CLODAGH FINN: It’s time to give the rape storylines on TV a break

Rape on TV appears to be having a sort of nauseating moment right now. When it isn’t the central storyline, it is often thrown in as a little attention-grabbing aside to keep you watching, writes Clodagh Finn.

There was a moment during the final episode of the ITV drama Broadchurch when Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller (Olivia Coleman) sat on the steps outside the police station and shed a few tears of quiet despair.

At home, I felt like doing the same because, for the second time in a week, I turned off the TV with a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. Over three nights, I’d watched two police dramas in which a total of six women had been raped to propel the storyline. Just three of them were given names.

Rape on TV appears to be having a sort of nauseating moment right now. When it isn’t the central storyline, as in Broadchurch, it is often thrown in as a little attention-grabbing aside to keep you watching.

And it’s not just in those detective dramas where we almost expect a voyeuristic exploration of the grizzled innards of murder victims or the too-intimate details of those misfortunate, often unnamed, women photographed running, panicked, through softly lit forests. (I saw just such a lady on BBC4 last Saturday).

Rape scenes seem to have gone mainstream. They have featured in all kinds of drama, from Poldark and House of Cards to Mad Men and Game of Thrones. What is going on? This is not a rant about TV shows sensationalising — or even sanitising — rape; it is a sad, despairing question from a weary viewer wondering why scenes of sexual violence have become so banal and commonplace?

There has been a rush to — rightly — praise the third series of Broadchurch for handling the subject of sexual assault in a way that was more nuanced, more honest, more victim-focused than anything we’ve seen on TV before.

But what does that say about how we generally see rape portrayed on TV? In Broadchurch, Julie Hesmondhalgh played victim Trish Winterman with the kind of exceptional intuition that jolts a viewer out of complacency. I think it’s safe to say that the majority of the show’s audience of 8m-plus stopped, if only for a moment, to consider the sense of violation — utter and complete — that is experienced by a woman who has been raped.

We were reminded during eight episodes that the damage was lasting, though not necessarily insurmountable. “You will survive this,” Trish was told during the investigation procedure, which was carried out with a sensitivity that may or may not be there in real life. There were some uncomfortable facts, too, ones that have often entered the conversation about sexual assault in unhelpful ways.

Trish had had a little too much to drink. She had also engaged in consensual sex on the morning of the rape and refused to say with whom. Explosive facts that, in the real world, have been enough to turn the victim into the accused.

The detective duo — Coleman and David Tennant — were just the type of people you’d want on your side, constantly challenging the cliches and preconceived notions that persist around the crime. Broadchurch was almost didactic in its approach; an educational drama that hammered home a few very welcome messages.

Rape is about power and control; it can happen to anyone; a rapist ‘is not what men are, he’s an aberration,’ to quote DI Alec Hardy after the disturbing denouement. Yet, if I was of the male persuasion I’d have been pretty upset about the portrayal of men in the series.

All the main male characters were a little creepy: We had the stalker obsessive, the spying ex, the sleazy womaniser, the porn-viewer. That’s not what men are, either. The series producers also prided themselves on not showing the rape, yet there were two very harrowing scenes; one in which the rape victim lay down on the spot where the attack took place and a second that showed a 16-year-old, who had been groomed by an older sexual sociopath, about to commit the crime.

And this was considered the ‘good’ rape show. The ‘bad’ rape show was on BBC4 on Saturday night. Department Q, a Danish procedural, has none of the panache of The Killing which got us hooked on Scandi-noir, but I tuned in anyway. And yes, I’m sorry now. To be fair, there was lots of general violence as well as the two rape scenes.

In one of them, a terrified woman was running through a forest — oh, when will women learn to stay out of the woods? — being chased by a gang of rapists, one of whom was a woman.

Later, the victim appeared as a black-and-white police mug shot with a graze over one eye, but little more. The other rape victim went on to be murdered, which secured her more airtime — and a name.

I really don’t think I can watch another woman being beaten and battered on TV. I don’t want to see another woman on a dimly lit street looking behind her at a stalking shadow. I don’t want to see another naked woman turn up dead in a skip. Gritty drama should not mean we have to feast on the entrails of a raped or dead woman.

Or man for that matter, though somehow that doesn’t seem to have the same appeal. True, not many TV dramas are sickening and fetishistic in the way that The Fall was, with its beautiful doll-like victims, handsome serial killer, and ridiculous, supposedly strong, female detective with her even more ridiculous silk blouses.

Yet, there was a time when rape as ‘entertainment’ was confined to storylines about very particular and heinous crimes — the Jack the Ripper story and its Yorkshire equivalent in which women of ill repute were targeted and left dead in the gutter, for instance. Not any more.

Now, rape is almost a TV norm. I wonder what that is doing to the average viewer? This average viewer has had enough — pass the remote, please. Anybody else want to watch something different on TV?