Louise Tickle
Journalist & Broadcaster
Podcasts
Who could have saved Sara Sharif?
The brutal circumstances of Sara Sharif’s murder were described by the judge who sent her killers to prison as torture. But when it emerged that three sets of family court proceedings had resulted in the girl ultimately being delivered into the hands of her killers, the finger of blame began to wander.
The Observer Slow Newscast
6 May 2025
Goodbye Mum:
The ruthless fight for child custody
One of the most difficult questions facing a judge in the family court is which parent should have custody of a child. To help them answer that, judges rely on independent experts to provide an impartial voice in the court. But what happens when the objectivity of those experts is questioned?
Tortoise Media Slow Newscast
S1, Episode 293 | 30 January 2025
Taking the stand:
Part One: Grace’s story
In the UK, more than one in four adult women are thought to have been sexually assaulted or raped in their lifetime. But what is going wrong and where?
Part one, Grace's story.
Tortoise Media Slow Newscast
S1, Episode 262 | 24 June 2024
Taking the stand:
Part Two: Emma’s story
In the UK, more than one in four adult women are thought to have been sexually assaulted or raped in their lifetime. But what is going wrong and where?
Part two: Emma's story
Tortoise Media Slow Newscast
S1, Episode 263 | 25 June 2024
Landmark:
The death of Kellie Sutton
During her Hidden Homicides investigation, Louise was told about another type of unrecognised domestic abuse death – women who take their own lives in the context of devastating abuse. Solicitor Sophie Naftalin told me about the case of Kellie Sutton, whose abuser had been jailed for coercive control and assault after she died. But he was never held responsible for her death. After attending pre-inquest review hearings, speaking with Kellie's family and attending her second inquest after the first was quashed, she waited to find out out if the jury would accept that a woman who took her own life was in fact unlawfully killed…
Tortoise Media Slow Newscast
S1, Episode 214 | 31 July 2023
How the country’s most distressed and vulnerable children are being abandoned by the state.
There are just 128 secure, Ofsted-regulated care homes in England for children suffering from severe emotional and behavioural difficulties. Social workers must scrabble daily for beds for the highly distressed, often suicidal children in their care. Usually, they can’t find one.
Tortoise Media Slow Newscast
S1, Episode 204 | 23 May 2023
A Hidden Hell: the prison for children
From the age of 10, children in England, Wales and Northern Ireland can be found guilty of a crime and, from their 15th birthday, they can be sent to prison. But children’s prisons have been crashing in and out of crisis for years. At one in particular, Cookham Wood in Kent, inspectors have reported that the regime is broken. And it’s breaking children, nearly half of whom are on remand, not convicted of any crime. Louise Tickle and Patricia Clarke investigate why the youth justice system is in crisis – and why it's not getting any better.
Tortoise Media Slow Newscast
S1, Episode 243 | 19 February 2024
What do you do when your children are taken away by your ex-partner?
Who do you call for help? And how do you get them back?
Last September Ana’s ex-husband took her two sons on holiday for a week, and didn’t come home. He told her they were going to Spain – he even showed her the tickets and proof of the hotel. But they never went to Spain. Instead, he took the boys to California, switched off his phone, stopped using his bank cards, and went to ground. In doing so he triggered an international manhunt.
Tortoise Media Slow Newscast
S1, Episode 186 | 31 January 2023
A Finding of Rape
How a former government minister abused the secrecy of the family courts in an attempt to hide the truth
It took a year and three days of battling through the courts to win the right to report that former MP and government minister, Andrew Griffiths, who had been found by a family judge to have abused and raped his wife, Kate Griffiths. Kate, now an MP herself, gave Louise her only interview on the collapse of her marriage and her ongoing fight to protect her child.
Louise worked with Tortoise editor Basia Cummings and producer Gemma Newby over many months on this case, which fits into a bigger debate about coercive control, abuse, sexual assault and power.
Tortoise Media Slow Newscast
S1, Episode 125 | 13 January 2022
Fallen Women
And nobody is counting
Twenty-seven women. Falling. Falling off balconies; falling out of windows; falling off the edges of multi-storey car parks. And there, in most of the cases, is a man, standing in the shadow of her fall. Together with Tortoise producer Gemma Newby, Louise investigated the case of Bianca Thomas who fell from the 11th floor a Birmingham tower block, witnessed by a man on the ground who gave evidence of an escalating row in the moments before she fell.
Tortoise Media Slow Newscast
Series 1, Episode 137 | 2 June 2022
