Sam Pepper YouTube video: 'Indecent assault' pranks were bizarre social experiment to highlight plight of male sexual abuse victims

'I wanted to do something that would highlight the difference between abuse towards a woman and abuse towards a man,' he says in Part 3

Sam Pepper's first video showed him appearing to pinch the bottoms of random female members of the public

Turns out, Sam Pepper’s three-part video series, charmingly titled 'Fake Hand Ass Pinch Prank', wasn’t an attempt for him and a female actress to 'indecently assault' as many random people in the street as possible, as his critics on Twitter asserted.

They were actors. And the entire thing, he says in a third clip, was merely a gender reversal concept, misguidedly designed to shine a light on male victims of sexual harassment and domestic violence.

"I wanted to do something that would highlight the difference between abuse towards a woman and abuse towards a man in a social experiment, with you [the viewer] as unwitting participants at the heart of the experiment," he says in Part 3.

He made the decision to make the video series he said, after he admitted “feeling uncomfortable” when female fans pinch his bottom.

"We protect women as we rightly should and again I don't want to downplay that side of things but again we have to remember that men have the right not to assaulted or touched inappropriately.

"It's wrong and we should see any attack on another human, whether physical or verbal as an issue to be fought.

"Men have the highest suicide rate in the world and I think a lot of the time it's because we're told to hide our feelings and get on with it, women are allowed an outlet, they have people on both sides trying to protect them.

"For a man to ask for help in our current culture, it can be viewed as weak and pathetic which is the saddest thing at all."

He ends with a plea to viewers for the same support and standards to be applied to male victims as they are to women.

However, as Sandra Horley, chief executive of national domestic violence charity Refuge, stressed to The Independent recently, victims of abuse are still predominantly women.

"Domestic violence is always unacceptable," said Horley. "Regardless of age, background, gender or sexuality, there is no excuse for using violence against a partner."