15 May 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, News and features, United Kingdom, Volume 54.01 Spring 2025
An investigation into maternity care in the UK originally appeared in Volume 54, Issue 1 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled The forgotten patients: Lost voices in the global healthcare system, published on 11 April 2025. Read more about the issue here.
Donna Ockenden is a senior midwife who chaired the independent review into maternity services at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust. Published in March 2022, it found that catastrophic failures at the trust may have led to the deaths of more than 200 babies and nine mothers. Ockenden concluded the trust “failed to investigate, failed to learn and failed to improve, and therefore often failed to safeguard mothers and their babies at one of the most important times in their lives”.
In May 2022, it was announced that Ockenden would chair a review of maternity services at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. It will report in 2026. She spoke to Index on Censorship for its special print edition on silenced voices in healthcare. Below is a full version of her powerful interview, and you can read Index’s investigation into whistleblowing in NHS maternity services here.
Index: Certain NHS trusts seem to be really struggling. This may be to do with all sorts of factors, including poverty and geography. Is this something you’ve also recognised?
Donna Ockenden: Absolutely. We know that if we take deprivation, where you live, where you receive your healthcare, the state of the public health provision around you, this will have a huge impact on all kinds of health outcomes. We know that women living in deprivation have much worse maternity outcomes, and often minority ethnic women are more likely to live in those areas of deprivation. So those are definitely linked.
The other thing – and it pains and upsets me to have to say it – is that I think a lot of kindness, compassion and civility has been lost from some areas of healthcare. The vast majority of people who work in the NHS every day go in to give their very all, to give us their very best. There’s no doubt about that.
But I’ve heard firsthand from mothers who have been shouted at, or mocked. When women talk about getting into the maternity room, they describe it as a brick wall. They have to ring [the hospital] multiple times when they know they are in labour. And there are examples of families who had an obstructed labour over days and days at home with tragic outcomes.
Index: It’s not a pretty picture. Is there a problem with listening to women? Is there a misogyny issue here?
DO: I think there’s definitely an issue with listening to women, a lack of hearing their voices, and then a lack of acting upon what they are telling you. There was an extra addition to this in Shrewsbury [and Telford], which is highlighted in the report. In some cases, when women died, they were blamed for their own deaths. The first time that one bereaved husband knew that it wasn’t his wife’s fault was when my team and I sat down and told him that, and he brought his teenage son along to hear it from us, because the boy had blamed himself as well. It’s horrible. So yes, in some trusts there is a problem; there is a belief that they always know best, and women are not listened to.
Index: Some parents have called for a wider national inquiry into maternity care. Do you think there is a good argument for a wider investigation?
DO: I have mixed views on that. I know many of the parents who are calling for a wider inquiry, and I appreciate where they’re coming from, and I’ve had many discussions with them on this. I suppose my concern is that public inquiries usually take a very long time to set up, and in the meantime, I think we know that what we need to do is to begin fixing perinatal care.
I say perinatal care, which means “around birth care”, because that includes not just maternity care, but also neonatal care and all the allied professionals. It would include health visiting, which is so, so important. We’ve completely lost our way with that – it’s a skeleton service. One health visitor said to me: “Our service has been vaporised.”
I think there is so much more that we could do in the here and now. I believe that what we are spending in a year on maternity claims more or less equals what we spend on maternity care provision. I’m not saying that a family shouldn’t be compensated – I would never say that. But we’re paying out so much for the cost of harm. And even with that compensation, we still leave behind harmed families whose lives can never be put back together again.
Index: Some people can no doubt be difficult, but surely, the first instinct should always be to listen, and assume that people aren’t problematic or lying. It seems that poorly run trusts assume the worst of people. Do you agree?
DO: I think you’re absolutely right, that is true. So, with our review, we offer all families the opportunity for a conversation. We don’t use the words “family stories” by the way. We say family accounts, because stories sound to me like Cinderella or Snow White, fairytales. But we start from the premise of believing families. [A traumatic event] might have happened a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, or eight years ago. Frequently, families will say this is the first time they have been heard, believed, or able to share what happened to them.
