The poll of more than 1,000 men and women suggests that the vast strides towards equal rights for women in the public spheres of work, pay and reproductive health have not been matched by advances in the more private field of sexual behaviour.

Women’s rights groups said that they were astounded and saddened by the findings, which appear to reflect widespread misconceptions that women are sexually available and that some men simply cannot help themselves.

Campaigners also said that the survey provided a sobering insight into why the conviction rate for rape prosecutions at jury trial are falling at a time when the laws on rape and consent have been tightened. The results also suggested that a significant number of people still think of rape as a crime involving a stranger, when in fact an estimated 80 per cent of rapes are committed by someone known to the victim.

Although the number of rapes reported to the police has gone up in recent years, the number of convictions has stayed constant, producing a dramatic drop in the conviction rate from 33 per cent in 1977 to just over 5 per cent today.

Kate Allen, of Amnesty International UK, which commissioned the ICM survey of 1,095 adults in Britain, said that the findings should act as a wake up call to the Government. “The poll also reveals the scale of public ignorance of the unacceptably high number of women raped every year in the UK,” she added.

Only 4 per cent of respondents thought that the number of women raped every year exceeded 10,000, when experts believe that the figure is more than 50,000.

The survey also found that 26 per cent of adults believed that a women was partially or totally responsible for being raped if she was wearing sexy or revealing clothing. Some 22 per cent held the same view if a woman had had many sexual partners. Similarly, 30 per cent said that a woman was partially or totally responsible for being raped if she was drunk.

Amnesty said that the findings for men and women were very similar. Vera Baird, MP, who heads the Fawcett Society’s Commission on Women and the Criminal Justice System, said: “We tend to blame the low conviction rate on failures in the police and judicial systems. But if juries are thinking like this, then improving the procedures is not going to make much difference. The attitudes in this survey are glib and outdated. They implicitly mean that the guy can’t help himself.”

Jenny Watson, acting chairwoman of the Equal Opportunities Commission, said: “There still seems to be an assumption that women are sexually available, so if a woman has gone out to have a good time, then she must want to have sex.”

Sheila Coates, the director of South Essex Rape and Incest Crisis Centre, said that victims — who often blame themselves — are reflecting the blame they can face from society. “Most women and girls who contact us will say, ‘This was my own fault’,” she said. “That’s the mirror of what goes on in a court case. While we have juries who are uninformed, we’re going to have rapists set free to do it again and again.”

She called on the Government to mount a campaign to highlight the facts about sexual violence. “We would expect to see the Government taking that seriously and doing an awareness campaign about sexual violence in the same way they ran an awareness campaign about wearing a seatbelt.”

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