We have to start treating rape as a serial crime

The idea is deeply abhorred by groups such as Women's Aid and the Rape Crisis Centre, which provide stalwart advocacy for women. It is fiercely championed by groups that seek to attack feminism, such as the UK Men's Movement, and by legal groups which are dominated by men, such as the Scottish Law Society.

Seen as a demand that is designed to protect men from the stigma of false accusation of rape, the possibility of granting anonymity for men as well as women in rape trials has been discounted by David Blunkett, even though a Commons Select Committee (chaired by a man, Chris Mullin, in case you were wondering) last month suggested that it should be adopted.

But if the extraordinary events of the last few days have taught us anything – and they should be able to teach us quite a lot – it is that accusation alone, even of an unnamed alleged assailant, can trigger an outpouring of frenzied, escalating, outrage. Simply trickling allegations into the public domain can result in a "verdict" and a "sentence" that a court would – and often is – extremely hard-pushed to achieve.

Back in the Seventies, when women were treated like dirt by the police and the courts when they made an accusation of rape, two-thirds of men charged with the crime were found guilty. Now that the police have been largely re-educated and retrained, and that the courts have developed at least some understanding of how a rape trial for a woman is a re-enactment of her ordeal, convictions are at an all-time low.

Some of this is due to our changing understanding of what constitutes rape. Back in the days when many more trials ended in convictions, rapes were conducted only at knifepoint, outdoors, by strangers. These monstrous acts continue. But now rapes are also committed against pissed girls who went back to the flats of young men they didn't know, then realised too late that the acceptance of late-night hospitality alone was considered by their host to be "consent".

The trouble is that while women are constantly told that the latter act is a crime that can be just as damaging as the former, the very stigma that has been rightly heaped up around the word "rapist" means that when it's a woman's word against a man's, the very heinousness of the crime means that juries will give the accused the "benefit of the doubt". As things stand, we women are hoist by our own petard. Rape is taken very seriously now, so seriously that people are loath to deliver a verdict against a man that can ruin him forever, unless they are very sure indeed that the accusation is rock solid.

Rape, more than ever, is bound up with reputation. When rape cases fail at trial, or when they fail to be taken up by the Crown Prosecution Service, or when the woman feels so unable to offer proof that she doesn't even report it, worries about the reputation of accuser or accused are dominant.

But this adversarial system, pitting individual against individual, offers little acknowledgement of the real nature of rape. Rapists have to be apprehended not just because they have committed an awful crime, but because unless they are stopped, they'll keep right on doing it. We need to convict our rapists not merely to save our own reputations, but in order to protect others from what we know our assailants to be capable of.

We're now quite familiar with the situation whereby a high-profile sex-crime case attracts other people who come forward to say that they, too, have suffered at the hands of this man. I'd like to see this situation reversed. I'd like anonymity for the man at the time of trial, partly because the inequality of anonymity at the moment skews matters so that the accuser has little reputation to lose, while the accused has much reputation to lose, and partly because further accusations made after the fact can be seen as opportunistic or even simply "colourful".

As a quid pro quo for this concession, I'd like to see a system whereby women who individually may not feel that their case holds water can approach the police in the knowledge that they may be able to have their complaint registered at the time on an integrated and highly encrypted database. The understanding would be that they may be called in future to give pattern-of-behaviour evidence at a future trial.

If this sounds to you like a grotesque infringement of human rights, then you won't be comforted to know that the legal process is moving modestly in this direction already. Indeed, the serial acquittal of men accused of rape has already inspired a radical rethink of the sort of evidence about male sexual history that can be put before a jury.

In the white paper Justice For All, it is suggested that previous convictions, and even previous acquittals that show up behaviour patterns, can be given in evidence at rape trials under the discretion of the judge. I think this should, as I say, be extended to included previous complaints not deemed at the time to be strong enough for the CPS to proceed.

Men's groups, so heavily in denial about the appalling rape statistics, will be quick to suggest that this could allow covens of mad, bad and dangerous women to orchestrate bodies of false accusation. The fact is that women do sometimes make false accusations of rape. In one recent case in Scotland, a man committed suicide after his ex-girlfriend had accused him of rape. She later admitted that her accusation had been fabricated.

Again, this obscene behaviour, so damaging to women as well as men, is much to do with the ruination of reputation that smear alone can bring. Anonymity for both parties will hugely weaken the temptation to make false accusations, while a register would track serial accusers – such creatures are not unknown because there's compensation involved here – alongside the serially accused.

On the whole, though, the threat from serial accusers is not so great as men's rights campaigners suggest. With only around 7 per cent of rape trials ending in conviction, the temptation for men with a burning conviction that the statistics suggest too many rapists around for them to be true is to look at things in stark black and white, and make the outrageous claim that 93 per cent of rape accusations are therefore false. My own view is that actually a small amount of men are committing a large amount of abuse. Group actions will take rapists off the streets in a way that individual actions cannot.

Each rape, in a real sense, is a crime against women generally, and the law should try to reflect this. The trouble with sex crimes is that we struggle hard to treat them like other crimes against the person, when they are partly based on the presumption that the police detect the identity of a criminal and may be tempted to round up known criminals again and again. In rape, it is the victim who goes to the police with a name. That danger does not exist.

A woman must have an incentive to approach the police and offer evidence against a person that she feels may subject others in future to the sort of treatment she had, even when she feels that it will count for little by itself. Waiting until the man in question is splattered all over the papers, be they national or local, is not the way we should be drifting.

d.orr@independent.co.uk