Index: You have spoken about your frustration that some of your “immediate and essential actions” (IEAs) from the Shrewsbury and Telford review have still not been implemented. Now we have another review into Nottingham. How optimistic are you that your findings will be taken up this time?
DO: I will keep pushing for the immediate and essential actions to be fully implemented. I think on a positive note, my sense is that the government is listening about health-related issues, of which maternity is one of many. But time will tell, and I will certainly keep campaigning and speaking out for the right thing to be done.
Index: You don’t want people to be frightened of going to their local hospital, but there does seem to be a postcode lottery. Do you have thoughts on this?
DO: I do a lot of work in Nottingham, specifically with minority ethnic women. So Black women, women of South Asian origin, and women living in deprivation. Often, the reason women and families won’t come forward for all kinds of healthcare (not just maternity care) is that they’ve completely lost trust in their local systems. They will describe to me how they haven’t been listened to or how they’ve been “othered”. They’ve been disregarded for so long. We saw that anyway during Covid, where the way to reach families was often through local community leaders. I think sometimes the NHS has a tendency to say: “Oh those women, they’re just hard to reach.” I think that, actually, if we go out and take time to build trust with communities, women and their families will come [to healthcare services] without a doubt. I think it’s really easy to talk about “hard-to-reach” populations: no, you’re just not trying hard enough, you’re not building trust and you’re not taking time.
Index: What needs to be done to address this crisis?
DO: It’s got to be investment into perinatal services. There’s a [financial] shortfall in maternity services, [whilst] more than £1 billion is paid out in claims [every year]. So, I think investment is the first thing and secondly, there has got to be an absolute commitment to listening to women, hearing women and acting on what they tell you. It’s fair to say that for many staff in the NHS, not just maternity services, they do not currently have the time to care. But there are occasions where there would be time, and still, women aren’t listened to. I always try to look at all aspects of an issue, rather than just say, “It’s definitely all funding,” and that’s the end of it. Funding is a massive issue, but civility, compassion, and lack of listening are huge issues as well.
8 Apr 2025 | Czech Republic, Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Slovakia, Volume 54.01 Spring 2025
This article will appear in Volume 54, Issue 1 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled The forgotten patients: Lost voices in the global healthcare system, which will be published in April 2025.
Jana Husárová was in labour with her second child when the doctor presented her with a document. “I didn’t want to sign it,” she said. So she didn’t.
“When I got home, I visited my doctor in Sabinov. He told me that my [fallopian tubes] were tied.”
She went back to the hospital and asked how that could be possible when she had not signed a consent form.
It was 1984, and Husárová was 15 years old. She is one of many Roma women who have undergone forced sterilisation, as she described in a video for the Slovakian Centre for Civil and Human Rights (known as Poradňa).
Since then, she has fought for justice and compensation, and to stop this happening to other women.
In Soviet-era Czechoslovakia, Roma women underwent forced sterilisations, just as they had done under the Nazi regime.
They were offered money by visiting social workers, pressured into agreeing to the procedure and told that their other children would be taken away if they did not comply. Others were made to sign consent forms while in agony during childbirth, often with no idea what they were signing. When a caesarean section was performed, they were sterilised at the same time.
Then came the Velvet Revolution in 1989 – which marked the end of Soviet rule in Czechoslovakia – and, in 1993, the creation of the Czech Republic and Slovakia as sovereign nations.
Sterilisation was no longer state policy, but the doctors who had implemented it were never punished, and racism towards Roma communities continued to thrive.
And for Roma women, the practice was far from over.
In 2003, a grim reality was uncovered in a report by the global human rights organisation Centre for Reproductive Rights and Poradňa. The organisations interviewed about 110 Roma women across eastern Slovakia who had been (or had likely been) sterilised since the fall of communism. They found that doctors and nurses gave women “misleading or threatening information” to “coerce them into providing last-minute authorisations for sterilisations” when they were undergoing caesareans. C-sections were sometimes given unnecessarily, partly as a pretext for sterilisation.
In some cases, women were not told about the procedure until after the event – if ever.
