It was the moment two female characters were brutalised within a few minutes of each other – one with a fatal beating by men who had abducted her, another by her rapist army superior – in a recent episode of BBC drama Collateral that did it for me.

I normally barely even notice when violence against women appears on my screen in the name of drama. If I did, I would hardly be able to watch telly again. It’s the backstory on everything from The Americans to Strike (a largely sensitive production that still displays plenty of dismembered female body parts and shows the eponymous detective bonding with his sidekick Robin over her past rape). It’s window-dressing in the likes of Game Of Thrones and Westworld. And that’s before we even mention procedural dramas, whose battered victims blur in my mind into generic shots of bloodied, unconscious or weeping women being thrown into the nearest gutter, onto floors or out of cars after the worst has happened so that the cops can demonstrate their intellect and compassion and we all get our 45-minute fix of purgative problem-solving.

Perhaps my reserves of tolerance were low because I’ve been reading so many crime novels recently. After you’ve gobbled up the top tier (psychologically acute, with brilliant characterisation, no trivialising of the subject, the victim or the suffering – Tana French, Erin Kelly, Susie Steiner, Elly Griffiths and more all provide this unfailingly), what proliferates thereafter is sexual abuse. I read – though didn’t finish – three books in a row that turned out to hinge on incest. Stalking, imprisonment, torture, beatings and the murder of women are, at best, simple plot points. At worst, they are merely ways to motivate, screw up or show how sensitive in response a male character can be.

“Why we need to stop using rape as a lazy plot twist”