Using powerful storytelling to drive real change: LOLLIPOP in Parliament

This week (Tuesday 13 January) The Birth Companions Institute brought award-winning film LOLLIPOP into Parliament for a powerful screening and panel discussion focused on maternal imprisonment, children’s social care, housing and family justice. 

Hosted at Portcullis House with Labour MP Jess Asato, LOLLIPOP filmmaker Daisy-May Hudson, and Project Accountability, the event brought together parliamentarians, policymakers, practitioners, campaigners and people with lived experience. Together we watched powerful clips from the film in order to explore the ways in which our current systems are causing profound harm to mothers and families, and what must change. 

The conversations were honest, insightful and grounded in the realities of women who are repeatedly let down by systems that trap families in intergenerational cycles of trauma instead of supporting them.

As Kirsty Kitchen, Director of The Birth Companions Institute, reflected:

“One of the things that LOLLIPOP does so well is show us the sheer brutality of systems that design out humanity. We need systems that can respond to the complexities of human life, and we've got to stop looking at fixing one system, in one way, at one point in time. We've got to look at the ways in which housing, criminal justice, children's social care, and the health system all overlap in the lives of women, their children, and society as a whole.”

Kirsty, Jess and Daisy-May were joined on the panel by cast members Posy Sterling, Idil Ahmed, Sherma Polidore and Mandy Ogunmokun; lived experience script consultant Emilia-Rose Porter; Kate Saunders from the National Youth Advocacy Service (NYAS); and Molly Ellis of Project Accountability.

With the screening of six scenes from LOLLIPOP, the panel discussion traced the lead character Molly’s journey following her release from prison as she tries to secure housing and regain the care of her children.  

During the event LOLLIPOP’s lived experience consultant Emilia-Rose Porter generously shared her own moving experience:

“There’s a lot of blame and a lot of shame - and in my experience, shame triggers a trauma response. When you’re shamed, you fight - or you freeze. You feel unsafe. And that makes it impossible to move forward, to pause and reflect on what’s happened in your life, or to think clearly about what you need to do next to keep both your children and yourself safe. What I would like to see instead is systems and organisations working together, without shame, blame, or judgement, and instead with compassion, empathy, care and love; keeping children with their mothers wherever possible.”

Kirsty Kitchen closed the event by highlighting a range of policy priorities being pursued by The Birth Companions Institute:

• Reforming housing policy and practice, to ensure women are not released from prison or displaced by safeguarding decisions without safe, suitable accommodation that supports family life and reunification.
• Ending the imprisonment of pregnant women and mothers of dependent children, and securing investment in community-based responses that support families to stay safely together.
• Prioritising services that address the root causes of offending: poverty, trauma, abuse, homelessness, unmet mental health need, and the loss of children to care.
• Creating more compassionate, coordinated care across systems, including the co-design of a National integrated Care Framework to improve consistency and accountability across health, social care, housing, and criminal and family justice.
• Prioritising timely mental health support for mothers at risk of separation, or separated from their children, whether temporarily or permanently.
• Improving support for young women and girls in or leaving local authority care, to help break intergenerational cycles of harm.

By bringing parliamentarians and policymakers into direct conversation with filmmakers, practitioners and women with lived experience, this event demonstrated how storytelling can deepen understanding, shift perspectives and help create the conditions for meaningful change.

LOLLIPOP airs on BBC2 at 11pm on Friday 16 January and will be available to stream on BBC iPlayer soon afterwards.