Alongside forced sterilisation, Roma women faced physical and verbal abuse by medical providers. They were segregated in maternity wards and sent to Roma-only rooms. If they complained, they were insulted by doctors and nurses.
During the course of the research, hospital authorities stopped Roma women accessing their own medical records, denying them the opportunity to get to the truth. The government failed to condemn any of these practices or put an end to them. The report writers urged the government to examine the issues and make things right with the survivors.
In 2004, Slovakia adopted new legislation around informed consent, requiring women to wait 30 days before sterilisation could be performed. It also gave more protection to patients seeking access to their medical records.
Soon after the report was published, lawyer Vanda Durbáková started working with Poradňa on a plan to bring some of the cases to court while urging the government to introduce a compensation scheme.
At the time, Slovakia was scheduled to become a member of the European Union (EU), and all eyes were on the state of human rights in the country. The reaction to the report from the state was not welcoming, and it initiated criminal proceedings against the report’s authors.
But a group of Roma women felt empowered to take their stories to Parliament.
“They not only submitted their cases in the courts but were also really active, communicating with the media and starting as a group to fight for justice,” Durbáková said.
With little luck in the Slovakian courts, they took their cases to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg.
Between 2011 and 2013, the ECtHR made rulings in three cases, finding that Roma women who had been forcibly sterilised had had their rights violated. The women were granted financial compensation, and the Slovak courts began to make their own rulings in favour of other women, but it was a slow process.
“The women were not really encouraged to take their cases to the courts, because the [Roma] community was afraid of any victimisation,” Durbáková said, explaining that they were worried that suing hospitals would lead to further discrimination.
But the women who spoke up told her they believed their actions eventually led to them, and their daughters, getting better treatment.
Roma activist Veronika Cibriková, who was forcibly sterilised in 2000 during a caesarean section, told Poradňa: “I don’t want other women – and my daughter, who is now pregnant – to end up like I did. We fight for each and every woman so that they do not suffer as we have suffered.” She eventually got justice at the ECtHR.
Following a call for an inquiry by the UN Human Rights Committee, the Slovak government finally apologised in 2021. It promised to pass legislation to allow for financial compensation, but this has not yet come to fruition.
In 2017, CRR and Poradňa published another damning report, documenting Roma women’s experiences of reproductive healthcare in Slovakia. Women reported abuse, discrimination and physical restraint in childbirth. Almost all the women interviewed reported being segregated in maternity units – something the Commissioner for Human Rights condemned during a visit in February 2025.
One woman, Viola, said: “When I was giving birth…they were yelling at women during childbirth… They tied some women’s legs or jumped on their bellies. One woman [jumped on my belly] with all her weight, pressed it and yelled, ‘Push, push! You were fucking and so now you have to deliver’.”
Durbáková said that sometimes Roma-only rooms were so overcrowded that the women had to share beds. Poradňa is now litigating a case against one state-run hospital.
The fight for Roma women has roots that go back decades. The first documentation came in 1978 through the campaigning organisation Charter 77, with signatories including dissident writer (and, later, Czech president) Václav Havel.
It outlined how Roma women were not truly consenting to sterilisation, saying: “Czechoslovak institutions will soon have to answer charges that they are committing genocide.”
The Czech Republic is facing this ugly truth, too.
“During the 1990s, we began to hear stories of [Roma] women claiming that they were still being forcibly sterilised,” said Gwendolyn Albert, a human rights activist and journalist from the USA who now lives in the Czech Republic. Albert has campaigned for Roma women who have allegedly been sterilised as recently as 2017.
The woman she’s worked with the longest is Elena Gorolová, who became the face of the movement to seek justice in the Czech Republic.
Many Roma women felt ashamed that the decision to choose to have a family had been taken away from them, said Albert: “[These women] went to the hospital fully believing that the doctors had their best interests at heart and were going to do what was best for their health and what was best for their children. And instead, they’ve been tricked into becoming infertile, and so they feel stupid.”
