The normalisation of this behaviour seen in Clark-Neale’s Grounded episode, however, is symptomatic of a wider, national, if not global, problem of distorted perceptions and stigma surrounding men as victims of sexual abuse and misconduct, one shaped by false stereotypes. As outlined in a 2017 paper published by the University of Huddersfield, these myths deem male victims to be: more responsible than female victims; less likely to be traumatised as a consequence; more likely to be homosexual and therefore willing, and, critically, so rarely affected that little attention to the matter is warranted, naturally resulting in relatively little empirical attention being paid to male sex offence victimisation. It was only in 1994 that the legal definition of rape in the UK ceased to be limited to cases of vaginal penetration, a definition that intrinsically excluded male victims. The tragic implications of these widely held perceptions are that a much lower proportion of male sexual offence victims, comparative to female victims, are reporting their experiences due to fears over how they will be judged and doubts over how seriously their complaints might be handled by the police.
These critical systemic issues were brought to light recently in the hit BBC lockdown sensation I May Destroy You, a TV drama created by and starring, somewhat ironically, another of Louis Theroux’s Grounded guests, Michaela Coel. Episode five of Coel’s series depicts the struggle of Kwame (Paapa Essiedu), a young gay man who has recently been sexually assaulted, as he attempts to report his experience to the police. In stark contrast to a previous sequence in which Coel’s protagonist Arabella reports her own experience of sexual assault to a police reaction of compassion and efficacy, Kwame’s claim is disparately met with ineptitude, laziness and even patronising scepticism. “You know, there are other ways you could have reported this,” a male officer tells him, visibly awkward, “we’ve got machines out there.” The officer subsequently dismisses the use of a DNA test, supposing that Kwame “just, erm, had consensual sex with him”. At this point, Kwame realises a lost cause and leaves the police station, abandoning his claim.
Kwame’s case is, of course, the extreme. Rylan Clark-Neal is by no means sexually assaulted on a BBC Sounds podcast hosted by the nation’s sweetheart. Theroux’s comments, and his production team’s editorial choices, are, similarly, by no means malicious or predatory, merely misjudged, symptomatic of a wider issue yet nonetheless vulnerable to scrutiny. It must be understood that these two cases, while at opposite poles, with contrasting degrees of gravity, operate respectively within one spectrum of dangerous attitudes towards male victims of sexual misconduct. Thus, broadcasting standards that address this issue must be compared with those put in place to protect female victims, if these attitudes are to develop in a healthy direction.
Words by Joe Harris