On Monday, BBC3, the corporation’s channel dedicated to teenagers and young adults, aired the latest documentary in its gender season, The Rise of Female Violence, in which presenter Alys Harte explored everything from alcohol-fuelled female street violence to knife attacks by girl gangs and female-perpetrated domestic abuse.

At the heart of the show were two questions: ‘Does society treat female-on-male violence less seriously than when the genders are reversed? And if so, why?’ A very good place to find the answers to both of these questions is in the one-sided gender narrative typified by BBC3 itself.

Here’s a selection of the channel's recent output: Murdered By My Boyfriend; Saving The Cyber Sex Girls; The World’s Worst Place to be a Woman?; Do We Live in a Sexist Country?; Girls Run The World; Murdered By My Father (a drama about female honour killing victim); Thirteen Lost Years (a drama about a young woman who escapes after being imprisoned in a cellar); and Is This Rape? Sex on Trial, which whatever your feelings about consent lessons, featured a young male rapist.

The most-recent in this parade of male murderers and abusers aired just a week before Monday’s female violence documentary, entitled Britain’s Biggest Sexists. An hour-long roll call of shame, it asked four comedians - three women and “a token man”, as the female presenter quipped at the start – to scrutinize everything from Lad Culture and pick up artists to discrimination against women in The City and sexist chants on football terraces. For the shows denouement, the comedians were asked to judge who they considered to be “Britain’s Biggest Sexist”.

Leah Green presented Britain's Biggest Sexists Credit: BBC3

The tone of the show was set in the opening seconds, when Guardian journalist and presenter Leah Green asserted that British society is rife with sexism against women, then informed viewers: “I’ll be teaching Britain’s men how to deal with us”.

I find that both smug and problematic - but that's not the issue, here, as Ms Green's words present a point of view that the BBC has every right to represent. What is a problem, however, is that it’s virtually the only point of view on gender issues the publicly-funded corporation is offering the nation’s teenagers and twenty-somethings.

In fact, as far as I can tell, there have only been two programmes in BBC3’s entire gender strand specifically addressing issues that affect young men – an exploration of men’s experiences of poor body image back in 2012, and the excellent documentary about male suicide by Professor Green. Only one other show in the series has veered from the narrative of men as abusers and women as victims - the documentary that triggered this article.

This one-sided depiction of gender politics isn’t just irritating to watch, it’s also surely a breach of the BBC’s requirements of balance and impartiality. Most importantly, though, it’s deeply irresponsible.

Britain’s Biggest Sexists for example was peppered with dodgy statements of fact and riddled with demeaning male stereotypes. Take this extraordinary description of the sexism supposedly faced by female university students from EverDaySexism’s Laura Bates: “You can’t get a book out of the library, you can’t go to eat that day, something happens in a lecture, I just don’t think people realise how pervasive it is”.

Or this from one of the female comedians: “My advice to young guys going to Uni would simply be, don’t be a dick”.

And another from the ‘token’ male comedian: “I think we should start distributing alternative songs across university campuses, the lyrics could just be like ‘please don’t rape people, it’s bad and also illegal’.”

What’s most damaging about this kind of one-sided portrayal of men is precisely the impact it’s likely to be having on the attitudes towards male suffering encountered in The Rise of Female Violence. I mean, if men are primarily framed as sexists and abusers, why would anyone care too much when women occasionally strike out, right?

In context of this relentlessly negative and sermonising portrayal of men and masculinity, what seemed most astonishing about The Rise of Female Violence’s wide-eyed questions about double standards in reactions to female abuse was that the show even asked them in the first place.

"BBC3’s gender series comes across as little more than a concerted effort to demonise young men" Dan Bell

At about fifty minutes in to Britain’s Biggest Sexists, during a section of the show addressing sexism against women in Parliament, we were shown a clip of Dominic Raab MP making this statement in the Commons: “From the cradle to the grave, men get a raw deal – work longer hours, die earlier and retire later than women”. Whether or not you agree with Raab that “men get a raw deal”, each of these inequalities faced men are entirely true; yet bizarrely and without explanation, Green mockingly dismissed his statement as just another example of male sexism.

Jess Phillips MP caused controversy for laughing at a proposal to debate men's rights

This instinctively sneering attitude towards men’s issues was recently displayed by Jess Phillips in her response to calls for a parliamentary debate to mark International Men’s Day. (In fact, appropriately enough, she herself appears in Britain’s Biggest Sexists, decrying the lack of female MPs.)

In fact, with its relentless series of negative male stereotypes, BBC3’s gender series comes across as little more than a concerted effort to demonise young men. How might this be affecting its teenage viewers, who are already fed a daily diet of negative social media propaganda about men and masculinity?

A glimpse of this was on show among the young audience of the Do We Live in a Sexist Country? debate – whose unbalanced panel comprised of three feminists, again including EveryDaySexism’s Laura Bates, and one female critic of feminism. Every assertion of injustice against women was met with cheers and applause, while attempts to raise issues that impact on men were met with stony silence or jeers and laughter.

A new study reveals that more middle-aged men are committing suicide in Britain than 7 years ago Credit: Alamy

As well as being required to remain balanced and impartial, the BBC’s core values are to “inform, educate and entertain”. That applies to boys as well as girls; men as well as women.

One moment in The Rise of Female Violence highlighted just how crucial it is that we approach gender issues with a sense of equality. It featured a police officer talking about a man who had narrowly escaped death after being stabbed with a kitchen knife by his wife.

The officer said: “I felt that Simon felt he had a certain responsibility as a man… just to play his part. If part of his relationship with his wife meant that he had to take knocks and verbal abuse and financial abuse and emotional abuse, which were all things that she did, he just saw that as part of his marital duty.”

So how about it BBC3? I’ve even come up with a few ideas to get you started: Who’s The Daddy? Young fathers fighting to stay in their children’s lives; Where Have All the Boys Gone? An exploration of the gender gap at university and The Disposable Male: why do we turn a blind eye to the fact ninety percent of rough sleepers are men?

At the start of Britain’s Biggest Sexists, viewers were told “sexism against women is now causing rage and controversy almost daily”. Yes it is. But it’s also just one side of the story.

Dan Bell is an award-winning journalist, Features Editor of insideMAN magazine and co-editor of the book insideMAN: Pioneering stories about men and boys