Warning: This story contains details of sexual acts
Fifty women have spoken out saying they were pushed or coerced by their partners into swinging.
They contacted us following a BBC News investigation which told the story of a woman who said she had been pressured into having sex with more than 100 strangers.
Many of the women who came forward said they had sex despite not wanting to, either because they feared the consequences of refusing or felt they had to keep their partners happy.
They spoke of deep, long-lasting trauma.
“I remember many nights of my partner keeping me up all night screaming at me, threatening me, and attempting to gaslight me into believing this was something I wanted,” said one woman. “It was never what I wanted.”
Another told us: “I felt like I had been given away. I felt used. I felt so dirty.”
Most encounters were arranged via the website FabSwingers, say the women, which claims to have more than half a million UK active monthly accounts.
Six women told BBC News they had been raped by men met through the site.
One said her partner had forced her to have sex with more than 90 men through FabSwingers. On one occasion, he held her down by the ankles, she told us.
Sixteen said intimate photos of them had been uploaded to the website without their permission.
Swingers
A detailed and at times disturbing investigation raising questions about the idea of consent and whether abuse can exist behind the language of sexual freedom.
Swinging typically involves couples meeting up and exchanging partners, but it can also involve just one half of a couple having sexual encounters while their partner watches. Many people take part fully consensually.
Some of the women who got in touch accuse FabSwingers of facilitating abuse and failing to tackle illegal behaviour.
The site says it has moderation policies and is not “responsible for private off-platform conduct between adults”.
“We do not accept any suggestion that FabSwingers is indifferent to misuse,” it added.
But the former minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, Labour MP Jess Phillips, believes FabSwingers “should be shut down”.
Police should recognise coercion or pressure to take part in swinging as a form of adult sexual exploitation, she says. “Calling it swinging implies consent, and therefore puts the blame at the feet of the women, and that makes it silencing for those women.”
Experts have told BBC News it is important to understand that people can be manipulated into consent. Partners who pressure women into swinging can then use the resulting shame as a means of control, they say.
The Swingers podcast and our previous article told the story of Ruth O’Grady, who said her ex-husband would arrange for her to have sex with other men, sometimes as many as four in a single day. She says she went along with it to keep him happy. Her ex-husband has not responded to BBC News’s questions.
The backgrounds and relationships of the women who contacted us in response to Ruth’s story are all different – but many said her honesty had given them permission to talk about their own abuse, kept hidden for years.
One woman said, had she not seen our reporting, she “probably would have had sex against my will literally this evening. This has been my situation for 12 years now.” The abuse will take place “no more”, she said.
Another woman, Emily from Derbyshire, said she had been pushed into going to a swinging club while pregnant. “That was my baby girl,” she said of her daughter. “It feels awful that I mixed her up in it.”
Emily had hoped a single visit would be enough, but she said her husband wanted more, and they ended up joining FabSwingers. For years, evenings became consumed by searching the site for hook-ups.
If their young daughter had not fallen asleep by 7pm, Emily said her husband would come into the bedroom and pull her away saying: “Mummy’s got to go now.”
Emily said her daughter would cry because she was not ready to say goodnight, or because they had not finished the bedtime story.
She eventually left the marriage but estimates she had sex with between 20 and 30 men while swinging.
She did not think of it as sexual abuse at the time, she told us, because she had agreed to try swinging. She does now.
Afraid to go to the police
Sixteen users told us they had reported to police either alleged abuse or the posting of intimate images on FabSwingers without consent. Three said this had led to convictions.
However, 10 raised concerns about the way police had handled their cases.
One woman said she was 21 when her boyfriend put her on FabSwingers. He ran the whole profile, she told us, and she does not even know the identity of some of the men she had sex with because her boyfriend would make sure she could not see them or talk to them.
She went to the police but they eventually dropped her case. She says they told her she looked like she had been enjoying the sex in the videos they had viewed.
The woman said she explained to officers that her ex-boyfriend would be angry if she did not look enthusiastic enough and make her have sex with someone else.
