By TOM RAWSTORNE for the Daily Mail
Three young men walked free from court having been cleared of rape in the last few days of September alone.
First, Joshua Lines was accused of forcing himself on an undergraduate friend following a boozy night out, despite being too drunk to even remember if they had sex.
Then there was Bartolomeo Joly de Lotbiniere, a high-flying York University student — also accused of attacking a woman after a night on the tiles — whose ‘victim’ only contacted police 14 months after the alleged incident when Joly de Lotbiniere appeared on a television quiz show.
And finally, trainee accountant George Owen was found not guilty after a jury was shown Facebook messages posted by his alleged victim in which she belittled the incident.
Given the evidence – or lack of it – many will question how these cases ever came to court. But far from being one-offs, they are part of a steady stream of cases which follow a strikingly similar pattern.
A young man and a young woman, often friends or acquaintances, have sex after a drunken night out. With no other witnesses to the act, the central issue is that of consent. While the man claims the woman agreed to sex, she says — sometimes many months after the event — that she did not.
In each case, the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was sufficient evidence for the case to be put before a jury.
Only after months of waiting, their lives put on hold, were the accused finally able to tell their side of the story in court.
Time and again, juries have either believed them or the cases against them have collapsed. But even though they have been able to walk free from court, their names will forever be publicly linked with the lurid claims and counter-claims of a rape case.
Because unlike their accusers, who under the law are rightly granted anonymity for life, they have no such protection.
Official statistics show there has been a dramatic increase in the number of allegations of rape made to police in the past few years.
While only a fraction of these allegations will ever reach court, there has also been a 25 per cent increase in the number of rape cases referred from the police to the CPS over the past five years.
Of the rape cases that ended up in court in 2015/16, 57.9 per cent resulted in conviction.
But it is worth noting that when taken against the total number of rape allegations reported to the police in that time frame, that represents a conviction rate of 7.5 per cent.
Last year jury acquittals accounted for more than 60 per cent of failed prosecutions — up from 51 per cent in 2011/2012.