I gave an interview this week that I have been sitting with for a few days before sharing.

Not because I am uncertain about it. Because it covers ground I do not usually cover in a single conversation, and I wanted to be sure I was ready for it to be out in the world.

The interview is with Scott Kesterton at BardsFM. It is the most complete account I have given publicly of the last several years. What happened. What it cost. What came out of it.

If fills in gaps that the research papers and the school reports do not cover.

Here is the short version of what we talked about.

In January 2024, a family court judge described me as a highly dangerous mother.

That same week, Gabriel and I were on our one-hour weekly FaceTime call, reading stories.

I want to sit with that contradiction for a moment, because I think it says something important.

The judge had not read the same things I had been reading, the government reports, the parliamentary inquiries, or the documentation of institutional harm that was by then a matter of public record. Instead he was working from a set of conclusions that had been built, brick by brick, from a process I now understand far better than I did when I first stepped into it.

What I know now is this.

When I contacted a children's charity in 2018 looking for advice, I did not know I was stepping into a system that would take years to step back out of.

I did not know that asking for help from the right institutions could become the thing that was used against me. I did not know that being literate, that being able to read a government papers and understand what it said, would be treated as a form of danger.

I know all of that now.

I also know what came out of that one hour a week.

Gabriel and I read Treasure Island together through a screen. An illustrated edition, slowly, looking at the pictures. When we finished it, I asked him: shall we make up a story where you are the hero?

He said yes.

About eight weeks later he looked at my desktop and said: Mum, it's a book.

That book became an Amazon bestseller in the UK, Canada, and the United States. The methodology that grew out of our process, the verbal handshake, the tell me more, the scribe and the storyteller, has now been used in nine schools with 465 children. It has been presented to the British Psychological Society. It has been considered by UNICEF for international distribution. It has been on the front cover of a magazine in India and covered in the Pakistani and Canadian education press. And my testimony been accepted by the UK Parliament and Social Work England as evidence for their own investigations in to harm. 

A 10-year-old boy and a one-hour FaceTime call did that.

I carry the risks and consequences of speaking publicly about how we got here.

I do so knowingly.

I do so because the asymmetry between those who caused harm and those who bear it needs to be named, clearly and on the record, by someone in a position to name it.

I also do it because Gabriel said something to me recently that I keep coming back to.

No brainer. Keep going, Mum.

So I do.

The full interview is here: https://www.bards.fm/e/ep4050_bardsfm-a-conversation-with-uk-mom-and-author-kate-markland/