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The Current Transcript for April 14, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

It's like pneumonia, malaria, and also diarrhea, in addition to malnutrition. This is a life threatening problem here, and those are the major killers.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Ethiopia's children are in crisis. Hundreds of thousands of them are malnourished as famine and a drought grip the country's eastern rim. And as the government appeals for help, there are questions about whether it even has the ability to deliver the aid it might receive, and why after devastating famines in past decades, this is happening again. In a moment, the CBC's Margaret Evans on what's she's learned on the ground. Also today, journalist Anderson Cooper saw time slipping away and began an email chain with his mom, trying to ensure there would be nothing left unsaid between them. He wasn't ready for everything he learned.

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She, at 92, believes the next great love is right around the corner, I said to her the other day, “you still think there's a guy in a boat off the coast of France, like waiting to whisk you away don't you?” And she said, 'a boat? A yacht!"

AMT: His Mother is Gloria Vanderbilt, dubbed the Poor Little Rich Girlby a ravenous press in Depression-era America. But the email trail makes it clear that neither mother nor son cared about having a name that carried fame. In half an hour, Anderson Cooper on the meaning of family, the language of loss, and the ties that bind a mother and son. And…

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VOICE 1: [singing]

VOICE 2: Ariel?

VOICE 1: Eric!

[dog barks]

VOICE 2: You can talk?

AMT: Yes, she can talk. But as a lead character in a Disney film, the girls never seem to talk as much as the boys. Research on how the gender imbalance animates those princess films in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

Ethiopia government under fire for slow response to worst drought in 50 years

Guests: Margaret Evans, Raymond Gilpin

[Music: Theme]

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: It is a land that's been ravaged by drought many times before, but what is gripping Ethiopia right now is said to be the worst drought in half a century or more.

SOUNDCLIP

[People talking, clinic ambience]

AMT: At a health centre in the eastern Afar region, mothers line up to have their children looked at before it's too late.

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[Speaking alternate language]

AMT: That woman is saying her children are sick with diarrhea and fever, and that she has come to the health centre to screen them for malnourishment. Her children are just a few of more than 430,000 believed to be suffering from acute malnutrition. Drought conditions have forced about 10 million people in Ethiopia to rely on emergency food aid provided by the government and international aid agencies. The CBC's Margaret Evans was in Ethiopia, she just returned earlier this month and she came face-to-face with the effects of this drought on the country and its people. She's in our London studio. Hi.

MARGARET EVANS: Hi, Anna Maria.

AMT: Margaret, if you could pick an image to illustrate what the drought in Ethiopia looks like, what would it be?

MARGARET EVANS: Oh that's a tough one. I think it would be on the image of workers coming off a dry horizon, as if they were called out of another land. As soon as something happens on this big flat plane, people come towards you. And they're always carrying water bottles, of course, because it's getting so difficult for them to find water. They're spending hours every day just finding water.

AMT: Wow. So as you were there, you saw, what, dry riverbeds too, then?

MARGARET EVANS: Yeah. I mean, dozens and not just in the areas that are worst hit by the drought, even up in the north, which is more mountainous, where they've made a lot of progress in terms of terrace farming and trying to fight erosion. Just dry river after dry river after dry river, and you'd see people with very skinny cattle, trying to go into the center of these river beds, trying to find a trickle of water left. And when you got there, if there was water, you'd see everything happening there. There'd be people washing their clothes, there'd be people getting drinking water, there would be cows defecating in the water. So you can see the potential for the problems ahead, and that’s, you know, when you were talking about what we were seeing in the introduction, it's not just the malnutrition, it's just that you have the spread of disease, which causes diarrhea, which causes dehydration. And that's where the fear is that things could start to spin, and why they're trying so hard in these very remote outposts to actually keep a handle on the kids. And they're weighing them and they're measuring their arms, but it's very hard for people to get there. And they need the strength to do it, and they need food and water to move around.

AMT: They measure their arms, why?

MARGARET EVANS: Well it's to just basically look for signs of acute malnutrition, oedema, you know, if you push on the skin of a baby suffering from malnutrition, it will leave an indentation. It's all about the height-weight ratio, stunting, they call it. A large number of children in Ethiopia suffer from stunting, they’re not growing as they normally should be. I think it's something like 430,000 kids are suffering from acute malnutrition, and then you have regular malnutrition, of course, and people, you know, mothers would say to you, “I have to make these decisions about my kids. We don't have enough food, so do I pull them out of school?” And when they're in school, anyway, they're not concentrating. They can sort of see their futures evaporating. People are saying, you know, we're at least eating once a day, so we're okay.

AMT: Wow. Where can the families go for help?

MARGARET EVANS: It depends where they are, really. I mean, 70 per cent of the population live in rural areas. And it's, of course one, of the great contradictions of Ethiopia. It is presenting itself as the lion of Africa. It has the fastest growing economy in the continent, and in Addis Ababa, you know, there's a huge amount of construction industry and endeavor taking place, but is still incredibly poor. So, you know, and they have made a lot of progress in terms of infrastructure. So highways are better, there's a new railway to Djibouti that gets them access to the sea, at the Gulf of Aden. But moving around is still difficult. I mean, we went east of Dire Dawa, which is a town to the north and east of Addis Ababa, and it took us about four hours to get to get out of that town to some of the remote areas where you'd see these kind of work for food programs getting on the way. But you have to have enough water. We were driving through desert, kind of dune-like conditions, you get stuck. So we're in a four by four, imagine if you're in a big truck with sacks of grain.

AMT: What brought this drought on?

MARGARET EVANS: Well, you know, the scientists say it is particularly severe now because of the El Niño impact. And there have been three failed seasons, rainy seasons in a row. So even if people had been planning and kind of keeping reserve stores, they haven't been able to plant the latest crops, the crops that they would have had, they've eaten or sold. And now they're having to sell animals. I think something like a million cattle or livestock have perished in this drought so far.

AMT: So how has the government responded so far?

MARGARET EVANS: Well, the government has come under a lot of criticism in some quarters for failing to deliver a stronger message asking for help. Some people have said they've left it too late. The government denies that, and actually gets very, very defensive about the question. I spoke with the government spokesman, basically, about this sort of, what some people have called mixed messaging, you know. We're fine, we don't need help, we can do it on our own. We are the line of Africa. And at the same time, they've launched an appeal saying that they need 1.4 billion dollars in order to feed people over the next few months. So, you know, and he came back at me and said, look, we're tired of the media, the international community, presenting us as, you know… the rest of the world hears from Ethiopia a shrill cry or an S.O.S from Ethiopia, and they don't like to be presented with that. They said, “Shouldn't we be able to just ask for money? Do we need to present you with images of emaciated children before you act?” And in some places they want to take you and say, “Look, this is how bad it is.” But in other places, they don't want you to see the kids at the feeding centres, because they don't want you to think that they're not trying to take care of them themselves. So there's a certain aspect of pride in it, and you'd see that sometimes. There's so many languages in Ethiopia that we were working through sometimes two or three translators, you know, Amharic to Somali to English, that sort of thing. So we had to check our translations really carefully, because ordinary people are conscious of presenting their in their country in a bad light. So if somebody said, “Yes, this drought reminds me of the 1984 famine.” You know, you wouldn't necessarily get that answer from your translator. So we've spent a lot of time back here in London going through those transcripts to make sure that we're getting an accurate picture of what people were actually telling us.

