DISPATCHES on Parenting Across Cultures

About DISPATCHES on Parenting Across Cultures

Maternal Dispatches with Hollie McKay is where frontline war reporting meets the stories that matter most: maternal health, human rights, and the human cost of conflict, told from the mother's lens. Every week, I dive into the headlines that should be making news: the hidden humanitarian crises, the mothers and families too often forgotten, and the extraordinary resilience of people surviving on the margins of war and policy failure. Welcome to Maternal Dispatches — where empathy leads the conversation. Follow Hollie on Instagram and X @holliesmckay Maternal Dispatches is proudly brought to you by holliesmckay.substack.com

Publisher

Hollie McKay

Category

education · news · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

20 Sept 2024

Latest episode

8 Jul 2026

Latest episodes

36 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   8 Jul 2026

   The Boys We Left Behind: The Heartbreaking Truth of Bacha Bazi in Afghanistan, and America’s Missed Opportunity

   Every morning in Kabul, a 14-year-old boy named Abdul waved from behind a bakery window. Then one day he was gone — taken by a government official, the kind the United States was funding to fight its war. What happened to Abdul has a name: bacha bazi, or "boy play." It is centuries old, it is systematic, and for two decades while America had a hundred thousand troops on the ground, it was largely ignored. Boys between the ages of 10 and 18, taken from the poorest families, dressed, danc...

2. 

   1 Jul 2026

   Can America Strip Citizenship From Sex Offenders, And Should It?

   The Trump administration is pursuing the largest denaturalization push in American history, more than 400 people targeted for having their citizenship stripped. The cases that have been made public are damning: men who abused children, groomed minors, and distributed illicit material while swearing under oath they had committed no crimes. The legal mechanism being used is not new, and in cases like these, few would argue against accountability. But when volume quotas are set before the ...

3. 

   24 Jun 2026

   Who is Buying? The Demand Side of Afghanistan’s Child Marriage Market

   The buyers in this market share one thing across every category: nobody is looking for them. Coverage of Afghanistan’s child marriage crisis is overwhelmingly supply-side. How many girls. How poor are the families. What do the Taliban edicts say? The buyers — the men whose demand makes the market function — receive almost no scrutiny. No government in the region faces meaningful pressure to investigate or prosecute the purchase of Afghan girls. Western donors have not conditioned their aid or...

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

23,084

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

6 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 49 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

55

Social presence

0

YouTube

76

Engagement

32

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Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.