editorial comment Quote: Six out of 10 women who have been raped do not perceive the attack as rape, however, even though most of them suffer bruising or other injuries. And they say you're on drugs.........

A new study shows more rapes are reported now than ever before but convictions are falling. Experts blame the new binge drinking culture, reports Lois Rogers



It’s a typical Saturday night in south London and 50 or more young adults are crammed into a smart house, celebrating a friend’s 25th birthday. Downstairs a large group are dancing manically. The front door is open and new faces regularly join the throng. All are welcome. Most have met at previous parties and only two or three strangers wander in.
Upstairs people crowd into the small rooms or hang out in the hallway smoking, drinking and chatting. Some of the dancers have taken ecstasy tablets; their pupils are dilated and their faces are sweaty. Others nip in and out of the bathroom, conspiratorial over lines of cocaine.



At 3am one girl feels ill and asks a friend, a young man she met a few weeks earlier, to help her to one of the unoccupied bedrooms so she can lie down. Once in the room, he kisses her. Then, taking advantage of her condition, he has sex with her against her will while the party rages just feet away beyond the closed door. She protests, but is too drunk to stop him.

Legally she has been raped, but when her friends find her they help her shrug it off as “just one of those things”.

For many of today’s twentysomething women that is how rape happens. Not by a predator in an alleyway, but by a man she knows in what she thought were safe surroundings. She will probably be too dazed by drugs and booze to defend herself. And there is no question of going to the police. Who would believe that she had not consented to sex?



THE number of rapes reported annually in Britain is at an all-time high of 11,700 — of which only one in 20 leads to a criminal conviction, an all-time low.

Yet, according to the biggest-ever study of rape in Britain, commissioned by the Home Office and published on Friday, the real number of rapes per year in this country is at least 47,000.

The study, carried out by the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit at London Metropolitan University, claims that an extraordinary proportion of the British female population — at least a quarter — has suffered rape or attempted rape.

It found that more than eight out of 10 rapes involve an attack by someone the victim knows; and more than half the victims have been drinking or are high on drugs before they are assaulted.

Six out of 10 women who have been raped do not perceive the attack as rape, however, even though most of them suffer bruising or other injuries.

Psychologists investigating sex offenders believe drink and drug-taking have changed attitudes to rape.

“It is a worrying trend,” said Gerald Bailes, a forensic psychologist in Northampton. “Rapists are rarely mentally ill, it is a behaviour linked to personality.

“We have this culture of getting off your head, which can lead to an increase in them expressing this type of behaviour.”

There is also an unspoken belief among some police officers that people have so much casual sex nowadays that consent is a blurred issue — and that intercourse against the woman’s will is less traumatic than it was for previous generations.
While nearly half of attacks happen in the victim’s or attacker’s home, many others occur at parties, pubs or clubs.



Gina, a 21-year-old student from Devon, recalled yesterday what happened when she went to a local bar last weekend with friends from her university course. She got drunk and was raped by two men who followed her into a lavatory.

She said: “I was so drunk that I couldn’t think of the word to make them stop. I called the police the next day, but I couldn’t remember what the men looked like. I think they could tell how drunk I had been.”

With female binge drinking on the increase, the victims only hazily aware of what happened or reluctant to add to their humiliation by reporting incidents — and the police reluctant to prosecute except in unambiguous cases — have predatory young males been handed a “rapists’ charter”?

Pete, 27, a publicist from Kent, is one of an increasing number of young men using the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra. He and his friends regularly buy 20 tablets for a mere £8 from the internet, taking them before going to parties and clubs to meet women.

While a night of boozing might in the past have diminished their sexual function or appetite, with Viagra both are enhanced. Drugs such as cocaine and ecstasy can have a similar effect.

“Viagra is great,” Pete said. “It’s cheap, it makes you feel horny all night and you can mix it with speed, cocaine or ecstasy to add to the fun. Loads of men I know take it to enhance their sex lives.

“You don’t want to waste it by going home alone. Viagra makes you need sex. You might not be able to talk without slurring, but you can have sex.”

Some men say they are genuinely confused by the behaviour of young women. Nick, 25, a television press officer, deeply regrets a “misunderstanding” with a friend which led to her saying he had forced her to have sex against her will.

He said: “I was out with two girls, flirting and drinking. Eventually the three of us went back to my place and the other girl went to bed. We started drunkenly kissing and one thing led to another.

“Eventually we were having sex on the sofa when she suddenly broke away crying. Then she just left. I was baffled because it seemed to have been going well.”

A year later a mutual friend told him she considered the experience a rape. “It didn’t seem that way to me, and I keep racking my brains to work out when I crossed that invisible line.”

The view from across the line is illuminating. “I felt it would be easier to let him do it than cause a scene,” Cheri, a 28-year-old secretary, said yesterday. She had been drinking and was raped at a friend’s house by a work colleague while her friends slept nearby.

“I told him I didn’t want to have sex, but he was insistent and I didn’t want to have to make my way home in the middle of the night. I felt violated and wretched, but I know lots of people who have had similar experiences and it’s not the done thing to kick up a fuss.”
Other women agreed. “It would be really frowned upon to accuse someone you know of something like that,” said one.
Another was raped when she let a male friend share her bed after a drunken party.



She said: “I put up a bit of a fight, but I was drunk and he was stronger. It didn’t even occur to me to go to the police. He was friends with my friends and I felt it was partly my fault for letting him get into bed with me.”

A 26-year-old primary school teacher from Birmingham said so many of her friends had suffered unfortunate sexual liaisons that they laughed about it.

“At the time it can be fairly upsetting to feel that you’ve been raped, but it is easy to see how the confusion happens: a bit of innocent flirting, too much booze and coke and it’s hard to stay in control,” she said.



THE culture of drink and drugs dominating Britain’s urban social scene has clouded perceptions of acceptable behaviour, according to the study by London Metropolitan University.

Jo Lovett, one of the lead authors, said that the rise in rape allegations from 1,842 in 1985 to 11,675 in 2002 indicated a growing willingness to report assaults. But they estimate that three out of every four rapes are still not being reported.

“I don’t think there are necessarily more rapes; there has just been a shift in the context,” said Lovett.

“Predatory rapists no longer hang around in public places; they just go to pubs.

“But this whole issue is still about women having to comply with the desires of men, and I don’t think anything will change unless we tackle this head on.”

The aim of the study was to dispel the myths surrounding sexual assaults, to investigate ways of preventing them and to improve the victims’ chances of getting justice. The team tracked the experience of 3,527 women who had gone to sexual assault referral centres or to the police with allegations of rape in six cities including London, Manchester and Leeds.

Only 322 cases proceeded to criminal trials and of those only 77 resulted in any sort of conviction. The biggest problem for victims remains the hurdle of being believed. “Most of the time the women never get the chance to have their complaint tested in court because the police or the prosecution service drop the case long before that,” said Claire Glasman, a spokeswoman for the charity Women Against Rape.

“Women are initially very keen to see justice done, but once they have been grilled by the police or asked if they really want to send a man to prison, they often back off.” She pointed out that the Soham murderer Ian Huntley had been reported nine times for sex crimes including rape, one of them involving an 11-year-old girl, but none led to a conviction.

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