New Humanist Articles and Posts

In a word: Climate

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 05:00:00 GMT

Climate, 14th century: The characteristic weather conditions of a country or region

In 1854, when the United States Magazine of Science, Art, Manufactures, Agriculture, Commerce and Trade used the phrase “climate changes”, they couldn’t have imagined that this would be one of the most pressing matters facing the human race in 2026. And yet the phrase was used like this: “Some have ascribed these climate changes to agriculture – cutting down the dense forests – the exposure of the upturned soil to the summer sun, and the draining of the great marshes.” So they were on to it even then.

The word “climate” first started being used in English in the 14th century as a borrowing from French and Latin. At the time, it was thought that the Earth had seven climate zones, each one determined astrologically. By 1400 or so, Sir John Mandeville, in his famous Travels, was explaining that the people of India were in “the first climate, that is of Saturn”, while the English climate, he said, was determined by the Moon. It was science, but not as we know it.

Of course, the word “climate” is often used figuratively, like when we talk about the “moral climate” or “economic climate”. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, this first occurred as early as 1661 with the phrase “climate of opinion”, a usage that wouldn’t sound out of place in a current Times editorial. But in uses of the word pertaining to the environment, the appearances of particular phrases tell a history all of their own.

“Climate action” and “climate emergency” both appeared in 1989. Seven years later, in 1996, “climate denial” and “climate sceptic” were first used. It took another few years for people to be labelled as “climate deniers” (2003) but, in opposition to these deniers, in 2014, along comes “climate strike”.

The word is likely to remain a battleground over the next few years. On the one hand, we’ll use it neutrally, to say what the weather is like. On the other hand, it will no doubt remain at the centre of some of the big struggles of the 21st century.

This article is from our Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.

Book review: Becoming George

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 05:00:00 GMT

Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand (Transworld) by Fiona Sampson

The title of poet and scholar Fiona Sampson’s latest biography denotes several journeys in the life of one of France’s first great women writers, George Sand. Starting with her childhood in rural Nohant in the aftermath of the French Revolution, it follows her to Paris where she takes part in some of the upheavals that followed, taking in her advocacy for women’s rights and against marriage, her self-discovery as a writer, her turbulent relationships with Alfred de Musset and Fryderyk Chopin, the public scandals caused in part by her adoption of masculine clothing, and by her use of a male nom de plume. To become George Sand, writes Sampson in her introduction to a writer no longer as widely read in the UK as many of her male contemporaries, required “will, imagination, chutzpah”.

Charting Sand’s life through the development of mass politics and rapid urbanisation, Sampson bookmarks significant shifts in Sand’s life by spending a few pages between each chapter analysing an image of her subject. As Sand lived from 1804 to 1876, and moved throughout her life in bourgeois circles, she was often captured not just by portrait painters, but also by photographers.

The first “impression” provides circularity, as it catches Sand with her granddaughters, just a year before her death, at the country house where she grew up. This allows Sampson to explore just how much France changed during Sand’s lifetime, positing Sand as a “bridge figure”. In the 18th century, writes Sampson, the likes of Bach, Goethe, Rousseau or Voltaire could shift European culture while working outside their capital cities, whereas Sand had to go to Paris to mix in literary and musical circles, at least for the prime years of her astonishingly productive career.

Sampson spends her first four chapters on Sand’s childhood as Aurore Dupin, establishing the formative nature of her parents’ cross-class relationship, her father’s early death after being thrown from his horse, her being raised largely by her grandmother, and the importance of Nohant as a location throughout her life.

Inevitably, the pace picks up once we move to Paris in 1831, when Sand chose her famous pseudonym – and successfully applied for a permit to wear men’s clothing in public, which was issued by the police at the time. (This permission did not stop newspapers or literary journals from making unkind comments about her lack of femininity, even if the concept of “transgender” was a century from existence, and friends as prominent as Victor Hugo said the matter of whether Sand was “my sister or my brother” did not concern him.)

Sampson, writing in an age of frenzied discussion about gender identity, wisely does not spend much time on the question of whether Sand was a proto-trans pioneer. Assessing Paul Gavarni’s drawing of Sand in male attire, produced for a gossip column in 1831 or 1832, Sampson quotes a letter from 1835 in which Sand writes, “I claim to possess, today and forever, the superb and complete independence which [men] alone believe [they] have the right to enjoy.” It was men’s privileges that Sand wanted, according to Sampson, not a male identity – at a time before the law, and sexologists, defined “the homosexual” or “the transvestite” as types.

Becoming George is at its most interesting when asking what it means to be an author – and what it means to write a biography. “Most of the ceaselessly branching alternatives and decisions that make up a life evade reconstruction,” writes Sampson at the beginning of chapter five, “Becoming a writer”. When discussing authors, this difficulty is compounded by the fact that the thing important writers spend most of their days doing – writing – does not have the same kind of technical interaction with a medium as painting or music, and tends to be solitary. But Sand was more sociable than many, and had complicated, cross-country affairs with famous composers and poets that gave plenty of material to future biographers and writers. (Notably, the German Expressionist dramatist Georg Kaiser’s 1922 play Flight to Venice imagined Sand’s relationship with fellow writer de Musset as a shared quest for artistic renewal.)

Sampson explores perennial questions for creative women, asking how Sand dealt with sexism, with men telling her “Don’t make books, make children”; the difficulty of pursuing a career while raising a family, with Sand prioritising her work, and her relationship with her daughter suffering as a result; and how her relationship with Chopin had to end because it was suffocating her ability to write. It’s full of insight that could only be reached by a biographer’s shared experience: “The most difficult step in becoming a published writer isn’t what you do with the blank page [but] what you do with the filled one,” writes Sampson, reflecting on how a person’s mid-twenties can be “when time passing begins to measure not progress but the stalling of some original trajectory”. This anxiety drives Sand to a phenomenal output – 70 novels and more than 50 other published works.

Naturally, an oeuvre so large is somewhat uneven, and Sampson charts the economic, social and political pressures for Sand to be so prolific, even if not every text can be analysed in detail in her 350 pages. Though Sampson occasionally overplays contemporary parallels (in lines such as “enjoying the kind of good life often featured in twenty-first-century lifestyle magazines”), this is a highly readable, subtly inventive book that argues for Sand’s importance not just as a writer but as a cultural figure.

Sampson closes with famous Paris photographer Félix Nadar’s portrait of Sand dressed as the satirical playwright Molière, which is “not of a man or woman, nor even of a woman dressed as a man, but of literary authority itself”. It reminds us that Sand is synonymous with the 19th century, France and the extraordinary written culture of that time and place – and that this remains the most important context within which to judge Sand’s life and work.

This article is from our Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.

Book review: The Revolutionists

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 05:00:00 GMT

The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s (Penguin) by Jason Burke

As the subtitle of this book acknowledges, hijacking has a metaphorical resonance as well as a literal meaning. Both describe the garnering of widespread attention by the determined actions of small and reckless groups or individuals. The key characters in this rollicking narrative number barely a few dozen, but they transfixed hundreds of millions throughout the 1970s.

