, the home currently has four women and their babies in residence. But it serves a second function, having a baby window – a 'window of life' as it is called in the country – fitted into the wall on the street side. The Krakow window was the first to be inaugurated in Poland, in March 2006, at the request of Pope John Paul II. Three months later it received its first baby, a girl; since then it has received 24 others – 12 of each sex, including two sets of twins. The abandoned babies spend no more than a few hours in the home – the nuns' role is to care for them until an ambulance arrives, and inform the family court so that the adoption process can get under way – nevertheless some of these modern foundlings have marked the sisters deeply. One premature girl was left in a shoebox, Sister Ancilla told me, wrapped in an old T-shirt, with the placenta and umbilical cord still attached – and, it transpired, drugs in her system. This was before Ancilla's time but, she said: 'There was a presumption that it probably wasn't the mother who brought the baby. She wouldn't have been capable.' The nuns also suspected that the woman might have been a sex worker. The little girl survived, and Ancilla believes she went on to be adopted. Poland has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe, and the Krakow window – like the dozens of others across the country – is advertised through churches and welfare associations. Over the years, police spokespeople have been quoted by local media as saying that the number of infanticides has dropped in the Krakow region since it was installed – the implication being that it is saving lives. A similar claim is made by Swiss Aid for Mother and Child, the non-profit organisation that runs six of eight baby windows in Switzerland, and by Safe Haven Baby Boxes, the company that has furnished all of the US baby windows. But the data doesn't really support these claims. Given that poverty is a known cause of abandonment, it could be rising incomes that have driven down infanticide in Poland – or lessening of the stigma attached to unmarried mothers. Sherr distinguishes between babies abandoned to live and those abandoned to die. Most experts agree that baby windows have no effect on infanticide rates, because forensic psychiatric evidence indicates that women who kill their babies – many of whom conceal or deny their pregnancies, then panic when they give birth – experience a degree of emotional turmoil that precludes the planning and problem-solving that using a window entails. They could reduce the number of babies abandoned to live, some of whom will die accidentally, but the data is ambiguous on this point at best. About 700 babies are given up in Polish hospitals each year, on average, compared with fewer than 10 via the baby windows. The hospital route is safer for mother and child, but not anonymous. Nobody can say what would happen to those 10 babies if the windows didn't exist, and women were better informed about their rights and options. They might be abandoned in unsafe places, or their parents might choose the standard adoption route. There is even some evidence that baby windows encourage the very thing they're designed to combat. When the Danish government was deliberating over whether to introduce them, it commissioned Laura Navne and Marie Jakobsen of the Danish National Centre for Social Research, in Copenhagen, to carry out a survey of the impact of baby windows in 10 high-income countries. The pair's startling conclusion, published in 2021, was that 'they increase the incidence of child abandonment'. The government decided against installing them. The Danish finding echoes recent historical research conducted in Italy, showing that abandonment rates fell after the foundling wheels were phased out in the 19th century. The wheels provided both a solution for poor families with more children than they could support, the researchers found, and a secret, socially acceptable way of getting rid of babies born out of wedlock. In so doing, they entrenched the stigma attached to unmarried mothers, while fathers were unaccountable. Today's baby windows operate in a different cultural context, but they too have that dual function, the study's authors argued – protecting infants and perpetuating a system that fails to tackle the root causes of abandonment. About 20 years ago, in an unpublished but much-cited anecdotal report, Hungarian child rights advocate Mária Herczog and colleagues interviewed porters at a Budapest hospital where visitors to the baby window were captured on CCTV. The hospital had the particularity of being located in the city's red light district, and the porters related that most of the 16 babies left there over the decade or so covered by the footage were brought by men. Who those men were, nobody knows. It's impossible to generalise from such a small and unscientific study, but it does serve as a reminder not to assume that the mother is the one giving up her baby, or even that she has consented to do so. For Herczog, the windows cynically exploit the most vulnerable women in society, since it is often the same women providing sexual services and babies for adoption. She called the devices 'profoundly anti-mother' and said that many women end up giving birth in unsafe conditions before returning to bad situations where they quickly get pregnant again: 'It is not a solution.' In her view, a humane society would intervene earlier, helping women to avoid unwanted pregnancies and supporting them through wanted ones. Sherr agrees. 