So strongly does she feel about the demonisation of single mothers that she has taken on the role of their champion by presenting a forthcoming BBC3 documentary about their harsh and unfair treatment in decades past to remind us how fragile and easily attacked is their status as head of the family. I'm talking to her the week after the riots, when single mothers have been indirectly blamed for the violence and looting in English towns and cities by fatherless boys.

Jamelia herself was brought up by a single mother, Paulette Davis, who became pregnant with her as a teenager, so she sees all the issues from the perspective of a second-generation single mother and believes that her dysfunctional relationships with her children's fathers were due to her own fatherless childhood. "I grew up without my dad being involved with my upbringing, without a father figure of any sort. Had I had one, my choices of partner would have been better," she says. "I first met my dad when I was 18 months old, but he was in and out of my life because he was also in and out of prison. He got out when I was 15, and by that time we couldn't get a relationship going because he had let me down so many times."

Jamelia was born to Jamaican parents in Handsworth, a deprived part of Birmingham with a history of rioting in 1981, 1985 and 1991. Her father, Donald Williams, spent years in jail for armed robbery and some of her stepbrothers by her mother's later marriage to Asher Beckford also have a string of convictions, most notoriously in the case of Tumbi Beckford who was sentenced to 18 years in jail for the fatal shooting of Daniel Bogle in a case of mistaken identity over a drugs row.

Read the full story here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/aug/20/jamelia-single-parents