AMT: Well, it's interesting, because that's the official line. I read it as I introduced you, said to be the worst drought in half a century or more. Worse than 1984. But what does that even mean?

MARGARET EVANS: Well it means that the conditions are as severe-- well, they're more severe than they were back in 1984. But the country really has come a long way in terms of its ability to actually reach people and help people. And there's also not a civil war in the country right now, although there is political unrest and the government has been accused of clamping down on dissent. So it's not the happiest of places, but it’s not what it was in 1984. But they want to get rid of that psychological hangover.

AMT: And, of course, there was lots of criticism on how the West sort of ran to the help, but didn't stay to do the long term help. And some of that, the criticism of the West, is not unfounded.

MARGARET EVANS: No, and it kind of, like the droughts or the cycles of these kinds of environmental crises, it comes and goes. But there's an enormous amount of work being done on the ground by aid agencies and the government. This image I talked about at the first, of people walking off the desert. That's a government work program, they're trying to encourage pastoral farmers to stay put and dig bore holes and dig into the table water so they can have a sustainable area and not be blown about by hunger and heat and things like that. So that kind of work is going on, too. And a lot of Canadian aid dollars are actually going to Ethiopia. That’s something, people remember it from the ‘80s and will say to you, we've always appreciated that help, and I think Canada now, or in 2015, in any case, was the fifth largest contributor of humanitarian assistance to Ethiopia. And there are also small projects, radio charities working with farmers in Ethiopia, trying to help them prepare for the drought. So it’s working toward sustainability.

AMT: There's also the Canadian Food Grains Bank which is that?

MARGARET EVANS: It is a small charity. It has a number of different projects, it's one of the smallest, I would say beneficiaries in terms of Canadian funding. Because Canadians work for a number of NGOs as partners and disperse its money that way. And again, not just emergency assistance, they announced $30 million in emergency assistance in December, but they also work towards sustainable things. So the Food Grains Bank is working in an area in the south, about two hours south of Addis, which we saw. You know, you saw those images that we all have of white grain bags with Canada across them kind of being slumped down onto carts and donkeys and things like that. So they're giving people packages that will last them for about a month. But they're working in a month-to-month basis, and that's kind of why the aid agencies will say that it is so important that they get this message across. And I think there is a frustration that it's getting lost, there are so many conflicts in the world today. But this is a huge, I mean, we're talking about 10 million people, and they're warning that because the stores are running out and because they've only got half of what their targeted money needs are, this is overall, the aid agencies, that the number could double in the next few months. Because right now, they're already having very below average rains, and it's supposed to be a rainy season right now. So that means, you know, likely another crop failure that they would be harvesting in the fall. So they have to be looking ahead all the time.

AMT: Well, you know, these are the kinds of stories that can get lost in all the other international stories. It's good that you went and you can report on it. Thank you.

MARGARET EVANS: Thanks for talking to me about it.

AMT: Margaret Evans, CBC foreign correspondent. She’s based in London, England and she was in Ethiopia, just returned earlier this month. As we heard, the Ethiopian government is being criticized for not acting quickly enough to the drought and famine. To learn more about some of the political factors at play in the region, we've reached Raymond Gilpin. He is the academic dean at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies. It's at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., and that’s where we reached Raymond Gilpin, hi.

RAYMOND GILPIN: Good morning.

AMT: What do you thinking as you see how this crisis is developing?

RAYMOND GILPIN: Well, two things: first how different this is from 1984. I think firstly, the Ethiopian government has taken some steps towards improving its response rate. They do have, as the previous speaker mentioned, a social safety net program. There’s an early warning system that works. But fundamentally, the infrastructure to transport assistance, to store food, and also marketing to ensure accessibility, there’s still a challenge. The second thing I’m thinking about is the recurring cycle of droughts. Over the last four, five years, there have been recurring droughts in Ethiopia, and the government’s response mechanisms have been fairly adequate. But this year, the El Niño effect led to a 90 per cent reduction in crops, which affected not just planting, but also food availability.

AMT: And, in fact, the Ethiopian government in statements is saying that there is a climate change effect here that the country is vulnerable to. But that there has been criticism that they're not acting quickly enough, and you're saying the infrastructure isn't there. Why is that?

RAYMOND GILPIN: Absolutely. It's a long term project for the Ethiopian government and its international partners. Over the last decade, a lot of the focus has been on the big cities, particularly the capital, Addis Ababa. There have been significant improvements in infrastructure there. But getting out of the capital, going about 300 miles north and east to where the place is hardest hit by the drought, the Tigray and Afar regions. The roads are bad, communication facilities are inadequate, and so it makes it very difficult to have any effective logistics to ensure that assistance reaches the most vulnerable in a timely and adequate manner.

AMT: And so, what's the solution there? Is that an international community, should it be stepping up on that front on infrastructure, or was that a political decision by the government not to worry about that earlier?

RAYMOND GILPIN: Well, that's a difficult question. I think the solution is threefold. First, we all have to emphasize that governance is more about the governed than those governing. And here, the governed are being hit by one of the most severe droughts in half a century, and I think that there is an element of predictability that should force both the Ethiopian government and its international partners to do more about these structural issues that make it difficult for the country to be resilient in the face of these shocks. Secondly, I think that we need to focus a lot more on making sure that the communities themselves are empowered and enabled. And yes, the government has its productive safety net program, but that is not as widespread as it should be. And I don't think it's resourced sufficiently to meet the need. And thirdly, I think even though they have a really good early warning system, there has to be a comparable mechanism within the government to ensure that it's able to respond in an early and timely manner. In this case, a lot of analysts are suggesting that there was a two month lapse between when the government should have realized that it was not eight million people they should be worrying about, it's more like 18 million people who are at risk. And that two month window is costing them now, to the extent that there are food shortages. Not just by Ethiopian government agencies, but also the World Food Program is saying its stocks are running low. So the speed with which the government responds and recognizes them problems also needs to be improved.

AMT: How does the instability of a famine and drought play into wider security issues in Ethiopia and the countries on its borders?

RAYMOND GILPIN: In a really, really, really serious fashion. Firstly, the mobility of people. By most accounts about 100,000 people have moved, which is not as much as in 1984, but it is significant. Particularly because that border region is pretty volatile, and so having moving populations puts not just the vulnerable at risk, but also there's a lot of literature that suggests that disaffected youth then become a lot easier to fall prey to extremist ideologies and extremist groups, who happen to be prevalent in that part of the continent.

AMT: Like who? Who's prevalent in that part of the continent?

RAYMOND GILPIN: You do have the Moro Liberation group that’s there. There are groups that are affiliated with al-Shabaab that are in and around that region. And so there is a vulnerability there.

AMT: Okay, and so what would you like to see Canada and the U.S. doing, just briefly?

