In the era of welfare, and aftercare, and intimacy co-ordinators, and every other regulatory safeguard against the exploitation of the first two decades of reality TV, a lot of us choose to believe it must be okay now.
Every participant has to go through rigorous vetting, and gets so much psychological support, that whatever we end up watching on screen must be kosher and no longer throws up any ethical quandaries at all. The industry has learnt its lessons and done the work, permitting us to binge the trash with impunity, safe in the knowledge that everyone involved must have come out of it tippity-top or it wouldn’t get broadcast.
Well, shocker, not quite. The latest – especially grim – reality TV scandal is that multiple women have accused their on-screen “husbands” of sexual misconduct during production of Married at First Sight UK. A Panorama investigation broadcast on Monday night revealed the allegations of three women, two speaking under anonymity, of coercive control, violence, and rape. It describes a culture in which the partners misunderstand consent within the constructed “marriages” (they are not legally binding), believing that label entitles them to sex.
There are reports of a man punishing his partner for “making him feel like a rapist” after he’d crossed the line and she was distressed. Of a woman resisting sex after it had grown violent, and her partner accusing her of not taking the marriage seriously – “you can’t say no, you’re my wife”. He threatened her with an acid attack if she told the production staff. She did, they continued filming. All the men deny the allegations and the programme-makers, CPL Productions, insist they adhere to the gold standard of welfare and that all participants had passed rigorous checks – but all episodes of MAFS have been removed from Channel 4’s website and this crisis surely spells the end of a series whose conceit was always too extreme to be safe.
