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In a scene in new drama Consent, which airs tonight on Channel 4, private-schoolboy Archie tells classmate Natalie how much he likes her, after the pair flirted at his birthday. In response, Natalie looks at him in terror. “What the f*** happened at the party?” she asks him. “I don’t remember.”
We later learn exactly what happened at the party – that Archie filmed himself having sex with Natalie while she was near-comatose, and shared the footage with his friends.
Yet the drama’s portrayal of this disturbing act has prompted claims that the #MeToo movement has gone too far. Citing Consent, a Times article published this week says that critics of #MeToo believe that it has caused “dangerous backlash” against schoolboys.
Complaining about the social uprising, which shone a spotlight on sexual violence against women, child psychologist Julie Lynn-Evans worries that boys might be “ostracised, punished or even expelled,” for what she describes as “teenage fumbling”, and says that she is “watching boys’ lives be destroyed by an excessive cultural shift… in the wake of MeToo.”
Although depressing, the reaction to Consent doesn’t come as a surprise. Six years ago, women who had been endlessly subjected to sexual harassment, exploitation or abuse were buoyed by a global movement that seemed to signal that their complaints were finally being taken seriously.
And yet now that heady early optimism has faltered. Cases like the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trial, which saw a powerful man who had fantasised in text exchanges about murdering his wife and raping her corpse heralded as a hero, showed how quickly and gleefully people could pile against victims of gendered abuse and sexual violence.
In its wake, Marilyn Manson followed suit, filing a defamation case against his ex-fiancée Evan Rachel Wood, one of multiple women who have accused him of sexual violence. In just a few short years, women have gone from finally being able to speak out to being told to keep quiet again.
And in spite of regular protestations that the #MeToo movement has gone “too far” – a sentiment often echoed by everyone from Twitter trolls to high-profile celebrities, there’s little evidence to suggest that sexual violence against women has decreased.
Although a worrying four in 10 Americans said that #MeToo had exceeded its aims just a year after the movement took hold, prosecution rates for rape are currently among the lowest since records began, with only around one per cent resulting in conviction.
And while some so-called experts might be hand-wringing about the plight of teenage boys accused of harassing their peers, the truth is that sexual abuse remains endemic in schools. In fact, a 2021 Ofsted investigation found that 79 per cent of schoolgirls surveyed said that sexual assault happened “a lot” or “sometimes” amongst their age group.
When I was at school and college in the noughties, long before the #MeToo movement took hold, young girls were conditioned to put up with everyday indignations and misogyny. The first time that I remember being catcalled, I was still at primary school. My friends and I were subjected to appalling, degrading and sometimes traumatising treatment.
Being groped was a regular occurrence, as was being pressured into sex and relentlessly badmouthed afterwards for relenting. You were “frigid” if you wouldn’t put out, and a “slag” if you did. And although camera phones were a relatively new toy, explicit images were circulated regularly and without much thought.
In one particularly memorable instance, naked images of a sixteen-year-old girl were printed up and stuck on the school gates. The teachers did nothing to intervene.
Social change is often scary. I understand why the parents of young boys might be worried that an accusation against their son could “destroy their life” – a phase that is often bandied about in defence of excusing bad behaviour, along with “boys will be boys” and “she was asking for it”.
But sexual abuse is also scary. Growing up in a culture that treats teenage girls as ripe for exploitation is scary. Living in a society that protects abusers over victims is deeply, devastatingly scary.
Based on the Ofsted report into sexual violence, Consent probes these issues with thought and nuance. It shows that many teenage boys are embroiled in a culture where porn and the objectification of women is so commonplace that Archie doesn’t seem to quite realise how dangerous and damaging – not to mention illegal – his actions are.
But if we protect the perpetrators of sexual violence, we move further and further away from fixing the issue. The report that inspired Consent said that girls “often don’t see the point of challenging or reporting this harmful behaviour because it’s seen as a normal experience”. If we insist that #MeToo went too far, then we run the risk of making women even more terrified and much too demoralised to bring their abusers to justice.
Truly fulfilling on the promise of #MeToo would mean that stories like Consent don’t need to be told. It would mean that women could feel that they could report sexual assault without the stark conviction rates staring them in the face. It would mean living in a world where teenage girls are safe – a world that still seems very far away.
Katie Bishop’s #MeToo-inspired novel ‘The Girls of Summer’ will be published by Transworld, Penguin Random House in May, 2023