RAYMOND GILPIN: I think, first, we need to support humanitarianism. About half a million children, almost over ten million Ethiopians, that's what about one-tenth of the population, are at risk. I think we need to deliver smart aid, and not just a parachuting food into Ethiopia, but trying to build some of the capacity and strength in the institutions that bode well for resilience.

AMT: Okay. Raymond Gilpin, we have to leave it there. Thank you for your time today.

RAYMOND GILPIN: Thank you.

AMT: Raymond Gilpin, academic dean at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University in Washington. That's an institution funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current on CBC Radio One.

[Music: Sting]

Anderson Cooper opens up about mom Gloria Vanderbilt and their history of love and loss

Guests: Anderson Cooper

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: theme]

AMT: Still to come, Friday host Piya Chattaopadhyay joined me to check in on your feedback on the stories we've been following and we'll delve into an interesting new study into the speaking habits of a certain type of royalty, the Disney princess. But first, an insight into American royalty.

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GLORIA VANDERBILT: I find it reassuring knowing the rainbow comes and goes. It helps me accept the way things often are. In every life you have moments of blinding beauty and happiness and then your land in a dark cave in there is no colour, no sky. Then the rainbow returns. Sometimes only briefly, but it always does come back. You have to believe that it will even in the darkest moments. That belief is what is really important.

AMT: That is Gloria Vanderbilt, the author, artist, and designer reading from a new book she has just published together with her son. Gloria Vanderbilt is an impressive 92-years old and she has spent virtually her entire life in the spotlight. Her birth made headlines and at the age of nine she became known as the poor little rich girl because of a vicious custody battle between her mother, and her grandmother, and aunt, which became a public obsession in depression era America. Her life never stopped being interesting after that. Her son is journalist Anderson Cooper, best known for his work on CNN. They've collaborated on a book The Rainbow Comes and Goes, A Mother and Son Talk About Life, Love, and Loss. Anderson Cooper joins me from New York, hello.

ANDERSON COOPER: Hey, nice to be here.

AMT: You know, that clip and the discussion around the rainbow coming and going in your book made me cry.

ANDERSON COOPER: Oh. It's interesting, the phrase the rainbow comes and goes is from a Wordsworth poem and it's interesting in the writing in this because my mom and I both have a very different perception of what it actually means. For my mom, as you just heard her say, she believes it's this very hopeful, optimistic phrase which is the rainbow comes and goes but it's going to come back. There will be dark days, there will be difficult times, but the rainbow always comes back. It comes back in nature and it will come back in your life and you just have to wait for it to come back and be there when it does. I feel like it's there's a little bit more of a hint of resignation in it. When people ask me like oh how's it going, I'll say, meh, the rainbow comes and goes. Meaning like, you know, there's good, there's bad and the rainbow may come back in my opinion, but how do you know you're going to be in the exact spot where it comes back? You might come back like you know, if you're in Toronto right now it may be in Ottawa and you're not going to see it, so I want to prepare for the darkness. I want to prepare for the winter that's coming and store up my supplies.

AMT: What do you call that, a catastrophist?

ANDERSON COOPER:[laughs] A catastrophist.

AMT: [laughs] I can’t even say the word.

ANDERSON COOPER: I’m not even sure it is a word. I don't like to call myself a pessimist because it sounds so negative so, where my mom is the eternal optimist, I view myself as a catastrophist. I want to prepare for the worst and if good things happen, then I'm pleasantly surprised, but I'm not disappointed if they don't.

AMT: You know, to write this book, you and your mother emailed each other over the course of about a year and you learned so much about her. Why did it take this correspondence to open up that communication?

ANDERSON COOPER: Well, I think a lot of us would like to change our relationship with a parent and really learn about them and often times we don't do it until it's too late. You know, we don't think to sit down and actually ask questions and my schedule, you know I travel all the time and so we started when my mom turned 91. She got sick for the first time and when she recovered I realized I don't want to wait any longer, we need to do this now and when my dad passed away I was ten and I used to imagine that he'd written me a letter that would come in the mail when I turned 18 or when I graduated college and would tell me all the things I didn't know about him and about what he hoped for my life and giving me life lessons. Of course there wasn't a letter and I didn't want to have that same fantasy with my mom when she's no longer here. So, we decided we're going to change the conversation. I'm going to start asking her questions and she was totally on board with this and she wanted to learn about me in a different way as well and something about doing it over e-mail, not only made it more convenient but it made it easier because there wasn't the awkwardness. A lot of these things are very awkward to talk about or difficult and something about e-mail is like writing a message, putting it in a bottle and sending it out only another bottle would return very quickly or sometimes days later with a response and so that's really how it began. We didn't know it was going to be a book but we just, you know, about three or four months into it, it was having such a profound impact on our lives that we thought this is something we really like to encourage other people to be able to do this with, whether it's an aging parent or somebody else in their lives.

AMT: Not everybody's 91-year old, now 92-year old mom can e-mail, so that was good too [laughs].

ANDERSON COOPER: That’s true. Going back to my mom, I got a friend of mine to teach my mom e-mail when she was about 89, so she's relatively new to it but it's totally changed her life. It's the main way she communicates now and she loves it.

AMT: You've never been comfortable with the idea of being known as a Vanderbilt. Why?

ANDERSON COOPER: Yeah, it just doesn't have any reality for me. I mean Vanderbilt is my mom's family's ancestry and my dad grew up poor on a farm in the city and I always felt much more connected to the Cooper side. What was interesting in writing this book is I learned my mom never felt connected to the Vanderbilt side either. She felt like she was an impostor. She didn't really know about the Vanderbilt family until she was forced to live with her aunt Gertrude by the courts. She was the subject, as you said, of this terrible custody battle at the height of the depression, which at the time in the United States was referred to as the trial of the century and so she grew up kind of disconnected from that family and I always just felt no good can come of paying attention to the Vanderbilt side. It's not as if there was a Vanderbilt trust that I was living off of. I was very motivated by taking care of myself and making something of my own life and I just felt like a lot of kids who come from famous families don't do very well and I don't want to be one of them and so I'm just going to ignore the fact that there's this kind of family history. I'm just going to focus on the Coopers who you know, there's nowhere to go but up.

AMT: It’s interesting because so many people talk about family and what family means and if you look at the Vanderbilt side, I mean you really do come from American royalty. Cornelius Vanderbilt helped build America.

ANDERSON COOPER: Yes, he was incredible businessman. He created a steamship empire in the 1800s and then moved into railroads, created a railroad empire and when he died, he was one of the richest men in America and certainly in the world. It was a kind of wealth that's difficult to imagine in this day. I think he had more than 100 million dollars when he died and this was in mid-1800s which would be billions and billions of dollars today, at a time when very few people had that sort of wealth.

AMT: And you even said that you thought at one point all kids’ grandparents turned into statues.

ANDERSON COOPER: You know my dad once showed me a statue, I guess Cornelius Vanderbilt, I think he's my great-great-great-great grandfather, four greats, and my dad once took me down to Grand Central Station in New York, which was built and created by him and showed me a statue of him and I got the idea when I was six or seven that all grandparents turned into statues when they died.

