She said no. She didn’t want it, she made that very clear, but he did it anyway; pushing her feelings aside as though they didn’t matter, because to him they seemingly didn’t. It’s a story so depressingly common that most women probably carry a private version of it in their heads, either buried in their own memories or confided to them by a friend. But still, there’s something profoundly shocking about the idea of it happening right under the noses of a TV audience.
Perhaps you’ve never watched Channel 4’s hit show Married at First Sight, which involves putting total strangers through a purely ceremonial “wedding” and making them live as husband and wife for six weeks to see whether they actually want to make a go of the relationship. But you’re almost certainly familiar with Panorama, which this week told the stories of three former “brides”. Lizzie and Chloe (not their real names) both say they were raped by their on-screen “husbands” – and, in Lizzie’s case, also subjected to alarmingly violent outbursts of temper and an alleged threat of an acid attack – while Shona Manderson, who has spoken publicly, accuses hers of sexual misconduct. All three men, it should be said, deny the allegations.
Long before this story broke, the risks inherent in putting human beings through the emotional shredder for the sake of an evening’s mindless telly were already crystal-clear. It’s hard to disagree with Caroline Dinenage, the chair of parliament’s culture select committee, that Married at First Sight was an “accident waiting to happen”, given the way it blurs boundaries by pushing total strangers into bed with each other. But it’s hardly alone in exposing contestants first to the psychological pressure cooker of the show itself, and then – for the unlucky ones – to months of being brutally picked apart on social media afterwards. (Already, a dangerous online guessing game has begun over the identities of Lizzie and Chloe and their anonymous accused husbands, alongside some grim arguments about whether they were somehow “asking for it” by agreeing to pseudo-marry strangers or why they didn’t just quit the show.) The domestic violence charity Women’s Aid has been warning for years about signs of abusive or controlling behaviour on a whole range of dating shows, not just Married at First Sight, and asking producers to work with its experts.
But, in focusing on the undeniable sins of reality television, there’s a risk of missing the wider point. The chilling thing about these allegations is that, for once, reality TV stands accused of being too real by half.
One in 10 women in Britain say they’ve been forced into sex against their will, according to landmark research in 2013. Half of female respondents to another survey said they had woken up to find a male partner attempting to have sex with them in their sleep – a scenario described by one of the Married at First Sight women, and one I suspect a lot of men still don’t understand is creepy. Violent, controlling behaviour of the kind Lizzie claimed she had suffered? A domestic abuse offence is logged by police in this country every 40 seconds, while rough sex – often influenced by porn – is so common that 35% of women under the age of 35 have been strangled during sex at least once. Marital rape has been a crime in Britain since 1991 but the belief that “you can’t say no, you’re my wife” – as Lizzie claims her TV husband said – remains alarmingly widespread, with a quarter of respondents to one survey arguing that sex without consent in a longterm relationship isn’t “usually” rape. These aren’t freak incidents but risks women run every day of their dating lives. They are the reason we tell our flatmates exactly where we’re meeting the guy off Hinge, or lecture our teenage daughters about red flags. If toxic men, unhealthily controlling behaviour and grimly confused attitudes to consent hadn’t crept into Married at First Sight, it would frankly have been a miracle, given how prevalent they are outside it.
None of this, of course, is to absolve Channel 4 of responsibility. It’s precisely because dating isn’t all hearts and flowers that anyone making a dating show needs to be hyper-alert to the risks, with a sophisticated understanding of how victims behave – or, much more rarely, how false allegations arise – that still eludes too many trained police officers. It’s common for women to take a while to process what actually happened, or to find the words; but also for the truth not always to be clear-cut, and for people to behave in ways that don’t necessarily make sense from the outside.
Lizzie, Chloe and Shona all say they raised concerns about the alleged behaviour of their “husbands” with the show’s welfare teams on set, but they didn’t all disclose the worst of the details shared with Panorama. If that sounds suspiciously blurry, it will also sound familiar to any professional used to investigating allegations of sexual or domestic violence. For its part, the production company says the women agreed to carry on filming, and Channel 4’s chief content officer, Ian Katz, says he is confident that the right decisions were taken about broadcasting episodes, given what was known at the time.
Yet that doesn’t change the fact that – as the barrister Helena Kennedy told Panorama – the level of vigilance required to be absolutely sure nothing goes awry when pushing two virtual strangers into bed with each other seems wholly unrealistic, and therein lies the problem. The Married at First Sight couples were being watched to the point of intrusion: the husbands knew they were going to be filmed every day for hours on end, and that they and their wives would be grilled in intimate detail by the show’s resident experts about how the relationship was going. There should have been nowhere to hide. Yet, if anything, the lesson is that knowing half the world is gawping at you expectantly from their sofas may make some truths harder, not easier, to tell in public.
For that, in the end, is how shame works. It’s hard to talk about something you can barely admit to yourself; hard, too, to let go of the ideal of a loving relationship, even when it’s shattered by violence. The myth of the fairytale marriage – the happy ending towards which the Married at First Sight brides are rushed, before they have even had a beginning – is still so powerful that admitting yours is nothing like that still feels like a failure. Taking the show off air, as now seems inevitable, might help save whatever remains of reality TV’s reputation. But let’s not kid ourselves, in the process, about the world to which it is holding up a mirror.
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Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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