'I always say the mother of the abandoned baby is herself abandoned,' she said. To be fair, Poland's Family Accompaniment Foundation and Swiss Aid for Mother and Child try to intervene early, offering counselling and support. But both are – or are perceived to be – anti-abortion. The founder of the Swiss organisation, Dominik Müggler, did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article, but among the 33 reasons to have a baby, posted on the organisation's website, visitors can read: 'Because God wants babies to live.' Herczog finds it telling that where the emphasis is on supporting mothers and keeping families together, as in the Netherlands and parts of Switzerland, the windows (or rooms) stand mostly unused. In 2016, the Swiss canton of Valais installed a baby box that is funded, not by Müggler's organisation, but by the cantonal authorities, who wanted it to be ideologically and religiously neutral. Their aim was to reduce the infanticide rate, said the paediatrician who oversees the box, Juan Llor of the cantonal hospital at Sion, who was personally sceptical that it would have that effect. Since 2016, seven babies have been given up for adoption in the canton's hospitals, but not one has been placed in the box. 'If the baby box is used, that's a failure of care for the pregnant woman and the family,' Llor said, adding that his initial scepticism had been vindicated: the window had had no impact on the Valais infanticide rate. The residents of the Krakow mother-and-baby home are in no doubt that an anonymous solution is needed. Several of them wrote me letters telling me how, though they couldn't have imagined giving up their own babies, they could easily understand women in situations only slightly more perilous than theirs choosing that path. Beschermde Wieg, the Dutch organisation that Romina credits with saving her life, thinks it has found a happy medium – a way to offer anonymity humanely. It was founded by Barbara Müller, who previously worked in child protection, where she saw too many children let down by a dysfunctional care system, and concluded that more needed to be done early on, to keep families together. So in 2013, in her home town of Dordrecht, she set up a home where pregnant women or new mothers could find temporary accommodation and support. A year later Müller decided that she still wasn't reaching the most vulnerable women – those whose desperate circumstances forced them to hide their pregnancies and to abandon or kill their newborns. She shared her frustration with her friend Kitty Nusteling, a mother of five who was working in the private sector then, organising childcare for middle-class families. Nusteling realised that she, too, would rather help women in greater need. At the time, around five abandoned babies were being found each year in the Netherlands, most of them lifeless. 'And you can ask yourself the question, how many babies are not found?' said Nusteling. She and Müller felt that many new mothers in crisis might just need some respite, and that if they got it they would eventually – and joyfully – take their babies back. They decided to provide that respite, in anonymity and with no ideological or religious slant. 'We're pro-choice, we're not pro-life,' said Nusteling. Uncomfortable with the somewhat brutal image of a hatch through which you pass your baby, never to see him or her again, they conceived of a room complete with child-friendly murals, cuddly toys and a sheepskin-lined rocking chair. A person couldn't give birth in the room, but they could spend undisturbed time there, settling the baby in and saying goodbye to him or her – also, importantly, browsing literature about the other options available – before pressing the button that would signal the baby's presence, and leaving. Since Müller's plan contravened Dutch law, which protects a child's right to know its origins – a right enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child – she decided to keep the baby room separate from the mother-and-baby home so as not to expose the latter to legal risk. So Beschermde Wieg, of which Nusteling is director of operations, was born in the converted garage of a volunteer's house in Dordrecht. The law could apply to anyone seen as enabling or provoking anonymous abandonment, as well as to the person actually abandoning, and the punishment could include a hefty fine and jail time. Müller said that the first time a woman brought her baby to the room, she was invited to the justice ministry, interrogated and threatened with prison, but the threat didn't materialise. Eventually she was summoned to an official hearing at the ministry where she just kept repeating her line: 'You are reading the UN convention in the wrong way.' In focusing on article 7, about a child's right to know their birth parents, she explained that officials had overlooked article 6, which defends a child's right to life. Müller argued that a person could only wonder about who gave birth to them if they were alive. In 2019, the government changed its stance. Though anonymous abandonment remained illegal, operating and using the rooms would no longer be punishable. The foundation even received funding from the Dutch health ministry after that, though nowadays it relies on private donations to pay for the 14 baby rooms – 13 fixed and one mobile – that it runs across the country, including nine in hospitals. If someone wants to give up a baby in the Netherlands, the official procedure begins with the child being placed with a foster family for three months. At the end of that period, the birth parents have an opportunity to change their mind. If they don't, the baby goes to an adoptive family, but the birth parents have a say in the choice of that family. Their identity is kept on record, and the child can obtain it, if he or she wants to, upon turning adult. Beschermde Wieg respects this protocol scrupulously, but it inserts the extra option of anonymity. Many parents in crisis are drawn to the baby room, Nusteling said, but few ultimately choose it. Of the roughly 1,700 who contact the foundation each year, 17 give up their babies, around two-thirds of whom later reclaim them. The foundation's goal is to reach the mother as early as possible in the pregnancy, and to help her change her situation – to get an education, say, or to escape a violent partner. It wants the rooms to stand empty. Beschermde Wieg was vilified to begin with, but as it shared more of the nameless women's stories, the criticism became more muted. 'People saw over 10 years that there were not long queues of women wanting to give up their babies,' said Nusteling. 