AMT: You make the point that you are also a Cooper and your dad died when he was 50, you were ten. How did his death motivate you in terms of what you wanted to accomplish growing up and what you thought about?

ANDERSON COOPER: It really, I mean changed my life forever. I think the death of a parent early on really does alter the course of one's life and there's a saying by a writer named Mary Gordon, and my mom often quotes it, said a fatherless girl thinks all things possible and nothing is safe. And I think it applies to boys as well, it certainly applied to me that after his death everything seemed suddenly possible, both terrible things but also kind of remarkable things. Anything seemed possible, but at the same time nothing ever felt safe and I still very much feel that. I think it's one of the reasons I still am very much focused on planning for the future and trying to anticipate what's coming down the pipe and preparing for it.

AMT: And you know, even though you say you and your mother see things differently when it comes to the rainbow, that sense of loss is great in both of you; that feeling as a young child that the world is changing and nothing can be safe.

ANDERSON COOPER: It is. I think we both grew up speaking the language of loss and I think once you speak that language you never really forget it and it's something that does shape your life. I always knew my mom, there was a sort of a sadness behind her eyes that when I was younger, I didn't quite understand the origins of it, or the reasons for it. But in the writing of this book it certainly became very clear and yet my mom is incredibly optimistic. She's the most optimistic person I've ever met and she at 92 believes the next great love is right around the corner. I said to her the other day, you know you still think there's a guy on a boat like off the coast of France waiting to whisk you away, don’t you? And she said a boat? A yacht [laughter], and I think that she does have this eternal optimism that around the next corner something amazing is waiting and her whole life will change or the phone can ring and something great can happen.

AMT: Well, she had quite the love life. She says in the book that at times instead of counting sheep, she'd count her lovers.

ANDERSON COOPER: I know. It's not exactly what you want to hear from your mom [laughs].

AMT: [laughs] I was just going to ask you about that.

ANDERSON COOPER: Well, the fact it was over e-mail made it a little easier so it’s less embarrassing, but you know my mom has had an extraordinary life and when she was 17, she went out to Hollywood and started dating movie stars, Errol Flynn and Bruce Cabot, Howard Hughes and later on, Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra and she's had sort of an epic life of love and loss and it's interesting to hear her perspective on it now at 92. She's able to kind of see it in the distance and laugh about it in a way that certainly she couldn't have when she was younger.

AMT: I got the impression that along with your dad, the other love of her life was Howard Hughes.

ANDERSON COOPER: It's stunning to me in the book and it's something, it's hard to understand. I mean, she had this very close relationship with him but she ended up in a totally impromptu, sort of abrupt decision, marrying somebody else who vaguely kind of worked for Howard Hughes. He was sort of a gangster. There were rumours he had killed his former wife and yet my mom, at 17, chose to marry this guy who was really kind of a thug, who was sort of a gofer for Howard Hughes and she you know, basically abandoned Howard Hughes and agreed to get married to this guy who ended up beating her and the marriage only lasted I think, three or so years. It was just one of many kinds of impromptu choices that my mom made and very kind of spur of the moment choices and it was interesting to me to kind of hear her perspective on it now and realizing that she's never really planned anything. She's always made kind of very hasty choices about things and I've realized why I'm sort of now the complete opposite because I grew up seeing that in her and realizing that about her and sort of reacting to it by being the opposite. That's another thing I've realized in the writing this book is how similar to my mom, I do have the impulsiveness that she has, I've just sort of consciously tried to tamp it down.

AMT: I want to ask a little bit more about your mom. You write in your book that your grandmother was in a lesbian relationship that became known in the thirties because of the custody battle, and it was a scandal at the time. How did your mother process that information as she got older?

ANDERSON COOPER: Well, she wasn't just in one lesbian relationship, she was a lesbian, she also had relationships with men obviously through her life, but at the height of this custody battle where my mother was-- my mother's mother and her aunt were fighting over custody of my mother. Her aunt felt that my grandmother was not an appropriate person and capable of taking care of a child, and she really wasn't. She wasn't very parental and my mother's nurse and my mother's grandmother conspired with the aunt to have my mother taken away from her mother and in the height of the trial suddenly the court was closed and this terrible scandal emerged and my grandmother--her housekeeper testified against her that she'd seen her in bed with a woman, a woman named Nada Milford Haven who was a British aristocrat and it was just one of several lesbian relationships my grandmother had throughout the course of her life. It was a huge scandal, it really turned much of the country against my mom's mom and it really turned the tide of the trial, to the point where my mom was removed from her mother's care and sent to live with this aunt who she didn't even know. It had a huge impact on my mom, I mean this was of course 1934 where being gay in America, you could be jailed and sent to a mental institution, you would be shunned. It really terrified my mom even though she didn't really know what it meant. She knew it was considered this terrible crime and it affected her for much of her life, really until her late 30s. She started having a lot of gay friends, she was involved in theatre and the arts and learned and realized that love is love and that there is no difference between the love between a woman and woman or man and man or man and woman. She was able to evolve beyond that and when I came out to her, she embraced it and not just accepted it but, embraces it and she says in the book she rejoices in the fact I'm gay and wouldn't want me any other way.

AMT: You were worried about her reaction because of that history, weren’t you?

ANDERSON COOPER: I was. I mean, I was sort of vaguely aware that my grandmother had been accused of being a lesbian. I didn't know if she really was a lesbian until my mom wrote about it in the book and I knew it had impacted my mom so deeply that there was some sort of feeling of-- I remember seeing her once as a kid you know, well I think before I had come out to my mom, saying, well I think being gay is partly genetic and she instantly said well, I don't think that's true at all because, as a kid she was so afraid that she had inherited whatever it was that the lesbianism of her mother and so there was part of me that was concerned this is going to bring up a lot of issues for her, but I knew ultimately she would be okay with it because I remember a statement she made when I was 11. A friend of hers, Jose Cantaro, who is a famous theatre director in New York who directs a lot of Eugene O'Neill plays on Broadway, and he and his partner Nick were coming over for dinner and I remember, I was 11 and I asked my mom about them and she said well, they're a married couple. And of course, in 1979 in the United States, most people probably would not have viewed a gay couple as a married couple, but it always stuck in my mind that my mom did view them as a married couple and so I knew at her core, she would be okay with it ultimately. And she is.

AMT: Your brother Carter died by suicide when he was 23 and we learn in the book that your mom was there when he jumped from the balcony of her apartment. You speak quite openly about it with her. How important was it to be able to talk about this tragedy?

ANDERSON COOPER: You know, for my mom it's been incredibly important. My brother Carter killed himself in front of my mother. She was begging him not to and the thing about suicide is that you're often left asking the question why and sometimes there isn't any why. Sometimes you can't find out why and for me, a lot of becoming a reporter was about learning to live in a world where there isn't any why. And for my mom, it's been very important to talk about what happened and replay it over and over again and certainly in the weeks after his death, people would come to the house and she would relive and talk about it second by second, what had happened. I found it really hard to listen to after a while. I actually react very differently, I become a lot more, in grief and tragedy, I become much more quiet and much more introspective and sort of, I talk about it in my head to myself but I have still have a hard time talking out loud about it. And so, we're different in how we kind of respond to grief, but I know from my mom certainly, it's been incredibly important to talk about and to continue to talk about it. There are days suddenly she'll, out of the blue, just bring up something that he said in the moments before he died or something that she wishes she had done and she still looks sort of replays it over and over again.

