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.”

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