“The police made me feel like I was disgusting,” she said.
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Details of organisations offering information about or support after sexual abuse or with feelings of despair are available at bbc.co.uk/actionline
Police need better training to understand coercive control and how pressure to engage in sexual acts can form part of domestic abuse, says Dame Nicole Jacobs, domestic abuse commissioner for England and Wales.
The National Police Chiefs Council told the BBC: “Victims deserve to be listened to and supported consistently across the country.”
One woman who contacted us said she felt she could not go to the police because her husband was a serving police officer.
Susie, whose name we have changed, said he talked for years about his fantasy of her having sex with other men – and eventually persuaded her to join FabSwingers.
She described one meet where her husband sat on a sofa in a hotel room and just watched her have sex with a stranger – a practice known as “hotwifing”.
The next man her husband wanted her to have sex with was a fellow police officer he worked with, said Susie.
The whole swinging experience broke her, she told us: “I wasn’t sleeping. I was drinking so much every night.” She is now getting divorced and taking antidepressants.
Eleven men also got in touch with their experiences of having used FabSwingers.
One described arriving at a house for sex, arranged through the website, and finding a woman naked on a bed. A phone was “propped up on the side and a male voice was telling her what to do next”, explained the man.
He and the woman then had sex, he said, and the man at the end of line “wanted evidence of it, by me holding the phone up close to show him”. The woman “had no say on what went down at all”.
It was only when he listened to the Swingers podcast, that he considered she was potentially being controlled and abused, he said. He now regrets what happened.
‘They don’t care about women’s safety’
Nine users told the BBC they had reported abuse to FabSwingers without any response, including one man who had reported the sexual assault of his female partner by a user.
Platforms like FabSwingers must, under the Online Safety Act, remove illegal content – including the non-consensual sharing of intimate images. They must also reduce risks of harm, including controlling and coercive behaviour.
Three women told us FabSwingers had failed to co-operate with police investigations – while multiple users said they had faced repercussions for reporting wrongdoing, including being banned from chat forums where they could flag their concerns.
The website does not care about women’s safety at all, said one woman, yet it “constantly protects dangerous men”.
FabSwingers told us that reports of coercion, sexual assault and the non-consensual sharing of intimate images are prioritised. It said it works with police and does not penalise those reporting concerns.
Three former site moderators told us, however, that none of them had been given any training. Two said they had worked in return for free membership – while the third said they had worked voluntarily.
Image source, Getty ImagesThis is concerning, Jess Phillips told us: “Not even training your moderators on your website. They should be ashamed of themselves.”
Unlike some other swinging sites, FabSwingers does not require identity verification, which can make it harder for police to identify suspects when allegations are reported. It also means a banned user can create a new account – although FabSwingers says it can detect this, without explaining how it does so.
FabSwingers told the BBC its moderation processes involve up to five site administrators, who moderators report to, alongside AI and “automated controls”.
Since 2023, the website has been mentioned in at least 329 police reports across the UK – according to Freedom of Information requests submitted by the BBC – including in allegations of rape, sexual offences, coercive control, harassment, blackmail, stalking, assault and possession of extreme pornography. Although, it does not mean FabSwingers was responsible for what was alleged in the reports.
Jess Phillips said she believes the site “falls foul” of the Online Safety Act, adding she would encourage the regulator Ofcom “to look into it very, very seriously right now and shut it down”.
Ofcom says it is “extremely concerned” to hear of the BBC’s findings and is speaking to the site’s provider, but it has not so far launched an investigation.
The vast majority of those contacting the BBC were women who wanted to thank Ruth O’Grady, the subject of the Swingers podcast, for sharing her story.
“I’m still not in a place where I want anyone I love to know some of these things about my past,” one woman told us. “But I feel a little less alone now.”
If you would like to contact BBC Journalist Catrin Nye and the Swingers investigation team about this story you can email on swingersinvestigation@bbc.co.uk, external
Additional research by Emily Parsons
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