“The Revolutionists” is a clever title, correctly implying a difference between Burke’s protagonists and actual revolutionaries – who, while no less zealous, are also organised and methodical, which is why they sometimes win. Revolutionists, by contrast, are essentially grandstanders and cosplayers, vastly more interested in means than ends. A revolutionary may see the application of violence as a regrettable necessity. A revolutionist is more someone who quite fancies striking poses in a beret and Raybans, and blowing things up, and seeks an excuse.

If one personality exemplifies the revolutionist, it is Andreas Baader: a twenty-something drifter who dominated West Germany’s Red Army Faction to the extent that it became interchangeably known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, after Baader and fellow militant Ulrike Meinhof. Burke describes Baader as “spoilt, arrogant and lazy”, and notes that he was “uninterested in politics and unmoved by progressive causes”. Baader was, however, extremely keen on fast cars, women, drink, drugs and the adoration of credulous supplicants. He went to extraordinary lengths to maintain supplies of them.

Baader and his comrades allied themselves early on to the budding militancy attached to Palestine, making their first visits in 1970 to the training camps in Jordan being operated by Fatah, the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The pages recalling the first trip undertaken by the Red Army Faction to Jordan are rich black comedy. “The following weeks could not be described as an unqualified success,” understates Burke. The Germans whined about the accommodation and the food, wasted precious ammunition acting the cowboy on the firing ranges, and annoyed their hosts with their general performative bohemianism. Nor were they the only vexatious guests (“A group of British International Socialists smuggled alcohol into one camp, got drunk, held an impromptu sing-song, and then got into a fight with a group of British Maoists.”)

Burke is the Guardian’s international security correspondent and the author of several excellent books covering al-Qaeda, Islamic State and other manifestations of a more recent fanaticism. The Revolutionists serves as something of a prequel to his previous works, suggesting a legacy even more baneful than the casualties of the bombings, hijackings and kidnappings wrought by its subjects: that the self-indulgence, self-regard and eventual self-destruction of this broadly secular pro-Palestinian tendency helped bring forth the theocratic nihilists of later decades.

The Revolutionists is a brilliantly told story with many dimensions – Burke also furnishes the wider geostrategic contexts to the follies of the players, even if many of them were ignorant of, or indifferent to these diplomatic shadow plays. It is mostly, however, a story – it might be hoped a cautionary fable – of failure. Things ended badly and/or early for most of the individual “revolutionists” – though some are still with us, including Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the prolific Venezuelan terrorist better remembered as Carlos the Jackal, now serving forever in a French prison.

And while the revolutionists may have got their pictures in the papers, and though they spawned a minor industry of literature, cinema, music and sundry popular culture, it is difficult to make any case that they, or their approximate contemporaries, much advanced any of the actual causes for which they claimed to have taken up arms. The Red Army Faction and similar groups in Italy, Japan and elsewhere fell some way short of dismantling capitalism, while Palestine, for all the picturesque mayhem wrought on its behalf, is arguably further than ever from being a functional sovereign state. The revolutionists did nothing good, and nothing good came of what they did.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.

A new kind of fingerprint

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 05:00:00 GMT

The names of bacteria rolled off my colleague’s tongue like chocolate bar brands. “There’s all kinds of streptococcus, lactobacillus, E. coli of course, and that’s just the bacteria. You can find out the viruses, too. We’re talking mycoviruses, enteroviruses, astroviruses – oh, and the sample is always contaminated with human DNA.”

I thought for a minute. “So, I could be identified from a sample of my shit?”

“Not could – you already can be! You could call it ... a data dump.” He chuckled.

I was talking with David, my office neighbour at the University of Oxford, about all the new information on humans and bugs that can be learned using cutting-edge methods in pathogen genomics. By examining the genetic material of microorganisms that cause disease, microbiologists can now see how your infection is related to someone else’s, or whether what you have is treatable or not. For example, by studying the DNA of the norovirus you’re carrying, in combination with other kinds of data, they might be able to tell what you have eaten, who you have been in contact with and if you passed the infection on.

It’s an up-and-coming area, already starting to overtake old methods of disease surveillance and diagnosis, which relied on assessing the symptoms of a patient, or sending off a sample of bacteria to be grown in a lab. Some of these new methods can also enable clinicians to look at a range of microorganisms at once, giving them a more complete and detailed set of data.

Your specific set of bacteria and viruses can be as identifying as your fingerprint – not only that, but they can associate you with other people’s disease fingerprints. The information can go on to inform your clinical care, and also public health responses like contacting people you might have infected, or designing vaccines. It’s fast. It’s reliable. It’s powerful.

But as well as helping prevent disease, this data can be used for other means – to establish where a person has been, who they have met and even the nature of the interaction between these people. It can be passed on to health insurance companies, criminal courts or to justify targeted public health measures such as quarantining “disease-spreading” groups.

As a bioethicist, I spend my days learning about ever-accelerating scientific advances like these. It’s my job to help make sure that new technologies are properly regulated and ethically used. So, I listened to David and then did my own research. Some questions immediately came up. “Where are you getting the genome fragments from?” (Surprisingly often, the answer is “shit”.) “And that information only gets shared with the individual and their doctor, right?” (Surprisingly often, the answer is “no”.)

I discovered that, while it has already had a significant positive impact – like helping us control Covid-19 outbreaks and improving care for people living with HIV/AIDS – pathogen genomics data is also being used in harmful ways.

So, should we simply stop? It’s not that easy. We need to be asking a different question: how do we prevent disease while simultaneously protecting people from privacy violations, unfair discrimination, and other moral wrongs?

Fighting disease outbreaks

My interest in pathogen genomics began during the Covid-19 pandemic, when I came across newspaper reports on apartment blocks full of “superspreaders”. These stories troubled me. The newspapers referenced wastewater testing, which used pathogen genomics to see if Covid-19 and other microbes were in building sewerage. These tests gave public health authorities reliable strain data, so they could take strong, fast action. But they also exposed these people, through their data, to public shame. And the apartments’ occupants didn’t consent to their waste, and therefore their DNA, being tested.

This kind of data collection might be justified on the grounds that no one person in any given apartment block is likely to be identifiable. But what if all the occupants are shunned, or their movements restricted? In Melbourne, Australia, nine social housing apartment blocks experienced extended quarantine during the pandemic, as a collective, as a result of pathogen genomic testing. And who is this most likely to happen to? Probably those living in the most overcrowded, unsanitary conditions where disease transmission is the hardest to control.

