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Woman's Hour: Black women and cancer, Eleanor McEvoy, Shamima Begum ruling, Yazidi women, A Victorian dress diary

Black women and cancer, Eleanor McEvoy, Shamima Begum ruling, Yazidi women, A Victorian dress diary

BBC Radio 4 - Woman's Hour, Black women and cancer, Eleanor McEvoy, Shamima Begum ruling, Yazidi women, A Victorian dress diary

Why are Black women more likely to get late cancer diagnoses?

New research from Cancer Research UK and NHS Digital has revealed that Black women from Caribbean and African backgrounds are more likely to be diagnosed with certain types of cancer at later stages, when treatment is less likely to be successful. This study is the first to show that ethnicity is a significant factor in late-stage diagnosis for women with breast, ovarian, uterine, non-small cell lung cancer and colon cancer.  Nuala speaks to Kruti Shrotri, Head of Policy Development at Cancer Research UK and Adobea Obeng who sought medical help three times over two years before she was diagnosed with incurable breast cancer.

Eleanor McEvoy is one of Ireland's foremost songwriters and has worked with the likes of U2, Sinead O'Connor and Mary Black.  She is the composer and co-performer of A Woman's Heart, the title track for the best-selling Irish album in Irish history, and one of Ireland's favourite folk songs, which recently featured in the award winning Derry Girls.  One of Eleanor's songs, Sophie, is used in treatment centres to treat patients with eating disorders.  She joins Nuala live in the studio to discuss her UK tour, the inspiration behind the tracks of her most recent album Gimme Some Wine and to perform the track South Anne Street.

In 2014, thousands of Yazidi women and girls were captured as part of an Islamic State Group genocide. While many of the men were shot, women and girls were forced into sex slavery for IS. Today, many of these women and children still live in camps in Iraq as they have nowhere else to go. Now, the Iraqi government says they’re going to close the camps. Nuala McGovern is joined by journalist Rachel Wright and CEO of Bellwether International Rachel Miner to talk about the conditions in the camps and what more needs to be done.

Judges from the Special Immigration Appeals Commission have today decided the removal of British citizenship from Shamima Begum, who left the UK as a 15-year-old schoolgirl to join Islamic State, was lawful. In the hearing last year challenging the decision, her legal team said it ignored the fact that she may have been trafficked into Syria.  Nuala is joined by BBC Home Affairs Correspondent Daniel Sandford.

In 1838 a middle-class Victorian woman, Mrs Anne Sykes, was given a diary on her wedding day which she filled over the years with snippets of clothes and household fabrics, carefully annotating each one.  Nearly two hundred years later Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian, came across the scrapbook.  She spent six years researching the materials she found stuck to the album’s pages and created her own book The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Skyes about this unique record of the lives of Victorian women.

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