Imagine this scene. A woman has been out one night, nothing too rowdy. It’s time to call it a night. But she can’t find a taxi for love or money so she starts to walk. And walk. And walk. By the time the taxis start appearing, she’s close to home, she’s enjoying the fresh air and figures she may as well walk the rest of the way home. It’s a busy road, a well-lit road. Apart from a dark bus stop.

A man is sitting on the bench and he puts his foot out as if to trip her. She tells him to be careful and walks towards home, perhaps a little faster. He gets up, follows her, catches her, puts an arm around her and over her mouth and tries to force her towards a hedge. She frees her head from his grip and screams and yells. The arm around her is feeling for her breast, the other hand is trying to make its way up her dress, she feels herself falling towards the hedge. She is still making a lot of noise. A swift elbow to his chest makes him lose his grip and she is able to get away. He runs off into the night.

She is a hysterical, teary, freaked-out mess. There is nobody around and the road is eerily quiet. She sends trembling, misspelt texts. Her housemate finds her and helps her home. She is safe but still shaking. She has a shower to wash him away and goes to bed, nursing a twisted ankle, a bleeding scratch on her right breast and another on her leg. The next day, everything is aching and she still feels like crap.

That night she decides to report the incident. After all, the next girl this creep jumps at might not be so lucky. But she gets a blame-the-victim interrogation. She is accused of making it up, the officer demands to know why nobody helped her, he asks her why she didn’t scream even though she made enough noise to wake the dead, the officer tries to confuse her story by suggesting it happened at a different time even though she can, through the evidence of sent and received text messages, pinpoint the exact time of the attack. He grunts derisively when she tells him she is unmarried. By the time the conversation gets too hard, she feels like she has been violated for a second time.

Surely this still doesn’t happen in 2006? Does it?