We saw too many cases of racism and group discrimination during the Covid-19 pandemic. For example, South Asian people were discriminated against during a wave of the disease originally called the “Indian” strain, because it was first detected in India. The World Health Organisation (WHO) and others then shifted from naming strains by country towards letter names (the “Indian” strain became “Delta”; the South African” strain was “Beta”.) But the problem itself points to risks in associating disease with particular communities, or groups of people. The availability of more – and more detailed – data on disease could lead to more speculation and ostracisation of groups that may already be underprivileged and marginalised.

At the same time, there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about pathogen genomics, now and in the future. More detailed data on disease is already helping with diagnostics and public health action, while the development of better vaccines against the next pandemic could save countless lives. In the UK in 2022, for example, a salmonella outbreak was curbed by tracing it back to specific contaminated chocolate products and issuing recall notices.

Playing out in real-time

Many of the harms and benefits will not affect us, but future generations. If you’re a parent, you might already be thinking about what this means for your children. It could help keep them healthy, but they also could face Big Brother-style surveillance, where the state has genetic data on people – block by block, city by city – collected in hospital rooms, in wastewater, in prisons, care homes and detention centres. If that powerful data is used for people’s benefit, that’s great. But what if it’s used against them? This depends on whether proper guidance and regulations are put in place.

We are already seeing this tension play out. For a start, tissue or fluid samples are often taken from hospital patients, to confirm their diagnoses or see which drug they should take. But, if they have a notifiable disease, doctors are required to report it to public health authorities – even without the patient’s consent – in order to track disease spread. If the patient’s sample was added alongside other data like their testing location, date or demographic data, the person may then be re-identifiable as a link in a disease transmission chain. The same thing can happen in disease chains in care homes or prisons.

This might not be a problem, if the data was only used for disease prevention. But it can be used for other means, including in criminal courts. In Australia, a 47-year-old man was accused in 2008 of intentionally infecting two people with HIV between 2001-2003. Pathogen genomics wasn’t powerful enough to provide conclusive evidence in the original legal case, but it was later used in a study with more powerful methods to confirm that the defendant had infected the first two people, lining up with the legal decision, which resulted in the man being charged with grievous bodily harm.

On the one hand, I am horrified that someone who knew he had HIV for years would intentionally expose his sexual partners to the disease. On the other, this man went to a clinic to receive a diagnosis, and his sample was used not just to protect his health, but to investigate a crime. And what about other court cases, in other jurisdictions? What about the deterrent effect? In countries where homosexuality is criminalised, men who have sex with men are already fearful of seeking healthcare and testing for HIV. Lower levels of testing can mean higher transmission rates and more deaths.

We need to ask the broader questions. Do people living with HIV have a right for their data to be used only to promote their own health? Many of my colleagues would object to this: it’s the job of clinicians and healthcare systems not only to protect their own patients’ health, but to protect public health more broadly.

The real risk of discrimination

Pathogen genomics follows an already established trend by not requiring individual consent for public health (and even, occasionally, forensic) uses of clinical data. But that has to be balanced against the risk of the data being misused, for example to discriminate or prosecute on the basis of sexual orientation or behaviour.

The stigma of disease can take many forms. Those living in poorer conditions, with inadequate housing or lack of sanitation, are more prone to disease and its spread. Migrant communities may be more vulnerable, particularly those living in refugee camps. In 2015, the BBC reported on chaos on the Greek islands as overcrowded camps left children at risk of disease spread, abuse and heatstroke. In 2020, 140 ill refugee children were moved from the Lesbos refugee camp, with Médecins Sans Frontières accusing the Greek government of “deliberately depriving” the children of adequate medical care. A few months later, refugees and asylum seekers were being blamed by Greek politicians and the media for Covid-19 spreading to the general population. These populations already face systemic discrimination. Then they’re labelled as disease carriers, too.

In the future, our healthcare will look very different. Clinicians will increasingly be supported by AI and care will be highly personalised. So will future ethical issues. Our decision to give away our own data may feel like a personal choice, but it could have significant effects on other people. (How many of your relatives have sent away their DNA for ancestry testing without considering how this might impact you?) Still, if you live in a democracy, then misuse of health data only happens elsewhere, right?

Wrong. Democracies in the western world are gathering and using pathogen genomics data, and there are legitimate concerns that well-intentioned public health authorities might be required to share that data with other agencies – for example, for immigration and customs enforcement, or even to inform political campaigns. There are many incentives for governments to use this data, including the desire to be technologically competitive with other countries and the economic savings to be made by predicting costly events such as potential epidemics.

Biopower

In bioethics, we call this form of state control “biopower”. In the future, it may not matter whether people are willing to disclose information about their interactions, behaviours, locations or health status. The authorities could find out about them regardless. The pathogen genomics data, certainly, is already there: in the water, on the bus handles, in the air of hospitals.

This may seem rather futuristic, but it’s important to look where the slippery slope may lead, and how we can put up barriers along the way to guard against moral failure.

But we also need to consider the significant positive outcomes, in diseases prevented and lives saved. These positives are also likely to increase. So do they outweigh the risks?

Let’s return to Australia’s use of this cutting-edge science. It’s true that people’s waste was tested without their consent during the pandemic, resulting in quarantine for some. But public health action based on pathogen genomics information was estimated to have saved almost 1,000 lives, by alerting policymakers early to a second wave of Covid-19. It was used to develop an award-winning wastewater testing initiative, which functioned as an early-warning system.

Also, because the state could better target lockdowns to areas where Covid-19 was circulating more, restrictions were eased earlier in areas where they weren’t needed. On the one hand, targeting lockdowns impinges on some people’s right to freedom of movement and association. On the other hand, it protected rights relating to health and to freedom of movement and association for others.

The same goes for other forms of moral harm. The asylum seekers who arrive at our shores are often not given access to basic healthcare, and pathogen genomics may only exacerbate injustice for them. But what about other groups who, though marginalised, might benefit from the use of this data? In the US, pathogen genomics data on hepatitis viruses has shown up clusters and chains of people who have infected each other – often through injecting drugs and sharing needles. This cluster data has been used to target populations in need of needle exchange programmes and other support.

Preparing for the future

The final piece of the puzzle is to re-examine future uses of pathogen genomics. The WHO is calling for a global network for pathogen genomic surveillance to be established. This network will better inform our response to two major threats: another pandemic, and the rise of antibiotic resistance.

We have seen how the field could help in the next pandemic. It could also help to combat superbugs that emerge in people, animals and the environment and cause deaths from drug-resistant diseases. Pathogen genomics can tell us about what genes a pathogen has that might make it able to flush out certain kinds of drugs. With this knowledge, we can opt for different drugs that can properly treat the disease, and stop the pathogen from surviving and passing its resistance genes down the line.

On balance, it seems that these efforts, and positive results, could outweigh potential future harmful uses of pathogen genomics data.
I knocked on David’s door.

“And? What’s the bioethicist’s conclusion?” David wasn’t exactly holding his breath; he was confident in the moral merit of his research.