Kumar Vishwanathan is the director of Life Together, an NGO working with Roma communities in Ostrava in the Czech Republic. When he found out that he knew many of the women impacted, he brought them together in his office. At first they were tentative to talk but they soon started opening up.
“They were suppressing it within themselves all their lives,” he said, adding that some women had faced physical abuse at home after it transpired they could no longer have children. “So that is a taboo which was broken around that table in 2003.”
In 2005, the Czech ombudsman published a report showing that there was significant reason to believe that forced sterilisations had continued until at least 2001.
Vishwanathan said that while there was a lot of support for the women during debates in Parliament’s Lower House, the problem came in the Upper House.
“A lot of them were doctors, former doctors, who felt threatened that if they agreed to the fact that these women were forcibly sterilised and have to be compensated… they will be challenged as people who violated the law,” he said.
The Czech government apologised in 2009, becoming the first in the region to do so. In 2021, Gorolová and others won the fight for women to receive compensation, although the government set a time limit for making a claim. Women had until the end of 2024 to apply, and they had to prove that they had been forcibly sterilised, even though many medical records had allegedly been destroyed or falsified.
The government is now debating a two-year extension of the process, and there are calls to remove the “burden of proof” from the victims and place it on the state instead. However, many women had already been rejected under the earlier rules, had not applied in the first place, or died before they had the chance to seek compensation.
There is likely more yet to be uncovered. Vishwanathan said that many Roma people have told him they still face segregation in Czech hospitals.
The issues in reproductive care for Roma women are not unique to the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Ana Rozanova from the ERGO Network, a group of pro-Roma NGOs across Europe, told Index that women in these two countries have simply been more vocal.
This is just a snapshot into the wider discrimination faced by Roma women across Europe, based on both ethnicity and gender.
It is the women who have put an end to forced sterilisation in the Czech Republic and Slovakia by fighting for justice – but there is further to go. The rest must now come to light and be eradicated.
28 Mar 2023 | Afghanistan, News and features
In deeply patriarchal and repressive societies like Afghanistan women have always been subjected to gender-based discrimination and violence. This was the case before the Taliban came to power but it has become much worse since – and women, who were already underrepresented in the media industry, are suffering immeasurably.
The dwindling community of female journalists has reached a concerning level. Soon after the Taliban’s coup they started a crackdown on all journalists. There were raids on the houses of journalists, arrests, detentions, intimidation and harassment.
In addition to direct threats, the Taliban started to systematically harass women in the media to make it difficult for them to work. The Taliban introduced strict dress codes, including making the veil mandatory. The ban on long-distance travel of women without a male guardian has made field work for women impossible. Women have also been banned from appearing on TV shows. The Taliban effectively want us to completely disappear from the media landscape.
Due to these barbaric laws many women have lost their jobs and many have fled the country. Those women who were the sole earners in the family are now living in destitution.
The outflux of women with essential skills has created a brain drain in Afghanistan. Years of progress with regards to media development, women empowerment and capacity building of women in media has been undone by the Taliban in merely two years. All the women journalists who toiled for years and built up their skills – despite the difficulties – are now either confined to the home or in exile in miserable situations. Unfortunately some have lost their lives in attempts to seek shelter. A female senior Pashto journalist, Torpekai Amarkhel, drowned with her family in a boat sailing them to Italy just a few weeks ago.
Amarkhel’s asylum case for Australia was in process. But due to the long, arduous, slow and chaotic process of filling and requesting asylum or refugee status in developed countries, journalists in distress are opting for perilous and illegal means of immigration. It’s a response coming from extreme desperation and frustration. Western countries must try to understand this and must make the visa process easy, fast and efficient.
Within Afghanistan, people’s desperation is being exploited for financial gain. Acquiring essential travel documents is being aggravated by long delays, tough requirements and chaotic procedures, which has meant the opening of illegal channels to mint more money from helpless people running for their lives. For example the average fees for a passport right now is at least $3000 and fees for a Pakistani visa is $1200. This makes the legal evacuation from Afghanistan for those journalists at risk almost impossible, forcing them to opt for illegal channels. For those taking this route the outcomes can be awful. In many instances people are arrested and detained in neighbouring countries.
