Why aren’t gay, lesbian, trans, and queer people full citizens in law? This question enraged gay activists in 1990s Britain. The HIV/AIDS...

Caption: Reception for the Shameless! Festival of Activism Against Sexual Violence. Left to right: Professor Joanna Bourke, Julia...

I loved working with the SHaME (Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters) team over 5 and a half years. SHaME’s Public Engagement Lead, Dr...

The SHaME project have talked to some incredible people who reflect on sexual violence and ways to create rape-free worlds. You can...

The events I have enjoyed most in connection with the SHaME project were our two Shameless! Festivals of Activism Against Sexual...

For five and a half years, I have been privileged to work with the SHaME team at Birkbeck. It has been the most intellectually rewarding...

On the 29 June 1864, a military surgeon in the 21st Kentucky Infantry wrote to his wife. ‘It has been almost one continued stream of...

Robairt Clough was a long-term patient at Holywell Psychiatric Hospital in Antrim (Northern Ireland). In the Christmas 1972 edition of...

Sleep is necessary to life. However, it remains shrouded in mystery, despite the fact that most people spend one third of their lives...

In August 1812, eminent novelist Frances Burney described with alarming precision her mounting sense of terror as she prepared to undergo...

On 12 June 1993, the editors of the British Medical Journal published an account by a male doctor of being sexually assaulted by another...

The Covid-19 pandemic is a stark reminder of human vulnerability. To be vulnerable (from the Latin ‘vulnus’, meaning ‘wound’) is to be...

Covid-19 exposed girls, women, and other minoritised groups to increased domestic violence. As has happened throughout the world, calls...

Andrea Quinlan’s 2017 book The Technoscientific Witness of Rape: Contentious Histories of Law, Feminism, and Forensic Science ...

What if nurses in A&E wards or staff at rape crisis centres could give rape victims a drug that would make them feel emotionally composed...

In 1918-19, the world was in the midst of a global influenza pandemic, that killed 50 million people (more than the 1914-18 war). When...

Amelia Dyer was a serial killer of babies and infants. She was the most prolific mass murderer (at least on British soil) in modern...

Friday, 15 October 1965. Saddleworth Moor, near Oldham in Lancashire, England. On Boxing Day the previous year, Lesley Ann Downey...

Pain is a phantom, a spectre that haunts clinical encounters. Physical suffering is the chief symptom impelling people to seek medical...

25 February 1946. ‘Poor Mary’ (a.k.a. Mary of Hendon) lies murdered in a field, her petticoats in disarray. Trainee detectives pile out...