“I think it’s really important work. There are so many ways the data can protect our future health. But it can also harm us – it’s chaos out there, and there aren’t enough rules to prevent misuse. We need to do better. Will you help me?”

This is where bioethicists like me need to work with both scientists and members of the public. Firstly, we need to establish how much people care about the different harms and benefits. What is most important to people, and why? Once we’ve answered these questions and followed them up with ethically informed regulation, we can put this exciting new subfield of genomics to good use.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.

Breaking free from faith

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 06:00:00 GMT

At 21, Joy Brooks had spent her whole life as a member of an evangelical charismatic church in Leicester. Her husband and three children were part of the community, too, and she worked for the Church as an events producer. But she was struggling to cope with her job, and was burning out. Her husband suggested stepping away from the community for a bit. At first, she was uncertain. “I was thinking, ‘I’m going to destroy my kids’ lives if I pull them out [of Church],’” she tells me. But his concern for her mental health gave her pause. “I now know he was thinking, ‘We’re never going back’. He opened the door enough for me to leave.”

Brooks now describes herself as agnostic, “with an allergy to certainty in religion”, while her husband believes “there probably is ‘something’, but he wouldn’t claim to know much more than that”. Having seen other marriages end after one party left the Church, she feels lucky that they moved together. But it still came at a personal cost. “About 90 per cent of our closest friendships ended,” she says. “The relational loss was the thing that hit first, before the loss of beliefs. At first I was too scared to let my beliefs unravel because I couldn’t face losing anything else.”

Twelve years on, Brooks has a Master’s in counselling and provides therapy for people questioning their faith. She’s also a host of Nomad, a podcast for Christians who are questioning their faith, and works part-time as an NHS counsellor. As a private therapist, she specialises in working with clients who are “deconstructing” their beliefs. This is a relatively new term used to describe the process whereby people untangle their own ideas from those imparted by their faith, examining where these might overlap, and where they don’t.

The term originated in the US, where it was originally connected with the “exvangelical” movement and used to describe people leaving conservative evangelical Christianity, often taking on more liberal positions but not necessarily leaving the faith altogether. That same year, non-denominational pastor and author Brian Zahnd defined “deconstruction” as “believers in the process of paring away the extraneous elements of culture, myth and toxic dogma from their faith”. In 2019, a piece published by Premier Christianity defined it as “what happens when a person asks questions that lead to the careful dismantling of their previous beliefs”.

This process can also be helpful for people leaving their faith, or breaking their connections with institutional religion. The proportion of Americans identifying as religiously unaffiliated – that is, atheist, agnostic or simply “nothing in particular” – has been growing for many years, although the latest stats suggest this trend may be levelling off. In the US, therapists offer “deconstruction” as a practice, and the term is starting to be used by some therapists in the UK, too, to describe the work of helping their patients navigate profound changes in their belief structure.

When Brooks became a therapist, she decided to specialise in deconstruction. For many clients, “the process is ongoing, maybe for decades or a lifetime,” she says. “But it’s not necessarily all really painful and difficult – there’s a lot of growth and stimulating exploration too.”

'Post-cult counselling'

Therapy to support people leaving religion is nothing new, and there are many kinds of therapy designed to support survivors of religious trauma, or to guide patients through the challenges of leaving a religious community.

The psychotherapist Gillie Jenkinson has developed a new methodology aimed at people who are leaving, or who have left high-control religious groups. She was part of such a group herself, which she describes as “a Bible-based cult”. After leaving, she gained a Master’s in Gestalt psychotherapy and in 2023 published the book Walking Free, which outlines her “post-cult counselling” methodology. She also offers therapy sessions online and trains UK and international therapists in how to use her process.

Jenkinson says her work helps people to understand the dynamics of the group they have left. “This is the process of how they developed a cultic or what I call an ‘introjected pseudo-identity’,” she explains. “You need to change to become a [cult] member ... If you’re born into the group, then you’re ‘introjecting’ constantly.” She describes this pseudo-identity as being like a “foreign” part that belongs to the group, “sitting over” the authentic identity. “For me it took me over. I fully changed when I was in the group.” The untangling process is painstaking. “As one of my therapists said, it’s like sifting sugar and salt.”

The idea of “deconstruction” helps to describe this process, which is not as simple as a total rejection. Some people choose to walk away from their religious group, but find themselves missing the positive aspects of being part of the faith or community. Abi Millar was brought up in an evangelical church in the north east of England but left at the age of 17, after several years of questioning. Later in life, she found that she missed aspects of her former faith, and began to look into secular forms of spirituality, which she writes about in The Spirituality Gap, published in 2025. Through psychedelics, somatic practices, meditation, nature and music, Millar has been able to discover new sources of profound meaning and deeper forms of connection with others and the world.

Millar tells me she didn’t have any therapy while leaving the faith. “I’m sure a therapist could have helped me, but it would have to have been someone specifically trained in these issues,” she says. “Back in the noughties (pre-Zoom) that would have been highly location-dependent and there wasn’t anything local to me.” Instead, she turned to informal support through online forums and books. “I fully believed myself to be ‘bad’, which I now understand is typical for people ‘leaving the fold’,” Millar tells me. “This was the water I swam in, and I didn’t recognise it for what it was: a cognitive distortion. Similarly, I didn’t frame my feeling of unsafety as a problem with me, so much as a problem inherent to the godless universe. It wasn’t till much later that I really grappled with it.”

Beliefs that linger

There are other ways to support the process of deconstruction, aside from therapy. Humanists UK, the charity that publishes this magazine, runs a programme called Faith to Faithless, which provides support and advice to those who have left or are leaving high-control religious groups, with support delivered by volunteers – some of whom have lived experience. The number of people using the programme’s peer support service jumped from 71 in 2023 to 260 in 2025. In February 2024, they launched a helpline, which has already responded to over 900 people.

One of the helpline volunteers, Iacopo, 39 – who did not wish to give his last name – grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness. He left in 2007. More than a decade later, during the first Covid-19 lockdown, he noticed that something did not feel right for him. At the time he was working for a corporation and says it began to feel controlling in a similar way to how the Jehovah’s Witness community had felt. “It was really very recently when I started deconstructing properly,” he says. “I started to notice that there were things about the way that I was behaving and the issues that I was facing that felt like patterns repeating.” He also found it difficult to shake the influence of particular ideas. He said that the impact of teachings about demons and possession lasted a particularly long time for him.

For the past couple of years Iacopo has worked with a therapist who follows Jenkinson’s “Walking Free” modality. He says specialist therapy was essential for him: “I went for somebody who would immediately get exactly what I’m talking about. That way, I can cut to the chase.”

While therapists with lived experience face particular challenges, they are also able to bring to bear unique insight and understanding. Aisha Khan is a therapist who draws on her own experience of leaving the Islamic faith. Growing up in the UK, she struggled to disclose to her family that she was not a Muslim. When she finally did, a friend – another ex-Muslim – suggested to her: “‘There aren’t many therapists who know what our struggles are. That’s something you should look into doing.’ I didn’t follow up at the time, because I wasn’t in a great place with that stuff myself,” she says. “But years later, I thought, ‘This is something I could support other people with’.”

