Maria and Sarah: Safe at Last

Available for over a year

Fi Glover hears 11 year old Maria and her mother Sarah (not their real names) remembering their years of surviving domestic abuse. Now part of Voices of Experience in Stoke on Trent, which helps victims of domestic violence, they have been helped by Children in Need funding to do some of the ordinary things every child has a right to experience and to create some happy memories of childhood. The Listening Project is a Radio 4 initiative that offers a snapshot of contemporary Britain in which people across the UK volunteer to have a conversation with someone close to them about a subject they've never discussed intimately before. The conversations are being gathered across the UK by teams of producers from local and national radio stations who facilitate each encounter. Every conversation - they're not BBC interviews, and that's an important difference - lasts up to an hour, and is then edited to extract the key moment of connection between the participants. Many of the long conversations are being archived by the British Library and used to build up a collection of voices capturing a unique portrait of the UK in the second decade of the millennium. You can upload your own conversations or just learn more about The Listening Project by visiting bbc.co.uk/listeningproject Producer: Marya Burgess.