'It's not easy.' They also saw that the women weren't all illegal immigrants – a common misconception. There were some of those, but there were also Polish women providing Dutch companies with cheap labour; young, unmarried Dutch women belonging to a strict Protestant denomination; and middle-aged ones like Romina, fleeing Dutch men with political influence. Perhaps, adds Müller, they also saw that there could be courage – and sense – in sacrificing your own desires to give your child a better life. During Romina's first exchange with Beschermde Wieg, she agreed to a prenatal scan four days later. It was January 2022. 'The next day it was very cold outside,' she said. 'It was raining and all my clothes were wet.' She fell sick and called the foundation, which arranged for an ambulance to pick her up. At the hospital she learned that she was three months pregnant. Technically she could still have requested an abortion, but having seen what she saw on the ultrasound screen, she decided that was no longer an option. Feeling trapped and frightened, her mind zeroed in on the baby room. Nusteling and her colleagues dissuaded her from taking an irreversible decision too soon, and she agreed to a period of foster care. She gave birth on a Friday, in hospital, by caesarean section. Given that she would only keep her baby for a few days, the medical staff advised her not to breastfeed him. 'I did it sneakily!' she said. The following Monday, the foster parents came. Handing him over to them was the hardest thing she has ever done, she said, but she felt she had no choice. She was still homeless. If she didn't give him up, child protection would surely take him away from her. She spent the next three months in a psychiatric facility, half the time sedated to help her cope with the emotional maelstrom that losing her baby pitched her into. 'The first three weeks were awful because your body is screaming for a baby but there isn't a baby,' she said. After six weeks she saw her son again, as the law required, and decided that she would do whatever it took to get him back. A judge agreed that she could have him, on condition that she found them a place to live. Beschermde Wieg's sister organisation offered her a room in one of its mother-and-baby homes, and when her son was three months old they moved into it, taking a single bag of clothes. Romina has some outstanding debts to The Hague city authorities. She is on welfare and feels guilty that there is no father figure in her son's life. But she is slowly getting back on her feet, and has re-established contact with her older sons. Last Mother's Day, they came to visit. She shows me a picture of her middle son playing with his younger half-brother, her arms encircling them both. All three are smiling. When her youngest starts school, in a year's time, she plans to find work. She and Nusteling have discussed the possibility of her joining Beschermde Wieg, to advise women going through experiences similar to hers. She knows it won't be easy – for a start, she's the perimenopausal single parent of an energetic three-year-old – but she can't get over how lucky she's been, or how surrounded she feels by kind people. 'I have a beautiful home, I have food on the table, I have a shower, I have clothes,' she said. 'Every day feels like a dream.' Listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.
The Herald Scotland
an hour ago
- The Herald Scotland
Netflix Hostage: Full cast list and how to watch the series
The series takes place against the backdrop of a state visit from French Prime Minister Vivienne Toussaint (Julie Delpy). British Prime Minister Abigail Dalton (Jones) is keen to smooth over any simmering tensions between the two countries, but then disaster strikes. The Radio Times adds: "When her husband is kidnapped, though, and Toussaint herself is embroiled in a blackmailing plot, the pair must figure out whether they can trust each other enough to work together to protect those closest to them." The new series comes from Bridge of Spies screenwriter Matt Charman, with Jones serving as an executive producer. Speaking about how the show came to be, Jones told the Radio Times: "Me and Matt Charman, the writer, have known each other for a long time. "We always wanted to do a project together, and I suddenly got an urge to do a political drama. I've always loved shows that take the viewer into the halls of power. "Matt had done Bridge of Spies and Treason, so I knew that he was the person to go to. We bounced ideas back and forth and then we came up with this idea of me as the prime minister.' Kidnap. Blackmail. Unimaginable choices. Get ready for HOSTAGE, a new limited series starring Suranne Jones and Julie Delpy coming to Netflix 21 August. — Netflix UK & Ireland (@NetflixUK) June 18, 2025 Jones was keen to avoid her character being a lone, Margaret Thatcher figure, as she explained: 'I didn't want to be the only woman in a room full of men, but one working with another female leader. That's the thing that's different about it.' Netflix Hostage full cast list Suranne Jones as Abigail Dalton Julie Delpy as Vivienne Toussaint Corey Mylchreest as Matheo Lewis Lucian Msamati as Kofi Adomako Ashley Thomas as Dr Alex Anderson James Cosmo as Max Dalton Jehnny Beth as Adrienne Pelletier Sophie Robertson as Saskia Morgan Isobel Akuwudike as Sylvie Anderson Martin McCann as John Shagan Hiftu Quasem as Ayesha Pip Carter as Dan Ogilvy Josh Barrow as Tristan Ami Okumura Jones as Zadie Paul Thornley as Michael Hall Sara Powell as Kathy Macintyre Fode Simbo as Simon Kingsley Vincent Perez as Elias Vernier Mark Lewis Jones as General Livingston Gerald Kyd as Agent Thomas Mercer Helena Westerman as Agent Rachel Pearce Tomos Gwynfryn as Agent Ken Allan Amita Suman as Dr. Maya Odari Recommended reading: Flora Montgomery as Dr. Traci Lambert Sofian Francis as Burke Reece Ritchie as Dr. Noah Jacobs Zubin Varla as Oliver Bahrami When will Hostage be released on Netflix? All five episodes of Hostage will be released on Netflix on Thursday, August 21.