Why specialists are needed

Khan is now an accredited therapist practising in Yorkshire. As she grew her specialism, she noticed two challenges that non-specialist therapists might face when working with people who are questioning or leaving their religion. The first is a failure to explore beliefs with clients. “People can present in session as religious, for example, wearing religious garments,” she says. “I’ve definitely been guilty in the past [of assuming they believed in that faith]. That’s one thing that I wish had been taught to me when I was in training. We don’t actually know a person’s religious beliefs if they don’t mention it.”

The second is assuming that faith is a “protective factor”, a term used in mental healthcare to describe something that helps someone cope, such as relationships, pets or a creative practice. But faith isn’t always “protective” and a lack of understanding increases the risks to clients, Khan says. For example, those struggling with their faith might be encouraged by their therapist to speak to people within their community, which can actually make things worse.

She experienced this herself after seeking counselling when she was grappling with how to tell her family. “There was a lot of having to explain why, for both the cultural and religious stuff,” she says. “One big area is that not all counsellors or therapists fully understand some of the risks that can be associated with leaving high-control religion. I felt like I had to fill in the gaps of why it wasn’t as simple as walking away, or sharing everything openly.” In new clients, Khan notices a lot of self-blame and perfectionism. “I often hear about guilt and shame, and that goes across all of the religions,” she says. “A lot of the time, people will be hiding parts of themselves from their loved ones.”

After a while, clients might begin to express a newfound vulnerability. “There may well be more existential themes coming up,” Brooks says. “People might say, ‘When I was anxious before, I used to be able to pray,’ or ‘I felt like God cared about me or would help me, and now I don’t know what to do’ – things around what helps a person feel safe in the world.” Khan says she also has clients with “sticky” beliefs. “Some people who’ve actually denounced faith completely and declared they aren’t religious anymore, still have this fear of hell,” she says. This is something she struggles with herself. “In my head I don’t think hell exists, but actually there’s a part of me that feels terrified that I’m going to burn in eternal torment. I can feel it in my body. That’s not an easy thing to tell someone.”

But while having personal experience of leaving a faith helps in many ways, it can also be a hindrance. Brooks says her greatest professional challenge is not to project her own experience onto her clients. Both personal therapy and professional supervision help reduce the risk of this. She’s been left with a lot of anger about the harm and injustice caused, but she sees her work on the Nomad podcast as a form of activism that fulfils her.

True freedom of belief

The wider provision of therapy aimed at supporting apostates, as well as other forms of advice and support, are also part of a broader cause to provide true freedom of religion or belief in the UK, which includes protecting the right of people to leave a faith. Religious affiliation in the UK is declining. Those saying they had “no religion” rose by 12 percentage points at the last census in 2021 and while this is largely due to religion “ageing out” (younger generations being less religious than older ones), a proportion of this shift will also be down to people changing their beliefs.

In 2023, the Bloom review into freedom of religion or belief recommended that the UK government fund services like Faith to Faithless as part of a wider package of reforms to protect those leaving faith groups, and those at risk of religious harm. The government hasn’t yet taken up the recommendation.

Whether people are receiving therapy or other forms of support, deconstruction is going to be a long and complex process. Millar says it took many years before she could untangle her old faith from her current desire to live a spiritual life. Today, she sees her departure from the Church as more of an arrival. “Over time, losing your religion may start to feel less like a loss,” she says, “and more like an opportunity to rebuild yourself from the ground up.”

In future, the idea of “deconstruction” may gain more recognition amongst mental health providers, particularly in countries where religion is in decline. And specialised therapists like Jenkinson, Brooks and Khan will be ahead of the curve.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.

You think you know me?

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 06:00:00 GMT

Olga Koch is a Russian-British comedian. Her award-winning debut show “Fight” told the wild story of how her father briefly served as deputy prime minister of Russia in the 1990s, under President Boris Yeltsin, but later fled the country. She has appeared on television shows including “Mock The Week”, “QI” and “Live at the Apollo” and is working on a PhD in human-computer interaction.

Your new one-woman comedy show “Fat Tom Cruise” is touring in Britain and Australia. It’s described as “immersive” and “genre-defying”. What does that mean?

I want to keep it as vague as I can to preserve the element of surprise. It’s a history lesson, it’s a gossip session and it’s a horror story. I’m really honing my storytelling abilities but also using a tremendous amount of tech in a way that I never have before.

There’s quite a bit of time travel. We’re going from the 70s all the way to the present day and the jumps occur constantly, so it’s a matter of creating a visual language for the audience to understand what timeline we’re in without constantly having to remind them. It’s like watching movies that do a really good job of signposting where you are at the very beginning and then later on you don’t have to be reminded what year it is. So, how do you achieve that on stage with one person who’s wearing the same outfit throughout? It’s a really interesting challenge.

Your first show explained how your dad came to play a key role in Russia’s privatisation efforts in the 1990s. Having moved to the UK when you were 14, is there anything you think the west gets wrong about Russia?

I’m very careful about not co-opting the experience of living in Russia or being Russian today because I truly don’t know what it’s like. Me and my fiancé went to Paris last weekend, and we went to Napoleon’s tomb. On the tomb is every battle he won, and one of them is Moscow. I have never in my life been so angry, because I was like “He didn’t win Moscow, we gave him Moscow! That was a strategic military decision to leave Moscow, light it on fire and then let him have it.” My fiancé was like “I’ve never seen you this angry, and I’ve never heard you refer to Russia as ‘we’ before”. I think it’s because I have as much claim on the Napoleonic wars as any Russian living today, whereas I don’t feel comfortable saying “we” when it comes to Russia now.

That being said, in some aspects the Russia that I lived in and remember was significantly more progressive than people give it credit for. I have a joke that Russia was one of the first countries to grant women the right to vote – in a single-party state. But my grandmothers were engineers and the idea that I would study computer science [Koch has a degree in the subject from New York University] was not as crazy in Russia as it felt in the US at the time I was studying. Obviously, Russia, especially in the last 10 to 15 years, has become more traditional and religious than before, but in the country that I was raised in, some things were more progressive than people realise.

In “Fight”, you mention an interesting anecdote about visiting the “Museum of Democracy” – officially the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center – in Yekaterinburg and seeing that your father had been written out of history. What did you take from that moment?

It was a matter of growing up. The thing that really struck me is how well produced the museum is. It’s a really high-budget operation. They have a recreation of the president’s study there, you walk in and they play Yeltsin’s resignation speech, and it feels very emotionally powerful. And then you leave and realise you’ve just been successfully manipulated into feeling all these things in a sort of Disney-level production.

