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 worded her questions in a very particular way for a good reason, because we women actually experience dozens of acts of sexual harassment, unwanted touch, assault, and rape throughout our lives, without even knowing. For example, if you ask a woman: Have you ever been raped? She might reply, no. Because her idea of rape is perhaps an extremely violent assault by a stranger. But if you ask a woman if she has ever woken up to find someone having sex with her, she might cast her mind back over her life and think yes, and actually, that would, in the eyes of the law, make her a victim of rape. 

There is a very good reason why women need to know this — it is so that they can keep themselves safe.

No-one teaches young people at school what an abusive relationship looks like, so often it is only when they actually find themselves in one that the penny finally drops – and often then, it is far too late to protect themselves.

A few years ago, I ghosted a book called Brave by Adele Bellis, which told the story of how as a sixteen year old, Adele unwittingly found herself in an abusive relationship. Not being able to recognise the signs she stayed in that relationship for years. It culminated with her partner paying a man to throw acid over her face. She is now scarred for life. When I ghosted her book, I labelled each chapter one of the eight signs of a potentially abusive relationship: intensity, jealousy, control, isolation, criticism, sabotage, blame, anger, because so many women do not know, yet I hoped they might read this book and recognise something in Adele’s story. 

The eight signs of a potentially abusive relationship…

So I was surprised to hear this rather uncomfortable discussion on Woman’s Hour today – a programme that I have appeared on myself, that I have only ever known to be groundbreaking itself in its campaigns to highlight violence against women - push back on this idea that having sex with your partner while they are not conscious to give consent is acceptable. 

Missing the point completely, that it was women who answered this survey, that the majority of those 22,000 said that they had woken up to find themselves being penetrated without consent, the discussion became more about whether women were assaulting men if they woke up and reached for them during the night.

Then, the discussion took another odd turn, with presenter Emma Barnett asserting that some listeners would disagree with Dr Taylor’s insistence that if you wake up and find you have been penetrated without your consent, that is rape. She insisted those listeners would say: 'I just don’t feel like that, they love me, they’re my partner, they’re expressing their way of coming onto me...’

So from here on in, the discussion became about women who are in loving relationships, but what about the hundreds of thousands of listeners in controlling or abusive relationships, who like Dr Taylor said, are gaslit by men who tell them they want their sexual advances, or who are too frightened to push men off them for fear of repercussions? Listening in, they would believe as their men tell them, they are making a fuss about nothing, that they should just lie back, unresponsive, and say nothing.

To make things even worse on a woman’s programme, the very first listener comment read out was actually from a man who said: ‘My experience is that most women love to be caressed and made love to while half asleep…’ 

Oh right, that’s ok then. 

In that short discussion on the programme, Woman’s Hour disempowered women, and empowered the men who are raping them. What a sentence to write, but it is true. It was short-sighted, legally misinformed and dangerous.

Up until I was in my late teens, it was actually legal in this country for a man to rape his wife. Can you believe until the mid-nineties this was perfectly acceptable? And it seems that some people still think that it is. What Woman’s Hour and their listeners do not seem to understand is that just because you give consent once to your partner, does not mean you have given blanket consent for the rest of your relationship, that is why that very same law was installed. 

And the big question is this, why would anyone want to have sex with an unresponsive person? One listener argued: ‘If you’re sleeping with someone you really love, I don’t see how it’s sexual assault. If I didn’t trust or love them, I wouldn’t be in a long term relationship with them.’

If only it were that simple. Try saying that to women in abusive relationships. It is not so dissimilar to ‘Why doesn't she just leave?’ And there we are, back full circle to the title of Dr Taylor’s book, victim blaming rather than asking men to take responsibility for gaining consent.

One listener even suggested it was a ‘woke’ discussion, and was ‘undermining women’. It’s not woke to enforce the law. It does not undermine women to inform them of their rights. We have so far to go… 

The bottom line is this, if you are lucky enough to have spent your life in loving and healthy relationships, then you will not know why this discussion is relevant. Like in the case of Adele Bellis, you will only learn when it’s too late, and I hope that is not the case for you. And if the numbers in Dr Taylor’s survey are anything to go by, more than half of women listening to that programme this morning fall into the category of those in unhealthy relationships putting up with abusive behaviours.

To them, Woman’s Hour, you owe a huge apology.