Every 34 minutes a rape is reported to the police in the United Kingdom. Thousands more victims do not come forward.

Yet three-quarters of local authorities have no services for rape victims and only one in twenty rapes reported to the police leads to a conviction. This failure to bring rapists to justice amounts to a near licence to rape.

Women are being failed by the criminal justice system, and left with nowhere to turn for support.

It's chilling to see that this is happening. It's an issue for everyone to grapple with. Too often we bring our own preconceptions about the causes of rape, policemen and women, jurors, judges and lawyers. It is these preconceptions that are doing the damage.

Somehow there needs to be a paradigm shift in attitudes. Something profound needs to happen to our thinking, like we did with drink driving, like we did with same sex marriages, like we did with smoking. We need a shift in attitudes to rape. Too often people think that women who get drunk, wear revealing clothing bring a rape "on themselves". This attitude needs confronting, dismantling and turning into something positive. Also too often people think that accusations are malicious or to cover an infidelity.

For more information on this issue and to see where I got my stats from head over to http://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/ or http://www.amnesty.org.uk/content.asp?CategoryID=10220