I was in my early 20s at the time and it generally made me more cynical when it comes to museums and countries writing their own histories as a whole. You know how the domino falls for everyone at some point? That was my sort of red pill Matrix moment – although not in the context of how “red pill” is used today, of course!

In your previous show, “Olga Koch Comes From Money”, you explored what it means to come from privilege. What made you write about that?

I think socio-economically we have reached a boiling point where it’s something that we can no longer ignore. It’s something that needs to be discussed, and it felt very cruel and unfair that the only people who are forced to have that conversation are people who come from working-class backgrounds. As a person who comes from tremendous privilege, the silence of that became deafening.

But also, after 10 years of doing stand-up, I felt – maybe wrongfully so or rightfully so – that I finally had the writing and performance ability to tackle a subject like that. It was one of the most agonising processes because I wanted to do it in an aggressively objective way, but there was a constant understanding of my own inability and failure to do so, because I’m so entrenched in it. There’s a silly gag in the show, “There’s only so much self-awareness and perspective I can have. It’s like taking a selfie – my hand can only extend so far before I have to hand my camera to my butler.”

You have experience of how different countries and cultures view money, and in the show you talked about the various moral mythologies around it.

Yes, so in Russia, money is luck, in America, money is hard work – with the caveat that people can work hard doing bad things – and then in the UK, money is something you get from your dad. Every country or culture thinks that theirs is the objective and correct attitude, when in reality there is no such thing.

The other big theme in your comedy is tech, and you’re doing a PhD now in human-computer interaction. What does that mean?

Oh boy, if I knew. It started in the 80s but now that computers are everywhere, everything is human-computer interaction. You unlock a door and it’s a computer now, because we don’t use keys anymore. You use a microwave and that’s human-computer interaction because it has a microchip in it. So it used to be how you interacted with a computer at work and what the interface would look like, and now it’s literally everything because we’re putting microchips everywhere.

One of my biggest pet peeves in life is putting a microchip in something that doesn’t need it. A door doesn’t need it, a scale doesn’t need it – there’s even electronic toothpaste dispensers. You can’t squeeze out your own toothpaste? Come on, buddy. The amount of tech waste we are creating with all these micro things, it makes me so angry.

What’s the focus of your PhD?

Parasocial relationships [one-sided relationships that people develop with someone they don’t know, such as a celebrity or social media influencer]. I used to think that parasocial relationships were an anomaly or almost pathological. But then when I met people who have all these intense parasocial relationships – for example, people who have one-sided conversations with celebrities constantly on social media – I realised it was the most normal thing in the world. If you are exposed to personal information about a person, which we are every day on Instagram stories, it is totally normal for your brain to short circuit and think you know this person. I got interested in it because I started experiencing it myself in some small way. People have seen the inside of my house, people have seen me without make-up, in settings that 30 years ago only a close friend or family member would have seen me in. Of course your brain thinks you know me.

It’s a weird phenomenon, but is it a problem?

The problem isn’t people developing any of those feelings or attachments; the problem is the technology that is actively encouraging it in order to increase screen time and addictiveness. People experiencing the effects of the technology aren’t to blame, it’s the architects of the technology. I don’t know if they know the true repercussions [of what they’re doing].

After your PhD, I hear you have plans to go into tech communications?

That’s always been the dream. I think that comedy is the best way to learn things. As children and young adults, we’re okay being patronised when it comes to learning things, but the older we get, the more sensitive we get to feeling like somebody’s patronising us or teaching us something. Comedy is a great way to sneakily teach people.

I read this paper that I keep coming back to. It said that people who watch satirical news shows are actually as, if not more, informed than people who watch the news. But satirical news shows do something that the regular news doesn’t do, which is give context. If John Oliver or Jon Stewart explain something happening in Congress, on The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight, they’re never just giving you that piece of news in isolation. They’ll go through the rigmarole of explaining “This is how the Congress works”. But because they’re doing it in a comedy setting, you don’t realise you’re being taught. I mean, Horrible Histories – what’s that? If you’re laughing, you don’t realise that you’re learning.

“Fat Tom Cruise” is touring until 4 December.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.

We're hiring a freelance marketing designer

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:00:35 GMT

About the opportunity

New Humanist is looking for a freelance designer to produce a suite of marketing materials for the magazine.

We're keen to hear from people who can bring some flair to traditional advertisements (both print and digital), inserts, banners and social media cards.

These will mostly be promoting our subscription packages, building on existing images such as magazine covers.

Requirements

We're looking for a professional with experience of designing ads for magazines or journalistic publications, combining design and marketing expertise.

Ideally, you'll have design experience across print, digital and social media.

Rate

£250 a day, for an estimated 3-4 days' work.

How to apply

Please apply with your CV and examples of relevant work, to editor@newhumanist.org.uk with the subject line DESIGNER in all caps.

Please apply as soon as possible or by 26th March at the latest.

We're hiring! Apply to be our Art Director

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 13:08:28 GMT

Job title: Art Director, New Humanist

Hours: Up to 6 days for an initial redesign project, followed by 5 days each quarter on an ongoing basis

Location: Largely remote, with 2 days each quarter in our central London office

Rate: £250 per day

Contract: Freelance

Start date: ASAP but no later than 20th April

We're looking for an Art Director for the beautiful print edition of our magazine. The role involves creativity and a keen eye for magazine design, a good understanding of story presentation, knowledge of legal issues surrounding the use of images in an editorial context, and experience of collaborating with editors in a magazine or journalism environment.

The role will kick off with a partial redesign project, which is expected to take 4-6 days of design work. This will involve creating new InDesign templates and producing designs for new article formats, with lots of opportunity for creative input.

After this, you'll work five days per quarter (3 remote, 2 in the office) on each edition of the magazine, on an ongoing basis. The Art Director takes the lead on layout design, picture research and image permissions, commissioning the cover illustration, managing image library accounts and overseeing the picture budget. There is also a small amount of work each quarter creating social media and other digital assets.

About New Humanist

New Humanist is a quarterly non-profit magazine covering politics, human rights, science, technology, philosophy and culture, and has been published since 1885.

This is an exciting time to join an award-winning magazine, with an exceptional reputation for its design. Since January 2025, we have been published by the charity Humanists UK, and our readership is growing. Join our small, passionate team at New Humanist, producing ethical journalism to the highest standards.

To apply, please send your CV and portfolio to editor@newhumanist.org.uk, with the subject line Art Director. Applications must be received by midnight on 30th March 2026.

We look forward to receiving your application!

Book review: Frontline Poets

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 18:47:35 GMT

Frontline Poets (River Books) by Joe Freeman and Aung Naing Soe

Talk of male anatomy was the last thing I expected as I walked into a book launch at Bangkok’s foreign correspondents’ club. Yet there it was, beaming across the projector screen: a poem about a political penis tattoo. “On my manhood rests a tattooed / portrait of Mr. President / My beloved found that out after / we wed / She was utterly gutted / Inconsolable.”