In exile the Afghan journalists are unable to continue their journalistic work due to a myriad of issues, such as lack of opportunities in the countries of temporary residence, language barriers, legal barriers and discrimination against Afghans. The result? Women journalists in exile are either forced to stay at home or they are forced to do menial work to simply make end meets. They’re out of work, gaps in their career growing. Some are now quitting the industry and switching careers.
The situation is stifling for male journalists too. The heart-wrenching stories of Afghan journalists are sadly countless. A journalist who worked alongside me in a media outlet recently posted on Twitter and other social media platforms about selling one of his kidneys to get some money to support himself and his family in exile in Pakistan. Another journalist from Afghanistan trashed all his academic and professional documents out of frustration at his joblessness and inability to get any humanitarian support. And another journalist, a senior one with a strong track record in the industry, has become a cobbler working in the streets.
In order to save the community of journalists in general, and women journalists in particular, the world must act. Western countries must open their doors so that we can access work, education and free speech and expression which we have been denied in our own country. But everyone can help protect Afghan journalists and create opportunities for them within Afghanistan and in exile. Engage with Afghan journalists through fellowships, scholarships, workshops, training and other opportunities to save the media from dying. And finally pressurise the Taliban to reverse their barbaric decisions that have created a gender-based apartheid and is pushing generations of Afghans back to the stone age.
3 Jul 2018 | Digital Freedom, News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”101103″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]Cultural stereotyping, extremism, a patriarchal society, a deficit of safe and secure educational environments, verbal and sexual harassment. These are the terms that Fereshteh Forough, founder of Afghanistan’s first ever coding school for girls uses to describe what women face in her country every day.
This repression continued after the fall of the Taliban in 2011, the Code to Inspire CEO told Index on Censorship, and still “prevents women from participating in many social activities outside of their hometown”.
Forough is working to open up online spaces for women and hopes that in doing so these digital freedoms will break down social and economic barriers in Afghanistan. Code to Inspire’s first school opened in Afghanistan in 2015 and teaches girls how to programme. By empowering young women Forough hopes to carve a way through the digital space, which mirrors the male-dominated spaces of their lives, so they can participate in the economic market in Afghanistan and gain independence. “Knowledge is power and technology is the tool for empowerment,” she said.
Harnessing technology is a way, Forough believes, of liberating women in all aspects of their lives. It is a way of using progress to combat regression. “Looking at the technology and how it enables people to cross borders without geographical boundaries and share their stories is such an empowering tool,” she explains.
“For an Afghan woman who can not commute due to family restrictions or safety reasons to other cities or outside, it can help her to explore the world virtually, get connected to the people outside of Afghanistan and feel more confident.”
Connecting
Internet use in Pakistan and Afghanistan is far from straightforward and being a woman makes it even harder.
Internet access in Afghanistan has much improved since the fall of the Taliban. Yet despite the current government’s recognition of the tool as important for the country’s development, problems remain. The CIA factbook reported in 2016 that only an estimated 10.6% of the country’s population had access to the internet. The National Unity Government is working to end gender inequality and there are more women holding positions of power than at any other time in history. 27.7% of seats in parliament are held by women. But according to Global Rights Study, 87% of women experience physical, sexual or psychological violence in their lives. Stigma still surrounds female education despite rising numbers in school attendance.
Freedom House concluded in their 2017 Freedom of the Net report that Pakistan’s internet is “not free”. Starting in June 2016, Pakistan’s mobile internet service was shut off for more than a year in Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The internet has been shut down several other times at politically divisive moments. As the country comes up to an election this year, Freedom House predicts internet shutdowns and for political speech to be restricted online.
The country’s first comprehensive cybercrime act was passed in 2016 by the National Assembly and Senate, enabling censorship and surveillance. Alongside infrastructure limitations, taxes on the internet are high and prevent the majority of the population from connecting. Many rural areas remain offline due to ongoing conflict or underdevelopment.