AMT: Well, you have had a lot of personal pain in your life. Do you think that has helped you as a journalist to have more empathy or to empathize with the people who you go and cover?

ANDERSON COOPER: Absolutely. I mean, I think it's made me a much better reporter and storyteller and it's the reason I do what I do. It's definitely you know, the losses of my dad and my brother propelled me into the world in a way that I maybe wouldn't have gone otherwise, and propelled me to places where the language of loss was spoken and where certainly the pain I was feeling inside was matched by the pain other people were experiencing and the pain that was all around. I understand everybody's loss is different of course, and I'm not comparing one to the other, but I do understand the language of loss and the experience of it and I'm comfortable talking with people who are experiencing, or have experienced grief or are in the midst of it and it's something that a lot of people find very uncomfortable to talk about, but it's something that is always present in my life and I certainly feel it's a privilege to be able to go places, after Haiti after the earthquake for instance, or even Katrina, or even, I think about what happened in Ottawa. Being there in the wake of that tragedy, or just being there and bearing witness to what a city is going through or what people are going through and seeing their resilience and their strength and showcasing that. I don't know, it's something just, I feel privileged to be able to do.

AMT: And because you know the language of loss, it’s okay that you ask.

ANDERSON COOPER: I know what it's like. When my brother killed himself it was a big event in New York. It made the front page of a lot of the tabloid newspapers for days. There were reporters camped outside our house and when I went to the wake to view his body with my mom for the first time, there were cameras, reporters waiting outside to take pictures of us and video us going into the funeral home. So I know what it's like to have a camera pointed at you at the lowest point of your life and I know it's not a pleasant feeling. And I remember in that moment hating the cameramen who were pointing their cameras at us and thinking they were vultures and so, I understand what it's like to be on the other side of the camera and it's really informed the way I carry myself in the field, it's the way I-- it informs the way I ask questions and even if I ask questions. I think it's important. I'm not interested in shoving a camera in somebody's face. If somebody, in the midst of their grief, I was thinking, there was a famous school shooting in the United States in Newtown, Connecticut at Sandy Hook and a number parents reached out to us and wanted to talk about their child in the height of their grief, days after their child was killed and that's not something I would ever try to force somebody to do but I felt privileged to be invited into a grieving parent’s home and to talk to them about their child and you know, often times people react to grief in different ways but many times people want you to know who's been lost and they want you know the life this person lived, not just how their life ended.

AMT: It's a really good thing to remember. Before I let you go, I have to ask what's going on in US politics right now. I watched you with the Trump family, did you ever think you'd see this kind of race?

ANDERSON COOPER: No. I mean I don't think anybody could have predicted this kind of race in the United States. It's whatever adjective, I don’t know, all the adjectives can be used to describe it. It's an extraordinary race on both the Republican side and the Democratic Bernie Sanders entered the race, I think at three percent or something and very few people thought he would have the traction he's done. He's raising huge amounts of money, he's winning states, he's going to go to the convention and we'll see what happens there. You know, obviously Hillary Clinton has a delegate lead and if you include super delegates as well, but Sanders is not going anywhere and is fighting hard. On the Republican side, there has not been a candidate like Donald Trump, you know certainly in my lifetime, and it's upended the race and anybody who tells you they know what's going to happen is just making it up because it's impossible to predict.

AMT: Do you talk politics with your mom?

ANDERSON COOPER: I don't. I don't talk politics with my friends. I'm not somebody who--it's not my job to express my opinion on, at least I believe, it's not my job to be a iberal reporter or a conservative reporter, Republican or Democrat. It's my job to ask questions and I revel in that role. I really like in my public life, but also in my private life. You know, plenty of people have strong opinions and argue over opinions with their friends. I'm not one of those people. I ask questions and I like that, and I like not necessarily taking sides and just-- I try to take the side of what's accurate and what's factually correct. I view myself as an observer and less as a participant.

AMT: Well, I'm glad you ask questions of your mother. It's a fascinating read and a lot to learn in your book with her. Thank you.

ANDERSON COOPER: Thank you very much.

AMT: Anderson Cooper, co-author with his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt of The Rainbow Comes and Goes. A Mother and Son Talk About Life, Love and Loss. Anderson Cooper joined us from New York City and if you want to visit our website, you can see photos of the two of them, cbc.ca/thecurrent. If you're joining us halfway through go to our websitecbc.ca/thecurrent, download the podcast or listen right online. And since we're talking about nonagenarian parents, I'm going to give a Happy Birthday wish to my father who is 91 today. Happy birthday, Dad.

'What I want is your voice': How Disney princesses get scripted out of movies

Guests: Karen Eisenhauer

AMT: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music: percussive]

VOICE 1: We all know that we need to act. We need to move to a lower carbon future. We need to innovate. But we also need to create the jobs of the future.

VOICE 2: What I think is interesting is what happens when someone has a miscarriage. In my own case, I had one. And I certainly didn't tell my employer.

VOICE 3: An electric car needs much less maintenance. You’ll see a wholesale shift. It’ll be a major technological disruption, much like the one you’ve seen in – what Google did to the Yellow Pages, for example.

[Music: percussive]

AMT: Some of the week that was on The Current and on our Friday host, Piya Chattopadhyay joins me to hear what you had to say about it. Hi, Piya.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Hello.

AMT: What you had to say, you being our listeners.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Yes, you being our listeners.

AMT: Okay.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: The royal you. [laughs]

AMT: Well, you can weigh in too. Okay. Let's get to it. Last Thursday, we discussed the implications of an interim decision from the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal that defined miscarriage as a disability. And we spoke with Andrea Paras, who shared her own harrowing experience.

SOUNDCLIP

On January 17th, I experienced a lot of pain, and so I needed to go to the emergency room in the middle of the night. I went at around 1:30 in the morning. Saw a doctor, who gave me some Percocet to knock me out for the night…At no point was there any follow up care…And there was no physical exam to see if there was something medically wrong or if it was it was just part of a normal miscarriage. I waited close to 10 hours until I saw another doctor.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: That was Andrea Paras talking about her miscarriage earlier this year. After that story aired we received a lot of response, including many personal stories from women who have miscarried. Melody Anderson of London, Ontario, told us about a miscarriage she had in 1980. She writes: “After my miscarriage, at 23 weeks, the clichés came. When I asked a doctor, were they boys or girls? I was told that it was 'best for me not to know'! To this day, I still don't know. I never did see my babies because the nurses were too busy making jokes about how much fluid had to be cleaned up in the room. I actually thought that things were a lot better, 36 years on, but obviously not."

