TV's Michaela Coel has exposed a new type of sex assault - stealthing

Michaela Coel as Arabella in I May Destroy You
BBC
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There’s a scene in last night’s episode of Michaela Coel’s BBC drama I May Destroy You in which her character Arabella is sleeping with a man and he removes the condom without her knowing.

After a post-coital bathroom trip she tells him where the bin is. “Oh, oh... oh,” he says, naughty-schoolboy-style. “I took it off. I thought you...”

It’s episode four and Coel’s character is already midway through police proceedings after her drink was spiked and she was sexually assaulted. But it’s this two-minute scene with a different man — a colleague — that stuck with me. Covert condom removal is clearly coercive and manipulative, but it’s more common than you might think.

A recent study in Melbourne found that 32 per cent of women and 19 per cent of men had experienced stealthing, and here in London many friends report similar stories. Often it was with men they trusted — or thought they did — and for some the consequences have been traumatic. One woman I know took the morning-after pill, but unlike Coel’s character, it didn’t work: three months later she discovered she was pregnant.

My friend was unthinkably unlucky, but she won’t be alone. What was one man’s heat-of-the-moment, pleasure-seeking decision became her nightmare: the trauma of the night in question and subsequent abortion will be with her for life. Like many victims, she blamed herself for going there in the first place; for drinking too much; for not noticing he’d removed the condom.

It was only years later that she discovered the experience counted as sexual assault. Stealthing is illegal in many countries because it is regarded as non-consensual sex. In Germany in 2017 a man was convicted of rape for removing a condom without consent, and Singapore is set to become the first Asian country to make it illegal.

Last year, a man in Bournemouth became the first British person to be convicted for stealthing (he was sentenced for rape) — the victim was a sex worker. British victims’ charities are campaigning for it to be treated as rape, but there’s a long way to go.

What Coel’s drama does is at least bring some hope for victims. Not only is it the first time I’ve seen stealthing shown on screen, but the scene gets more than its two minutes of airtime as the series takes its course. Friends say seeing it has stopped them blaming themselves and helped them speak out. We must thank Coel and her producers for starting that conversation.

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