New: Swingers

Today, we’re sharing the first episode of a new BBC podcast, Swingers.

Swingers tells the story of Ruth - a woman who joined a Swinging website and ended up having degrading sex with strangers more than 100 times.   Ruth thinks she is not alone, that there are women all over the UK like her and so she decided to tell her story, using her full identity, to investigative journalist Catrin Nye. 

Ruth says that she never wanted to join the website - but did it to please her husband who had been slowly persuading her for more than a decade. She ended up having sex with strangers in lay-bys and filming it for her husband. She ended up pregnant by a stranger and giving oral sex to another man while bleeding from an abortion.    In the podcast Catrin pieces together Ruth’s story and asks what it tells us about sexual consent, pressure in relationships, and the swinging community. She digs deep into the online world of Fab Swingers - the website Ruth and her husband used. Catrin discovers countless crimes across the UK linked to the website and speaks to a man who admits to having sex with women who he thinks were pushed into it.   She considers the police response to Ruth, the law and whether Swinging can be a cover for abuse.    This is a story told in full honesty. It’s the trickiest investigation of Catrin’s career, but one she also feels must be told.

This is episode one in the six-part series. To hear the rest of Ruth’s story, you can listen and subscribe to Swingers on BBC Sounds. If you’re outside the UK, you can listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.