'Baby Reindeer inspired male rape survivors to come forward. I’ve never seen anything like it'

For the past 15 years, if you’ve seen any soap opera that has a storyline of male rape, it’s come through my office. 

I remember I got early access of Baby Reindeer from Netflix. I was sat at home, I watched, and I was like, this is something different. I rang Richard [Gadd] and said, “I don’t think you realise what you’ve created here.”

Nobody expected the tsunami we saw.

There was an 80% increase in first-time callers; 40% of referrals mentioned Baby Reindeer as being the reason they were stepping forward. I’ve never seen anything like that before.

The show was the trigger. This wasn’t something that happened last night that somebody was talking about. This was something that happened 10 or 20 years ago.

What the show had done was bring that stuff to the front of their mind. People were a bit like, ‘Shit, what do I do with this now?’ The show, plus the conversations about it – you couldn’t sit on a bus without hearing someone talking about the show – prompted people to call.

We always ask people, why are you talking about this now? Why not yesterday? And why don’t you wait
till tomorrow?

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Without falling into my psychotherapy head, there’s something about men and permission giving. I think men see people talking and it’s like this window of opportunity – shit I better jump through now before it closes. Because we’re clever like that, men, aren’t we? 

I would say the bounce lasted about six weeks. Then you start to see the longer lasting impact. We had to adapt. These men that have sat in silence and in isolation and loneliness, how do we get them to be with – and I say this as a survivor – my own kind?

Rather than employing a couple more therapists – which is great, but once someone’s in therapy that ties that therapist up on a one-to-one level for quite a period of time – we invested in our community development team, which meant we could hold more groups and drop-in sessions, and we could organise more activities that involve people coming together. 

On average, if a male victim doesn’t report at the time of something happening, they’ll take roughly around 20 years to speak out. Statistically speaking, females take about seven years. Since Baby Reindeer, the length of time has got less and less, which is brilliant. 

In a world where, rightly so, we talk about violence against women and girls as being a national emergency, maybe we can create some space now to talk about violence against men and boys. And maybe if we talk about that, we’ll begin to have fuller conversations and find better solutions.

Duncan Craig is founder and chief executive of We Are Survivors, which supports male victims of sexual violence, and has advised on depictions of it in popular culture – and also sees first-hand the impact.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

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