Prison dynamics and Robert’s lost story
So I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole of reading articles, essays and statistics about ‘husband and wife’ prison dynamics and there’s such a more interesting and powerful story that could have been told about Robert and Kev as opposed to what we got.
A prison wife is the inmate who takes on the more 'feminine' role in a prison relationship; they're often the submissive one, the 'taker’. Protection and security from the 'husband' are commonly exchanged for sexual acts. Sound familiar? Kev was offering Robert protection in prison once the two of them began their relationship.
People who become prison wives are often the people who are more vulnerable in the prison environment. You know who was vulnerable? Robert, who was being attacked and beaten up constantly. Other people who become prison wives are those who are considered to be good looking or pretty. That sound familiar? Robert even referred to himself as pretty when talking about prison.
Robert could have been a prison wife with Kev playing the husband. It was basically written out for them already. Robert was married to a man who was protecting him from the other inmates who had constantly been inflicting mental and physical harm on him. That’s a fact. They were already half way there, they just needed to embrace what they’d already been setting up (intentional or not).
Kev and Robert’s relationship could be known as a ‘protective pairing’. One article I read said protective pairings are “a form of prison rape in which men protect weaker inmates in exchange for sex”. This again links to Robert’s potential as a prison wife but also acknowledges that what Robert was experiencing was a type of rape. The same article also says “inmates do not label a behaviour as rape or sexual violence unless 'those acts meet particular conditions set by inmate cultures constructions of rape’” which would explain Robert not seeing it as abuse because it was more or less what was expected from him in this relationship with Kev.
Kev has also referred to Robert using female pronouns multiple times which I just think adds to this theoretical prison dynamic because it feminises Robert, exactly what a prison wife experiences. According to another essay I read the term ‘wyfie’ is also used to refer to a prison wife. I can actually imagine Kev saying this to Robert and it would have been a good indicator to their prison dynamic if they went in the coercive manipulator route.
There’s so many stories about men in prison who fall into the prison wife role just to be safe, it seems to be a lot more common than people think. And yet, I feel like it’s something that is joked about. You hear phrases like “being someone’s bitch” thrown around in regards to men in prison and, of course, the classic “don’t drop the soap!” which trivialises and makes light of sexual assault in prisons (especially men’s).
Soaps love doing issue based storylines, especially when they dip into never before done territory, and I feel like exploring this dynamic and life in prison through a very popular legacy character like Robert Sugden would make for much more powerful and informative storytelling than what we got.
There were moments pre-Kev that felt like they were hinting that Robert had been sexually assaulted in prison. There was his nightmare where he was whimpering “please don’t”, his reaction to Vic touching his leg when he was asleep, Joe calling Robert a lackey. It really felt like they were going in that direction and when we heard news about a prison husband I thought they were doing it.
We were robbed of something potentially so good.