AMT: On Facebook, Gabrielle Ascott said: “I've been through it, my friends have been through it. One is going through a late pregnancy miscarriage now. It affects society to the core and it's about time people recognized that the silence and disregard towards families affected actually weakens our communities as a whole."

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: A.E. Matheson in Saskatoon disagreed with the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal's ruling. He wrote: “Grief is grief and it should certainly be recognized as such in the case of miscarriage, but let us not put a medical diagnosis on human emotion. People who suffer other losses in hospitals also grieve. It is not a disability. It is our humanity."

AMT: And a couple of comments now that we received on Twitter. Andrew Lint wrote: “From the smallest flicker of life our child mattered, even at five weeks any miscarriage is difficult to cope with.” And Sheelagh Schulze said: “Miscarriage as emotional emergency. YES. I cried listening to your guest and recalling the same experience 15 years ago. Cruelty.”

[Music]

AMT: If you're just joining us, this is The Current on CBC Radio One and Sirius XM. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti with Piya Chattopadhyay. And now an animated character in search of a voice.

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VOICE 1: If I become human, I'll never be with my father or sisters again.

VOICE 2: That’s right! Oh. We haven't discussed the subject of payment.

VOICE 1: But I don't have—

VOICE 2: I'm not asking much, just a token, really, a trifle. You’ll never even miss it. What I want from you is… [sinister] your voice.

VOICE 1: My voice?

VOICE 2: You’ve got it, sweet cakes. No more talking, singing, zip.

VOICE 1: But without my voice, how can I—

VOICE 2: You have your looks. Your pretty face. And don't underestimate the importance…

AMT: Well, that will be familiar to many of you, from the Disney movie The Little Mermaid, but it seems Ariel is not the only one surrendering her voice for a man in Disney films. New work by two linguistic researchers has revealed that animated Disney princess movies are short on one key thing: Women with dominate roles. Karen Eisenhauer is a Masters student in linguistics at North Carolina University who has been working on this research. And she joins us from Raleigh, North Carolina. Hello.

KAREN EISENHAUER: Hello. Great to be with you today.

AMT: Now, why do you want to study the speaking roles of women in Disney princess films?

KAREN EISENHAUER: Well, we decided to look at these because as you know the Disney princess films are wildly popular internationally. And they continue to be marketed so that they're popular even almost 60 or 70 years after their initial release dates, in some cases. And because of this, there's a lot of conversations that are already happening about whether or not these princesses are actually good role models for our young children, particularly, our young girls. But often those are very qualitative arguments or opinion pieces, so we wanted to apply some of our well-tested linguistic methodologies in the field of language and gender to this media project to see if we could lend a more quantitative wide-reaching voice to the conversation.

AMT: Well, you compared traditional Disney movies, such as the original Snow White in the thirties, with the modern ones, like The Little Mermaid. What did you actually find out?

KAREN EISENHAUER: So what we found out is-- We've divided up the Disney princess movies into three categories. Like you said, the older films including Snow White and Cinderella, films that came out in the nineties, and then films that have come out since 2009. And what we've found is that, especially between the older films and the nineties films the amount that the princesses speak don't actually vary that much. But what we did find is that the cast of the films in the nineties increased exponentially from, usually, single digit numbers to upwards of 40 cast members. And all of those extra smaller parts, sort of, chorus member parts or background bit parts were all given to men. Consequentially, all of the speaking basically in the nineties films have gone to men, anywhere between sixty and ninety percent of the speech in those films are male speech.

AMT: So even the minor characters tend to be men and that's where it starts—

KAREN EISENHAUER: Especially, the minor characters, I would say.

AMT: Now, if you look at a film like Frozen, it was seen as a real step forward. It had two lead female characters. How does that factor in?

KAREN EISENHAUER: That definitely improved things. That being said, Frozen is not quite as equal as one would expect, even with two female leads. Men are still speaking 59 percent of the time and women only 41 percent of the time.

AMT: So why did the older traditional princess films have more lines for women?

KAREN EISENHAUER: The greater proportion of the speech ended up going to women because there isn't a lot of extraneous speech given to people who aren't main characters. I think it's also true that in the older movies we have an archetype of villain, of villainess, of this older woman who is jealous of a younger woman's beauty, which we see in all three films and because the main villain is a woman we have a lot more speech there. This is compared with the renaissance era where out of the five films actually only one villainess, in The Little Mermaid. So that's another main speaking role that's been given way. Additionally, we often, in the nineties films, have some really chatty sidekick characters, like Mushu from Mulan or Genie from Aladdin, that are all male as well.

AMT: That's really interesting because I would have thought something like Mulan or Pocahontas would have actually have ended up seeing more women.

KAREN EISENHAUER: Yeah, you’d think that, wouldn’t you? Our theory right now is that, you know, for all of these princess movies, what Disney is really doing is showcasing what they've constructed to be an exceptional woman. These princesses are generally, you know, especially in the nineties, actually are pretty powerful. They have a lot of really positive character traits and in some cases they're complex characters, but in showcasing this one exceptional woman they have her navigating through this man's world, essentially. And I think the lack of men in other places almost highlights, they're like, oh, this is a princess movie and it's only about the princess. But what we miss is a complicated backdrop of female characters, because all of those other parts are given to men.

AMT: You also looked at how women characters were complimented. What did you find out?

KAREN EISENHAUER: That data was a little bit more complicated, but, by and large, we found that women tend to give and receive more compliments than men, which is also true in real life studies that have been done. We've also found that, especially in the first two sets of movies, females are complimented more on appearance than they're complimented on any other facet of their personality, like skills or possessions or their friendliness. Men, on the other hand, are complimented more on skills or performances or intelligence than they're complimented on anything else. So I think we're still seeing a sort of gendered split in what men and women are praised for.

AMT: And it's interesting as well, because I think you identify Brave and Inside Out as later films which do have more speaking roles for women. Why is that and is that a change that you see coming?

KAREN EISENHAUER: Yes, that's actually really true, especially about Brave. Brave we have, actually, as the only film that has a really statistically significant female majority speech, 74 percent of the speech in that movie is done by women, which is interesting given that even that film has more male characters than it has female characters. As for Inside Out, we haven't actually conducted an analysis of that film yet, but our prediction is that it will be a majority female speech. We're looking forward to the future of Disney animation, actually Pixar animation as well because Brave was a Pixar film. We think that there are greater trends toward-- There's beginning to be a trend towards more diversity in these films, especially more gender diversity and I think it's obvious that audiences want that, with the success of Brave and Frozen and also Inside Out, that audiences are really looking for better representation and films that represent a broader human experience, which includes a woman's experience.

AMT: Okay, so what's the lesson learned from all this?

KAREN EISENHAUER: I think the lesson learned is that-- That's a great question. I think that it's important to keep in mind that these are just numbers. We're painting with a really broad brush right now, just speech. Speech amounts doesn't say anything besides what it says, you know. We're not saying that therefore the princesses are terrible role models or anything like that, but I do think that it says something important about our expectations of the media and our expectations of what genders appear in the media, that it's so easy to overlook the fact that these worlds are overwhelmingly populated by men and that is because we have come to expect about representation in the media. And I think that paying closer attention to what we see or don't see in the media will ultimately lead to more diverse and more accepting national culture national media culture.

