THIS ONE TV drama still has some lessons to learn about its use of sexual assault

It's only reasonable, then, that rape and sexual assault, and their consequences, should be explored in TV dramas – they are, unfortunately, a fact of life.

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In the past 18 months, three of the most watched and most talked about prime-time dramas have placed rape at the centre of their plots. But while they have succeeded in making the subject a talking point, they have often done so in a way that is damaging when it comes to the way we see victims and perpetrators.

The third series of Broadchurch, ITV’s much-loved detective drama starring David Tennant and Olivia Colman, switched its focus rom the murder of Danny Latimer to the rape of local woman Tricia Winterman (Julie Hesmondhalgh).

An audience of over eight million watched the opening episode, which documented in forensic detail what happens when a woman reports a sexual assault. In harrowing yet unhysterical scenes, writer Chris Chibnall’s research – and Hesmondhalgh's acting – stand front and centre.

Chibnall explained that as the driving force behind the storyline, he felt a “responsibility” for the choices he made in how to depict the assault.

“It’s difficult for me to speak about other shows, but I hope Broadchurch offers the emotional complexities of it,” he told the Telegraph. “It’s not there as a plot device.”

But while Broadchurch succeeds in observing the nuances of pain and emotional turmoil of a rape victim, it fails by enforcing the misconception that someone who commits rape is a deranged exception to the norm. The perpetrator of the rape, the young and handsome Leo Humphries (Chris Mason), turns out to be an utterly remorseless serial rapist who video-taped his crimes and proclaims himself "proud" to have groomed a younger man to follow in his footsteps – only fuelling the notion that the only type of person who could possibly commit rape is a psychopath.

Rape is too common an offence to be treated as a crime only committed by deviants and outsiders; it’s woven into day to day life, it’s a culture that is pervasive and normalised in our own society. It's not just rapist – he could be the highly educated university student, the family man in accounts.

This notion of the psycho-rapist is also explored in Liar, ITV’s compelling yet rather problematic drama that aired just months after Broadchurch, drawing a healthy audience of 7 million.

Following a date with surgeon Andrew Earlham (Ioan Gruffudd), Laura Nielson (Joanne Froggatt) wakes up groggy after apparently having been drugged and fears the worst, that she’s been sexually assaulted by Andrew, as she struggles to remember the events of the night.

The first two episodes of the drama, written by Harry and Jack Williams, go out of their way to make Laura seem utterly unlikeable in an expert turn by Froggatt. No drugs are found in her system, which sees our eyebrows raise with doubt. Other characters keep referencing her murky ‘past’, a hint at a struggle with mental health. She’s been accused of ‘making it up’ before. She labels Andrew a rapist on a public platform, causing widespread criticism even from her own friends. She even breaks into Andrew’s house in a desperate attempt to find what she was drugged with.

In contrast, Andrew is charm personified – with his affable smile and warm and caring demeanour, the character invites sympathy from the audience. His career is at risk, after all. He could lose everything.

We are invited to pick a side, decide who’s telling the truth, leading to gleeful exchanges on social media about who’s the ‘liar’ in these grim circumstances.

Only at the end of the third episode is Andrew exposed, just as in Broadchurch, as a remorseless and calculating serial sex attacker with a secret stash of recordings of his assaults, again highlighting the sensationalist idea of a ‘psychotic’ character concealed behind a veneer of respectability.

Yet even once she was vindicated in the drama, there was still an outpouring of vitriol on real-life Twitter about ‘false accusations’ – a concept that already makes up far too much of the public conversation about rape, given that estimates (by the Crown Prosecution Service) suggest that false allegations make up just 0.62 per cent of all rape cases.

False accusations are also pivotal to the plot in the second series of BBC3 teen drama Clique which focuses on the attack on Edinburgh University student Rayna.

The sophomore series of the often-brave drama delves into sexual assault in the very first episode as we see Rayna get graphically attacked on the beach.

???Para about people questioning her and it again been set up as 'is she telling the truth'???

A shock twist halfway through the series that reveals Rayna actually staged this assault in order to seek revenge for a genuine attack she was the victim of during Freshers’ Week. So even when she really was raped, she is also a liar.

Either way, Clique is never fully focused on Rayna's experience as a victim of rape. Instead it prefers to descend into a sensationalist plot in which we discover that it’s not prime suspect Leo who raped Rayna (despite his black-outs and penchants for violence), it’s actually Calum – Leo’s nice younger brother, who hoped to oust Leo in order to continue his borderline incestuous affair with his foster mother.

So the rape victim at the centre of the drama is first made depicted as a liar and then ignored.

Clique writer Jess Brittain previously explained that she wanted the programme to encourage debate in that field, inviting her viewers to disagree.

“It’s very difficult to have a right way of depicting something that’s quite so graphic,” she previously explained to RadioTimes.com. “It’s very scary as a female writer to head into that area. But it’s the responsibility of drama to explore the complicated nature of these things.

“I don’t offer the correct way of looking at a subject matter or experience, and simply want to hang out something to be discussed – and disagreed with.”

???yes, rape needs to be discussed but???

While being an intensely moreish watch, Clique’s priorities are misplaced – Rayna’s rape is only a side-dish, her suffering sidelined in favour for the frankly less interesting family drama between Leo, Calum and main character Holly. It would have made for a more powerful, impactful and responsible drama if more time was given to Rayna’s genuine assault, instead of attempting to fool the audience with the was-she-wasn’t-she attack on the beach.

Television still has a long way to go in responsibly depicting sexual assault and rape on screens, with writers needing to think more carefully about the consequences of the plotlines and the repercussions they may have on particularly impressionable audiences. It is the often cack-handed handling of sexual assault with results in dramas letting themselves down when depicting the crime which is still hugely misunderstood, and yet unfortunately so common.

Clique series 1 and 2 boxset is available on BBC iPlayer.

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