This is the most reserved translation of a terse, subversive piece written by Maung Saungkha, a poet in Myanmar. When he posted his work to Facebook in October 2015, he “dropped the poetic equivalent of a bombshell,” according to a new book by journalists Joe Freeman and Aung Naing Soe – a bombshell that led to six months behind bars for online defamation of the president. It was while covering this bizarre court case that Freeman and Aung Naing Soe first met Maung Saungkha. A decade on, he is one of five poets they have profiled in a deeply moving, often humorous book that repeatedly defies expectations.

While it includes several works translated from Burmese to English for the first time, this is not a poetry anthology. Rather, it is a history of Myanmar told through the lives of poets who have not only chronicled but actively participated in decades of political upheaval, resistance and conflict since the end of colonial rule. Yet its main goal is not to explain Myanmar’s many deep divisions, or why the 2021 military coup and subsequent civil war unfolded. Instead, at its core, the book is an exploration of why poetry is still such a powerful force in Myanmar, where the literary form continues to be a vehicle for resistance and identity. Writers evade military censorship with obscure metaphors, short works become rebel anthems, and poignant poems allow people to reflect on all that they have lost.

“I abandoned everything after I had abandoned everything” is one especially gut-wrenching line, in a long, tumbling poem by Yoe Aunt Min that depicts the mind of a rebel fighter. After the coup in February 2021 and the junta’s violent crackdown on peaceful protesters, Yoe Aunt Min followed Maung Saungkha into war. Maung Saungkha had become the leader of an armed opposition group called the Bamar People’s Liberation Army, and Yoe Aunt Min was one of his first recruits. Their journey from poets and activists to armed fighters living in the jungle hits on another theme in the book. Yoe Aunt Min’s vivid, meandering poem points at this shift in her own life, before concluding: “What kind of wisdom is necessary for those who hold / lethal weapons? / I don’t know how to solve this. / Please answer.”

The book asks what it means to be a frontline poet – whether that frontline is Maung Saungkha and Yoe Aunt Min’s battlefield, the street protests that cost another poet, K Za Win, his life, or the displacement camps where two others, Lynn Khar and A Mon, fled to safety. Yet despite the palpable sense of loss, the narrative balances heartbreak and horror with humour, humanity and – much like the penis poem – the unexpected.

The book evokes a vivid picture of life in Myanmar, and of the poets who remain determined to better their country against extraordinary odds.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.

Red lipstick resistance

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 06:00:00 GMT

Darya Afanasyeva remembers sitting at a sewing machine, in the factory of a penal colony in south-eastern Belarus. In front of her was a round cushion, which she had studded with three pins: two white and one red. The three dots of colour were tiny, but looking at them filled her with joy. “To me, it was a form of inner protest,” she says.

During the summer of 2020, Belarus was flooded with red-and-white flags, symbolising people’s opposition to President Alexander Lukashenko. Hundreds of thousands of peaceful protestors took to the streets following a disputed election that brought the authoritarian strongman and close ally of Russia’s President Putin to office for the sixth time, making him the longest serving leader in Europe. Afanasyeva was jailed for two years for taking part.

Today, she lives in exile, and wants to tell her story, and the story of the many women imprisoned in Belarus for resisting the regime. Hundreds of dissidents were jailed after the mass protests – including politicians, journalists, activists and students. And while US-led negotiations secured the release of more than 100 political prisoners in December, people continue to be arrested for as little as liking social media posts critical of the president or supporting the opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. Of these, many are sent to penal colonies – a legacy of the Soviet-era gulags. But despite the government’s attempts to crush their spirits, the women who have emerged from these colonies tell stories of defiance and solidarity.

Afanasyeva told me about her life in the Gomel colony, one of two that hold women prisoners. She said they were put to work doing strenuous manual labour and only allowed to take a short shower once a week. One of the guards “enjoyed punishing” them by not even permitting this chance to clean themselves. “She was a young woman, about 25 years old,” Afanasyeva said. “I wanted to say to her, ‘Damn it, imagine doing this yourself: spend the whole day working at the sewing factory; then lift heavy sacks filled with metal off a truck; then sweep the [colony] streets; and then finally go to the cafeteria, where your clothes will soak up the smells – knowing you can’t change them. And after all that, you can’t take a shower!’”

But Afanasyeva also told me how she and other women were determined to resist, and to support each other wherever they could. They came up with handy inventions – for example, they would cut up a plastic bottle and use the bottom section to wash their body parts, one by one.

The women campaigning for president

Along with many of her fellow political prisoners, Afanasyeva wants Belarus to be rid of Lukashenko, so that the country can move on. He is the country’s first and only president, having held the office since 1994, following independence from the Soviet Union. In the 2020 election, he claimed to have secured over 80 per cent of the vote, but a lack of scrutiny, with no observers present, led to widespread allegations of vote-rigging.

Opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya claimed that she had actually won the election. Tsikhanouskaya had launched a presidential campaign alongside two other women – Maria Kolesnikova and Veronika Tsepkalo – after their husbands and partners were imprisoned or exiled due to their own intention to run. In a country where politics has tended to be male-dominated, thousands of women came out onto the streets, calling for change and opposing the authoritarian and patriarchal culture.

When the crackdown began, Tsikhanouskaya and Tsepkalo fled the country. Kolesnikova was jailed – and only released as part of the December 2025 deal, after more than five years in prison – while Tsikhanouskaya was sentenced to 15 years in prison in absentia. Many other women who participated in the protests and women’s marches are also now in exile. Even after the December release, 175 female political prisoners remain in jail, according to the Belarus Women’s Foundation.

Journalist Ksenia Lutskina was released in 2024, after more than three and a half years of imprisonment on charges of “destabilisation of the political, social, economic and informational situation” in Belarus. When I talked to her, she also recalled how united political detainees were. “We lived as a community. The conditions were very hard, but solidarity made up for that,” she said. “If food was sent to one of us [by family and friends], we shared it. And when a new political prisoner was brought in, we knew what we needed to do, right away: give her clothes, hygiene items and food; make her tea or coffee; and if she smokes, give her cigarettes.”

Acts of solidarity

Viktoria Zhukouskaya – a Belarusian researcher with a PhD in management and sociology, who lives in exile – has interviewed many former political prisoners. She confirms the stories of solidarity. Several women have told Zhukouskaya that prison authorities would throw homeless people into the cell with them, “using the bodies of other women” to increase their discomfort. They would have to endure “the smell, the lice, and so on, in a cell designated for four people – but where eight to 12 were held.” But the political prisoners said they rejected this tactic of division. From the moment a homeless woman entered their prison cell, they would start cleaning her up: “One of them took off her clothes, another washed her, while a third extracted the lice.”

However, there was a price to pay for these acts of solidarity. In the penal colonies, they could be harshly punished.