AMT: Now, you are a Masters student. Did you grow up with any of these movies?

KAREN EISENHAUER: Oh, did I? Yes. Actually, The Little Mermaid-- It's funny you played that at the beginning, because I was obsessed with The Little Mermaid when I was about four or five. I used to have a Little Mermaid bedspread and everything like that and I would sing that song from the film - I want to be where the people are - until it drove my parents insane. These movies are really close to my heart, especially the nineties films.

AMT: And those are the ones you found to be the most problematic. What surprised you as you looked at the data then?

KAREN EISENHAUER: It definitely surprised me how I personally had overlooked how many-- In my concentration on the princesses when I was little I definitely overlooked the fact that anybody who wasn't a princess basically wasn't a woman in the films. And it surprised me even Mulan, which I was really excited about when it came out and it was one of my favourite movies for a long time, how unbalanced that movie is as well. Definitely, really surprised me. And I think moving forward I still enjoy the films, but I'm definitely taking a more critical, more complex view of them.

AMT: Karen, thanks for sharing your research with us.

KAREN EISENHAUER: Thank you so much for having me.

AMT: Karen Eisenhauer, Masters student in linguistics at North Carolina University. She’s in Raleigh, North Carolina. So, interesting.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: I know. You know what? I’ve got little kids who are watching all these movies and I was surprised when she said Frozen, 59 percent of the speaking is done by men. It's like, you don't pay attention to this stuff. And now I will.

AMT: And then the women are either princesses or they’re mean. They’re Ursula or they’re witches.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Yeah, like, they’re the moms, like Rapunzel’s mom.

AMT: Or their moms are dead. Did you notice that? The moms have to die or be dead before the film even starts.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Yeah. I also—

AMT: What’s that about?

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Listening to her, it also just reminded me – I know we’re speaking about the animated context, but this is what happens in Hollywood too, women have fewer speaking roles and when they do they're often relegated to the sidelines, so that was interesting as well for me.

AMT: Start writing, people. Start writing something.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: We are using our voices right now, we women.

AMT: Yes, we are. [laughs]

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: All right. Let us move on. Across Canada consumers are getting all charged up [pause] over a new generation of electric car.

AMT: I caught that, I caught that.

PC But Canada's infrastructure may be lagging behind drivers’ enthusiasm. Earlier this week, we heard from the Globe and Mail's National Driving columnist, Peter Cheney, about how far electric vehicle technology has come and how far it still has to go

SOUNDCLIP

PETER CHENEY: Ideally, what you want is high amperage chargers like the Tesla supercharger, which makes the electric car really usable. When I drove up the west coast in the Model S I went from supercharger to supercharger like a giant hummingbird from flower to flower. It was fantastic. So these are really powerful chargers. You could have an electric chair execution one with one of these things. It’s a big electric--

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Well, good to know.

PETER CHENEY: Well, just in case. So, it's a really high average charge that charges the car quickly. If you're charging on a 110 outlet, it might take you three days. So what we need is more high amperage chargers. And when that comes it's a chicken-and-egg situation. When there are more chargers there will be more cars. A lot of people are waiting for that.

AMT: And then we heard from plenty of you. Barbara Heywood-Jones wrote: “I bought my electric car, a Nissan Leaf, a year ago and I love it! I live on Denman Island, BC -- off the grid -- which means the sun powers my car for at least 6 months of the year...I find ‘range anxiety’ a bizarre concept given that every EV I know of comes with a 110-volt charge cord that is stored in the vehicle. I can charge my car at any home or business with an outdoor plug. It is a slow charge but it beats hitchhiking with a stinky, heavy gas can!"

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: On Twitter, Gaby Wickstrom wrote: “I am not opposed to electric cars. However, I am opposed to free charging. No one gives me free gas. #payyourway." And Dave Mielke tweeted: “Electric cars may be good for the environment, but, due to their quietness, they'll be very bad for blind pedestrians." Gail Erickson from Sooke, BC wrote to say: “Any discussion of electric cars must also include the heavy metals used in batteries and the amount of hydro used in processing these metals. People need all the relevant information to make the decision to support electric cars as a green solution to our car culture." Alright. Let’s move on.

#BringBackOurGirls founder says humanity has failed abducted Nigerian girls

Guests: Dr. Hussaini Abdu

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Tracking the story.

[Music: sting]

[Crowd singing/chanting]

VOICE 2: If they are alive—

VOICE 3: Yes.

VOICE 4: Right.

VOICE 2: If they are alive, they can be found.

VOICE 4: Amen.

VOICE 2: If the will of the government and the military is there, they can be found.

[Crowd chanting/singing]

CROWD: Remember!

VOICE 5: Over 200 girls go missing from school. It’s unacceptable. If that was to happen in a Western country, it’d be all over the news.

AMT: Well, when 276 Nigerian girls were abducted by Boko Haram from a secondary school in Chibok in northeastern Nigeria, they soon became a flashpoint for rallies and protests around the world, from Lagos to London to LA. Even First Lady, in the US, Michelle Obama joined the movement to find the missing girls, taking part in the hashtag that was shared by millions. It turned into a rallying cry: #BringBackOurGirls. Since then, 50 of the girls are said to have escaped, leaving roughly 226 of them still missing. Just a few days ago, Boko Haram released another short video clip of 15 of the girls as proof of life, indicating at least some are alive and still in custody. Dr. Hussaini Abdu is a founding member of the #BringBackOurGirls movement and he is also Plan International's Country Director in Nigeria. And he's in our Toronto studio. Hello.

HUSSAINI ABDU: Hello. Thank you.

AMT: What do we know about where the girls are now?

HUSSAINI ABDU: It's a very difficult question. We’ve been struggling for the past two years. There hasn’t been any clear definition of exactly where these girls are. It happened like a joke. We actually thought it was going to be short time spell, and even when we started the Bring Back Our Girls protest, solidarity movement, we thought it was going to be for the short while before we would get the girls back. But after today, officially from the government side, it's clear they don't know where exactly these girls are and it's quite unfortunate.

AMT: You know, the stories coming out of there, there have been another 2,000 abductions since the inception of Boko Haram.

HUSSAINI ABDU: Sadly.

AMT: Human Rights Watch has new numbers out this week and it said in the past seven years Boko Haram has destroyed more than 910 schools, it's forced the closure of 1,500 schools, it has killed at least 611 teachers, it's forced 19,000 teachers to flee, and then it’s abducted 2,000 civilians. That’s staggering.

HUSSAINI ABDU: Very, very staggering. And I think that this figure is certainly not getting the required global attention. It's quite sad, because it was a group that is tribally against formal education. And so their first victims were schools. So you attack teachers and attack schools. In one of the three states that have been badly affected by Boko Haram, close to 80 percent of the schools have been destroyed in Borno state, in particular. That was the epicentre of Boko Haram activities. Teachers have been killed on a regular basis and just like what Human Rights monitors are saying, a number of them have fled. Yes, tremendous gain has been made in recent times, in terms of military action, against Boko Haram. In the last six months it's been quite good. Some of the state governments are trying to revive schools. But the fear is, would there even be teachers to teach in those schools?

