YESTERDAY on BBC Radio Scotland, the Call Kaye phone-in posed the question: Where do your sympathies lie in the Ched Evans case?

Before the first response had hit the airwaves, we could have predicted the way the ensuing “debate” was going to go. Down into a 1950s grubby gutter.

There was plenty of support for Ched Evans – whom Kaye Adams described as a “promising young footballer whose career is now in tatters’’ – but not much for the woman involved, predictably.

That is the problem with opening up a rape trial to the public for commentary. We were asked to judge the worthiness of the complainant and the accused and, as such, the discussion quickly dissolved into one on morality and the “type of woman’’ the former is. That woman, we learned, is one who has “loose morals’’, as one caller suggested. Another informed us that “she was hardly a virgin, was she?’’ while another asked: “What does she expect? These are young footballers’’. One said we all know women like this, who “put it about a bit, are a bit of a tease and a bit minxy’’.

Alongside the regular callers, we heard from experts. Well, one anyway – a co-ordinator from Rape Crisis Scotland. This would have been immensely helpful to the discussion, had she not been speaking alongside Mike Buchanan of Justice For Men And Boys.

Listeners to Call Kaye will know that Buchanan is regularly invited on when issues affecting women are discussed, to “balance” the views of female experts. His usual trope is that women are liars with an inherent victim complex and that the justice system is hugely skewed in their favour.

What was unfortunate about yesterday’s discussion was that most of the debate was framed around his line that women and men get drunk and have sex – so why are men always criminalised for doing so?

It doesn’t seem to matter to BBC Scotland that rape is overwhelmingly unreported, nor that Crown Prosecution Service analysis on “false accusations” shows they are comparatively uncommon. It wasn’t mentioned that while violent crime overall is decreasing, instances of sexual violence are actually increasing.

It is frankly an insult to the expertise and knowledge of guests from women’s groups that they are so often expected to use the limited airtime they get to refute Mike Buchanan’s many misleading and inaccurate statements around the reality of sexual violence.

The solution, as Adams suggested yesterday, is not to avoid all use of statistics when discussing these issues. Or as she put it “we have to be careful of quoting lies, damn lies and statistics’’ .

No, the solution is to invite guests with demonstrable expertise of the subject matter at hand. There will be people who listened to the phone-in yesterday who believed Buchanan when he inaccurately suggested that 25 per cent of sexual assaults are carried out by women.

There will also be people who believe the most important issue raised by the whole Ched Evans debacle is alcohol consumption. That tired old trope that women should “protect themselves” from being raped by modifying their way of life. This disregards the fact that women are more likely to be raped by somebody they know.

So, in short, don’t go out, don’t stay in, don’t drink and be wary of every man in your life because the odds are it will be one of them that attacks you.

Alternatively, the BBC could stop pushing the line that the onus is on women to foresee their rape and take precautions accordingly.

Adams repeatedly described issues around consent as “murky”, which should offend the majority of men in Scotland who have never accidentally assaulted a woman or seen one as an easy target when she was drunk.

On the one hand we had callers suggesting that if Ched Evans was drunk then his actions shouldn’t be judged, and on the other, people lamenting the morality and sense of a woman who has a drink. The hypocrisy of the segment was summed up when Adams spoke of the “vile abuse” the woman had encountered while opening up the airwaves to allow callers to perpetuate that abuse further.

When Ched Evans’s actions that night were raised, Adams asked: “Is that the behaviour of a rapist – or is that the behaviour of a cad?” The theme from the discussion was clear: who are we to judge the actions of a man who has been found not-guilty of rape? Which wouldn’t have been so unpalatable had Adams herself not asked: “What kind of woman wants to be in a hotel room, blind drunk, making themselves vulnerable?’’

BBC Scotland needs to do better on these issues. This isn’t a new or interesting take on a discussion but an irresponsible and unnecessary repetition of the same myths we hear time and time again.

We saw from the recent societal attitudes survey on gay marriage that views in Scotland can change for the better over time. Yet still, in Scotland, 40 per cent of people think that a woman can be partially to blame for being raped if she was drunk.

Changing that perception would encourage women to come forward. Framing consent as a minefield and criticising the morality and judgement of women who don’t cut themselves off from society to “stay safe” does the opposite.

BBC Radio Scotland plays host to some worthwhile discussions and responsible and necessary journalism. Unfortunately for listeners, and for women, neither were in evidence during yesterday’s Call Kaye.

‘Horrific’ radio talk as callers debate Ched Evans case on Kaye Adams show