Woman's Hour Owes Listeners An Apology

Sorry, but admit you got it wrong this time

This week Woman’s Hour is celebrating its 75th birthday. And to mark the occasion it felt like we had regressed all the way back to 1946 to listen to a discussion about rape in relationships today on the programme. 

Dr Jessica Taylor, author of the brilliant Why Woman Are Blamed For Everything, was invited onto the show to debate whether women could consent to sex while they were asleep. I assume the producers saw this as a debate, although somewhat short-sightedly given that in the eyes of the law penetrating someone whilst they are sleeping is rape. 

Not many women realise this (clearly not on the production team at Woman’s Hour), and more worryingly, not many men do either. But it is there, in black and white, in our statute books. No grey areas.

The reason that Dr Taylor was invited onto the show to talk about it was because of her ground-breaking survey of 22,000 women, 51 per cent of whom admitted that they had woken to find a man having sex with them. For this survey, Dr Taylor…