“Women are being excluded from the digital revolution”
While progress may be slow and the internet unstable, going online presents fresh possibilities and challenges for women in these neighbouring countries. As new technologies clash with historically patriarchal cultures, being connected means being seen. Being plugged in provides greater scope for education and potential participation in an ever-expanding jobs market. Online spaces, ideally, enable democratic discussion and freedom of expression. But in societies where independent women can be regarded as shameful, prejudice inevitably follows them into online spaces.
Mats Granryd, director general of the UN’s Working Group on the Gender Digital Divide said in their 2017 report: “Mobile is the dominant platform for internet access in many parts of the world. The issue is that while mobile connectivity is spreading quickly, it is not spreading equally.” Oliver Rowntree reported from GSMA’s Connected Women’s Study 2018: “Women are being excluded from the digital revolution. Only 10% of women in Pakistan use mobile internet compared to 26% of men.”
Access to technology and autonomy online are difficult, however. Access is often monitored by male family members or connections. Some women are fatally endangered through online activity.
In 2016 Qandeel Baloch died after being strangled by her brother for her social media presence. In his confession, he said: “Girls are born only to stay at home and to bring honour to the family by following family traditions.” Online harassment is rife and further discourages women from accessing information communication technologies, especially with social support in such situations unlikely.
“The digital divide between men and women in Pakistan is among the highest in the world as a result of religious, social, and cultural restrictions on women owning devices,” Freedom House’s report outlines. Militant Islamic attacks have also been carried out on internet cafes for encouraging moral corruption.
Professor Deborah Wheeler has lectured throughout the Middle East and Europe about her research into the internet’s impacts on women. She currently works in the United States Naval Academy’s Political Science Department. Wheeler is passionate about the potential for technology to empower women everywhere.
She tells Index on Censorship: “Given social constraints on women’s movement, participation in public life, dress, expectations and voice in the Muslim world, digital communication gives women tools with which to create change on issues which directly affect their lives.”
“While censorship and punishment for violating media laws by directly opposing the government online do occur, what I find more interesting and more promising as a force for change in women’s lives, are the kinds of widespread experimentation with voice and agency taking place in everyday life.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_raw_html]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[/vc_raw_html][vc_column_text]Time for change
Like Forough, Nighat Dad, who runs Pakistan’s Digital Rights Foundation, is trying to enable just that. A digital rights lawyer and activist in Pakistan, she is fighting against women’s exclusion from online spaces and working to ensure safety online. She told TED: “It’s how patriarchal norms treat women in offline spaces, and the same mindset is true in online spaces.”
Dad explains that her family forbade her from having a phone as a young woman. Her husband, from whom she is divorced, allowed her to have a phone but it was so strictly monitored she says it felt more like a surveillance device. She founded the Digital Rights Foundation, which like Code to Inspire was shortlisted for a 2018 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards Fellowship, in 2012 to defend women’s rights online. They recently established a helpline for women experiencing harassment online.
Women, who make up only 20-25% of internet users in the country, are regularly subjected to revenge porn, harassment, blackmail, privacy violations and more. As a result, they retreat from online spaces. Dad wants to prevent this silencing of women’s voices.
The DRF said: “Digital Rights Foundation envisions a place where all people, and especially women, are able to exercise their right of expression without being threatened.”
Hope
Thanks to the courage and persistence of women like Forough and Dad, things are changing in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Forough is not letting a lack of resources hold her back. “Sometimes you don’t have the available resources to succeed,” she said. “As a refugee born, I learned to be scrappy and resourceful. Change is possible, no matter who or where you are!”
Over email, she quotes Rumi. “‘Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.’ From the ruins of a shattered nation and shattered lives of refugees can come treasure, if we know where to find it. We hope to empower this generation of young women in Afghanistan with technology so that the next generation will be peacebuilders and not war makers.”
Women like Nighat and Fereshteh are forging a new future for women, both online and off. Nighat tells Index on Censorship she hopes for “A future where women don’t have to fight for the rights they were born with, a future that is without discrimination and is safe, inclusive and free for everyone.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][three_column_post title=”Digital Freedom” full_width_heading=”true” category_id=”4883″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
