When it comes to date rape there is a line of thinking that if a woman is sexually aggressed there is nothing that would have lessened by one iota the likelihood of her being raped or assaulted — and if you think there is, then you’re an enemy of women.

I can see why people are so hardcore on the subject: the alternative viewpoint — that wearing pretty clothes, going out at night and enjoying a drink and male company means you are “asking for it” — is as morally repellent as it is patently nonsensical, to say nothing of prehistorically misogynistic.

But since everyone is agreed that rape is a) vile and b) under-reported, and since nobody is on the side of the rapist or aggressor, it seems mad to me that the debate should get mired in black and white absolutes.

The truth of the matter is that most of the issues occupy an underdiscussed grey area — underdiscussed because the subject has been smothered by political correctness of the most irritating sort. If you dare to suggest that lying comatose on the pavement, alone, with your skirt rucked up and your knickers showing at the end of an alcohol-fuelled night is not necessarily a terribly good idea, you’re slapped down by the sisterhood (whom I expect don’t get out much, and who probably haven’t visited a city centre at chucking out time for a good few decades. Emerging blinking from the Groucho club doesn’t count).

A police study published last week found that alcohol is the main factor in most date rape sex attacks, and that those old tabloid favourite “date rape drugs”, Rohypnol and GBH, feature so little that they are heading for urban myth territory.

A 12-month study, Operation Matisse, was ordered by chief constables. It used scientists to examine 120 cases of date rape; they found traces of GBH in only two cases. But of the 120 cases, 119 involved the victim having drunk alcohol — enough to put her three times over the limit in 22 cases. Only traces of drink were found in 63 cases. Drugs were found in 57 cases, both prescription and recreational; of the latter, cannabis and cocaine were the most common. The 120 cases involved victims who believed themselves to have experienced, or suspected, a drug-assisted rape in the previous 72 hours. But the drug in question was, more often than not, alcohol — and the victims had consumed it willingly.

Now drinking — a little or a lot — is what people do. No young woman goes out on a Friday night with the clear intention of remaining stone-cold sober; nor does she make a special effort to look as plain as possible. She’s dressed up and made up. She is likely to drink quite a lot, and, it being 2006, she is quite likely to add to her consumption with the odd line of coke.

She may pop a pill or two on top, she may drink that fifth cocktail knowing she shouldn’t really, she may have to go and stand outside for a bit because she feels dizzy. And then, hopefully, she’ll walk home with her friends, drink two pints of water and have nothing more alarming than a bad hangover to deal with in the morning.

And all of that is fine: having just described my own late teens and early twenties, I’m hardly going to sit in moral judgment on a lifestyle that will be familiar to young women of all ages and backgrounds (not least Rod Stewart’s daughter Kimberly, 27, whose partying ways have resulted in “very serious liver damage”, he said last week).

However, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you choose, as you are free to do, to wander about drunk and not wearing many clothes, it might be an idea to wear a coat to cover up your tiny dress when it’s time to roam the streets looking for an unlicensed minicab to take you home. It might be an idea to educate yourself about unlicensed minicabs in the first place. Or indeed not to sit on the laps of the group of lairy boys you meet on the night bus and give them the “ cuddle” they’re baying for.

No, of course neither they nor the minicab driver nor the dodgy man eyeing you up in the street has any right over your person: nobody does. But that sentence presupposes we all live in the same moral universe, where people are good and righteous and respect personal boundaries. And it’s a spectacularly naive assumption to make.

In an ideal world you could cartwheel home not wearing anything at all and know that you were safe, because anyone you might pass understood fully that they had no right whatsoever to touch a hair on your head. In this utopia you could also get the grubby man who never opens his curtains to babysit, and ask the local hoodies to keep an eye on your unlocked car.

In the real world there are predatory men with demented, damaged ideas about women. There are confused men who don’t understand the mixed messages many of us sometimes give out inadvertently — especially if we are young and confused ourselves, and have spent all night flirting massively only to shriek with shock and disgust if the object of our flirtation dares to lunge. There are men who believe what they see on telly, online and in their silly little magazines — that all women, everywhere, are gagging for it.

Pointing out that these men exist doesn’t mean women are in any sense to blame for their existence. It doesn’t mean women shouldn’t continue to do what modern women do. But it does mean that there is a problem, and since it is a problem that affects women, there is no point or sense is sticking our heads in the sand and repeating, in the old 1970s phrase, “whatever we wear, wherever we go, yes means yes and no means no” — because, frankly, the guy planning on pinning you down in 20 minutes’ time isn’t listening.

I repeat, the problem isn’t originated by women. But since all of us are its potential victims, splitting hairs about feminist theory and getting irate at the fact that the world isn’t how it’s supposed to be doesn’t get one far: it’s like going to bed with the door unlocked and the windows open because nobody has a right to help themselves to your property.

Instead of wittering on about how horrid it is that women are sexually assaulted (no! really?), take precautions. Wear a coat, carry a mobile, make sure you’re not alone if you’re incapacitated, stay at a friend’s rather than totter home in the dark, and learn kickboxing. None of these will make you safe, but they may make you safer. And that, surely, is the point.

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