“The [prison] system is aimed at dividing people, and not only political prisoners,” said Alana Gebremariam, who spent two years behind bars for student activism. Sharing anything – even toilet paper – could lead to punishment, such as being held in an isolation cell with no access to letters from the outside world. “You’re kept in this small, damp, dark cell, where all you can do is keep walking around to avoid freezing [to death] if it’s winter and there is no heating,” said Gebremariam.

The women were also subjected to high levels of surveillance. Gebremariam told me that, in the Gomel penal colony, authorities set up a “network of informers” among inmates. As a result, she said, people were “very suspicious of one another” and “scared of telling each other things”. Afanasyeva added that political prisoners were under particularly high levels of scrutiny, and were more likely to be labelled as “maliciously breaking the rules” – an official term that could often lead to punishment. They were made to wear yellow tags on their uniforms, which set them apart from non-political prisoners, who had white tags. Afanasyeva was once denied a visit from a loved one because she had shared “a small piece of ice cream” with another inmate.

Yet these women still found ways to connect with each other. After work at the factory, many formed “interest clubs”, Afanasyeva said. “We would tell [other women inmates] about modern art, or about our hobbies, such as hiking in the mountains, and so on. As for me, I spoke about feminism and femicides.” For example, she explained to other prisoners what domestic violence is – and that being beaten by one’s husband or partner “is not the norm”. Some of the women had been jailed for murdering their husbands or partners, she pointed out, when many of them were acting in self-defence.

'Defiance drove the authorities mad'

Gebremariam added that political prisoners tend to have a higher level of formal education and can pass on their knowledge and skills. She said that they were able to help other inmates understand the political and social situation in Belarus, as well as supporting them practically with actions such as appealing their convictions. She said it was important to educate these women about the outside world. They might have spent 10 to 20 years behind bars. For some, “the last thing they saw was a push-button phone,” so they needed to catch up with developments in Belarus and internationally, including being told about the 2020 protests and the women’s marches.

Gebremariam said you could always spot a fellow political prisoner, because they refused to be victims. “They were recognisable by their smile, their straight posture and their appearance, including hair and makeup; and by the way they carried themselves as they walked through the [colony] streets, with their heads up high,” she said. Zhukouskaya, the researcher, noted the importance of maintaining this attitude. “In a situation of absolute control, domination and violence, where people are reduced to the status of animals, the very fact of preserving one’s dignity is an act of resistance,” she said.

Red lipstick became a symbol for supporters of Maria Kolesnikova, mimicking the opposition figure’s signature style. “This [kind of defiance] drove the authorities mad, because they wanted to see prisoners broken and humiliated. Instead, they saw beautiful women in front of them,” said Zhukouskaya. The prisoners were later forbidden from wearing red lipstick.

The political prisoners would also try to lift the morale of their fellow inmates by organising their morning routine with an emphasis on helping each other out – such as making coffee for everyone instead of just themselves – and finding opportunities for creativity and generosity. “We drew together, we made things with our hands; we gave gifts to each other for birthdays, and New Year’s Eve,” Gebremariam said. They hand-made gifts from materials that were permitted, such as paper for origami. “We gave one of the girls a heart made from old red fabric, which we filled with feathers from a pillow.”

Secret acts of protest

There was also something else that prison guards couldn’t prevent women from sharing with one another: laughter. Ksenia Lutskina recalled how they would find humour even in the barbaric prison conditions. One of the cells was comically small – maybe nine square metres for the beds, toilet and the table where they sat to eat their food. “And so, we used to joke that while sitting on the toilet, we could put our feet on the table!”

Gebremariam told me that some of the guards couldn’t help but feel moved by the dignity and integrity of the political prisoners. She remembers one who worked in the detention centre where they were sent before trial. He was “a very simple man, who spent 15 years working in the [prison] system”. At first, he looked at political prisoners “suspiciously”, she recalls, but “little by little”, he became “intrigued” by them. “He would come near our cell and ask us what we were doing and how we were feeling.”

During their trial in court, she and other defendants had to stand next to a wall with their hands tied behind their backs “for an hour and a half, or two hours”. But the guard must have decided that this was not right, because he let them have breaks – taking them to the restroom or to have a smoke.

“When the trial was over, he said he was very tired of working in the system,” Gebremariam said. “He said its cruelty and absence of humanity was killing him, and that he wanted to live a simple life and didn’t care what became of him – whether he worked as a taxi driver, or went back home to help his father in the countryside.” I asked her what became of the man. “As far as I know, he did quit.”

But that was more of an exception, rather than the rule, she emphasised. Some guards, on the contrary, “wanted to hurt people, mentally and physically, in very perverse and sadistic ways”. Afanasyeva agreed – many of them were “overly proactive” in punishing prisoners. That’s why she often chose secret, small acts of protest, like studding the sewing cushion with red and white pins. Of the guards she said, “there is no sense in trying to prove something to them.”

The female-led government-in-exile

But with fellow prisoners it was different. She told me about making bouquets of three autumn leaves, to resemble the red-and-white opposition flag. Another form of hidden protest was doing work poorly at the sewing factory, which for her wasn’t hard to achieve. “It happened naturally because I’m not very skilled at sewing!” she laughed.

She was skilled at decorating, though. She told me how, in the colony, they only had black clothes, but they were permitted to mark these items with their names, in bleach, so that they wouldn’t get stolen. Along with some other political detainees, Afanasyeva added glittery paint to the bleach and marked one of her T-shirts with a “GRL PWR” inscription. She hid the T-shirt under other clothes, but secretly wearing it made her feel powerful.

As we talked, she lifted up the black T-shirt and showed me the words “GRL PWR” written on the back. She was able to smuggle it out of the penal colony. Now it reminds her of the years spent in imprisonment, but also of the bonds she formed with the other women, some of whom she still sees now that they’ve been released. “Many of them have become my close friends,” she tells me. “Going to the cinema, sharing a pizza, or even having a chat with someone who has been through a similar experience is easier. That’s why we stick together.”

Today, Lukashenko has regained total political control of Belarus, having dismantled the opposition and clamped down on civil society. And although he has released dozens of political prisoners under US pressure, many women dissidents remain in captivity. Inside Belarus, no one talks in public about the political prisoners. But their cause is considered a top priority by Belarusian civil society, which continues to organise abroad.

The 2020 protests showed what civil society might be able to acheive, as well as women’s ability to take the lead. Within hours of her release in December, Maria Kolesnikova was filmed wearing her signature red lipstick and calling for the release of those who remain in prison. Tsikhanouskaya has formed a government-in-exile, which is preparing democratic reforms that, according to Zhukouskaya, will be implemented as soon as “a window of opportunity” opens for political changes.

When that happens, she hopes that civil society in Belarus will come together to build a new future. Perhaps it will be led by women – once they return from exile and are released from jail. Lukashenko has put much effort into cracking down on them. But listening to the women I spoke to gave me the feeling that the state hasn’t yet managed to crush this source of resilience and opposition.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.