AMT: That's one of the reasons the younger, like, the girls are targeted because they are against schools; they're especially against girls getting an education, right?

HUSSAINI ABDU: Yeah, against girls, not just girls, against formal education. So, they are against even boys going to school.

AMT: Because boys are being abducted as well and adults are.

HUSSAINI ABDU: Boys are being abducted, yeah. And for boys, actually, there instances of Boko Haram invading schools and slaughtering young children. In schools—Buni Yadi Secondary School, is a very important example where tens of children were slaughtered at night. They put fire on the school as the children were camping around. They were hacking them down and killing them.

AMT: When did that happen?

HUSSAINI ABDU: That happened three years ago. And these incidents happen in four other schools. So the atrocities committed by Boko Haram are worse than anybody can imagine. It’s just that there’s limited international media glare on what is happening here.

AMT: And the other stat that I have here is that they've organized more than 150 suicide bombings, last year alone. And they used children in almost a fifth of those bombings. Some of the kids they take, they turn them into…

HUSSAINI ABDU: Yes. That's what to do. They take those kids, they arm them to fight. Initially, they were using the boys for the suicide bombers. But in the last six months, close to 75 percent of the suicide bombings were actually done by girls, young girls. They strap them with a suicide jacket and they go out and they blow themselves. Sometimes they succeed. Sometimes the military hack them down. And sometimes the girls cry out and escape. And so, consistently, in the last six months most of the suicide bombers have been girls. And we actually—A very good example, very recently, one of the girls couldn't detonate her bomb, in Cameroon on the border side with Nigeria. Unfortunately, she was arrested. Initially, we thought she was one of the Chibok girls, but on receiving the pictures, we checked around and found out that she wasn’t one of the Chibok girls.

AMT: You know, Nigeria is a big place.

HUSSAINI ABDU: Absolutely.

AMT: But it's not that big. How can this organization keep that many people abducted and nobody can get near them? Like, how can that be?

HUSSAINI ABDU: How can that be? Because the logistics of moving such a mass of people—

AMT: But they’re keeping them somewhere, yeah.

HUSSAINI ABDU: They’re keeping them somewhere, but we’ve got to understand lately, particularly from [indecipherable], is that they are now being kept in smaller clusters and dispersed in different locations. That’s the only kind of news we have. And then we also had one of the leaders of the terror group saying that they have married some of the out to individuals within their sect or within their terror group. But we think, we want to believe that these girls are still alive. We belive they are going through terrible, harrowing experiences of sexual violence by those elements, but we don't want to contemplate that they’ve been killed or anything. Because we are rest assured that they are somewhere and we think if the right thing is done, we could these girls back.

AMT: It's an incredible, because then they're vulnerable on all sides now too. They're not only vulnerable to their captors, to Boko Haram, they're also vulnerable because if they walk out, they're seen as part of the terrorist, quote-unquote-movement—

HUSSAINI ABDU: Absolutely.

AMT: --because they could have a bomb on them, they could have been forced into marriage. So, now they’re seen as complicit even though they've been forced.

HUSSAINI ABDU: Yeah. It’s one of the major issues that we're actually going through now. Because some of the girls, not the Chibok girls, some other girls that have been kidnapped and have managed to escape, some came back pregnant or just came back with children and those children were a product of the sexual violence they went through with Boko Haram element. And some of the communities are refusing to accept them back because they're considered to have had a child or children for such bad, terrible elements within the society.

AMT: So, they’re re-victimized again.

HUSSAINI ABDU: So, they are re-victimized again. So, the struggle is how do we ensure those children are protected, those girls are protected, and the community allows them back home? And that's part of the work we're doing.

AMT: So what do you want the international community, including Canada - you're here in Canada right now - to do to help bring back our girls?

HUSSAINI ABDU: These children are part of this community of people around the world and that we can’t afford fail them. Failing them is utterly failing humanity. And that is the major message we want to pass on - that the world should not just show outrage and show solidarity, that the world should do everything possible to ensure that these girls are out. We believe that the world is capable of doing it because it has done it before in many other places. And it should take the Nigerian situation as a serious situation, as almost as serious as the ISIS and, in fact, some of the atrocities committed by Boko Haram, ISIS hasn’t even done it. That is not to romanticize the situation. It is a terrible, terrible situation and the world as a very important role to play.

AMT: Thanks for coming in.

HUSSAINI ABDU: Thanks very much for the opportunity.

AMT: Dr. Hussaini Abdu, founding member of the #BringBackOurGirls movement and he is also Plan International's Country Director in Nigeria. He's in our Toronto studio.

[Music: sting]

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: And now it's time to give credit where credit is certainly due. The week that was on The Current was produced by: Idella Sturino, Shannon Higgins, Karin Marley, Howard Goldenthal, Ines Colabrese, Lara O'Brien, Julian Uzielli, Pacinthe Mattar, Sujata Berry, Liz Hoath, Marc Apollonio, Willow Smith, Sarah Grant, Josh Bloch, and intern Paula Last.

AMT: Special thanks to Michael O'Halloran in Calgary, Matthew Kupfer in Ottawa, and Anne Pennman in Vancouver. The Current's writer is Peter Mitton. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our technician is Gary Francis. Our senior documentary editor is Joan Webber.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Our senior producers are Richard Goddard in Toronto and Cathy Simon in Vancouver and the executive producer of The Current is Kathleen Goldhar.

AMT: We’ve got congratulations in order. CBC Radio's John Chipman and The Current's documentary editor Joan Webber have won an Amnesty International Canada Media Award. The award was in the audio/video category for John Chipman's documentary, To No Man's Land: The Story of Saaed Jama's Deportation to Somalia, which aired on The Current. John is part of The Current as well. Congratulations, John and Joan, on a really moving documentary.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Hear, hear. If you want to add anything you hear on The Current, you can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. And if you want to join the conversation about our season long project Ripple Effect, make sure to use the #rippleCBC. You can find all our Ripple Effect stories by going to our website and clicking on Features.

AMT: And you can also email us from our website by going to cbc.ca/thecurrent, click on the Contact link. While you're there, subscribe to our podcast, check out the links, check out the pictures—

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Check it out!

AMT: --all the information on what we've been up to. Do it all there. Download the podcast.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Yes. Thank you to you too for the job of the week and weeks past. No one thanks you. I’m going to thank you.

AMT: [laughs] Okay. And you’re here tomorrow.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: I am.

AMT: Can you tell me in five seconds what you’re doing?

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Yeah, we’re talking about taxes and the Panama Papers. It’s tax time. We’re going to talk about the Panama Papers and whether public officials—I’m going so fast—should release them publicly. I will slow down by tomorrow.

AMT: Okay. Well, I’ll be listening. Piya Chattopadhyay, this week's Friday host of The Current. I’ll be back Monday. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

[Music: theme]

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Apr. 14, 2016 Episode Transcript

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