About this episode

The episode discusses the need to broaden the understanding of torture to include women and children, featuring guests Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald.

Abuse and systematic cruelty against women and children is common across the world, but the term torture is still reserved mostly for men - think political prisoners, prisoners of war, victims of evil regimes. But guests on today’s episode, retired-community-nurses-turned-global-human-rights-activists Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald have a plan - a 60-year plan - to broaden our understanding of torture to include women and children, and to get non-state torture recognized as a crime everywhere. Jeanne and Linda spent their whole working lives as public health nurses in Nova Scotia, Canada, providing womb-to-tomb care throughout their province. As nurses they came into contact with a lot of family violence and abuse of women and children - and advocating for and counseling victims were an essential part of their job and their personal mission. But in 1993, Linda and Jeanne had a fateful encounter with a woman who reported being a victim of life-long systematic torture, and they soon realized that they were dealing with a very different category of harm - and this set their careers and their lives in a whole new direction. The story of how Jeanne and Linda helped and cared for…

People in this episode

Host: Elle Kamihira

Guests: Jeanne Sarson, Linda MacDonald

Topics covered

• torture
• human rights
• women's rights
• child abuse
• activism

Keywords

• torture
• human rights
• women
• children
• activism
• abuse
• systematic cruelty

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Women Unsilenced

Places: Nova Scotia, Canada

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