FEMALE call handlers at Wiltshire’s emergency services have reported feeling “violated” after receiving a barrage of sexually aggressive calls, including rape threats.

On Monday night, Channel 4’s fly-on-the-wall show 999: What’s Your Emergency? revealed the full extent of sexually deviant behaviour aimed at emergency services call handlers.

In the first episode of the new series, centred on Swindon, one woman, Jen Marshall, who is the first point of contact for people requiring an ambulance, spoke candidly about the abuse she has received.

After revealing that a man threatened to rape her, she said: “That automatically instils so much fear in you. And you know, realistically, it’s not going to happen. But just that threat is enough to make you feel almost violated already. It feels really awful.”

The episode focused on Swindon’s well-known problem with flashers and perverts.

“What more can be done to tackle a problem that’s as old as man and womankind?” said the show’s narrator.

Figures released in March revealed the full extent of the problem, resulting in the town being labelled the “pervert capital of the UK”.

It was found that roughly one person in every 2,310 people living in Swindon will engage in sexually inappropriate behaviour such as flashing or voyeurism - three times higher than the national average.

In Wiltshire, two thirds of police and ambulance call handlers are female.

Laura Plamer, who works for the South Western Ambulance Service, said: “Sometimes they play porn down the phone, which is extremely uncomfortable.

“I’ve had a colleague who a man has told her is tapping his penis on the phone, and she said you could actually hear it tapping.”

Commenting on the problem, one police officer, PC Ian Woodward, said: “Some men don’t think about how their behaviour is affecting women. They just become overly sexual and overly aggressive.”

The programme features on Channel 4 every Monday night.