It was late and, yes, I’d had quite a few cocktails. I was fumbling for my keys on the street outside my flat when a man stepped out of the darkness and punched me three times in the face – twice in the jaw, once in the mouth – and stole my bag. Two of my front teeth broke in half and the damage to my jaw meant I had to eat mush through a straw for the next month.

My neighbour called the police who were sympathetic. They said the assault was GBH and sent an artist round to produce a sketch of my attacker. Ten months later, I picked the police’s suspect out of a lineup and was called to give evidence against him in court. But shortly before the trial date, I received a brief email from the police saying I had been “de-warned”. I had no idea what that meant.

“Phobe [sic], De warning means the case is not going a head [sic]. No witnesses are required for trial. Case has been dropped,” my designated witness care officer wrote.

I turned to the officer in charge of my case for a fuller explanation. He said the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) didn’t think the artist’s sketch and the suspect looked alike. Moreover, “they have grave concerns about the fact that you had been drinking on the night”. The case had been dropped, he said, due to lack of evidence.

The responsibility of testifying against someone I’d seen briefly at night more than a year-and-a-half earlier had been weighing heavily on me. Someone’s freedom might be at stake. But I had not anticipated another moral judgment – one in which I had no say. I had gone out, had a few drinks and so was not credible. I had held the entitled conviction of a middle-class, white British woman that all victims of violent crime could expect access to justice. They can’t, it turns out – and particularly not if they have been drinking.

There is currently no single coherent piece of legislation protecting the rights of victims in the British criminal justice system. A recently published inspector’s survey found that communications between the CPS and victims are routinely slow and “lack empathy”. This inspection concluded that victims of violent crime are being failed by the CPS.

There’s no data on how many cases, like mine, are dropped because the primary witness had been drinking. There are of course many male victims of physical, sexual and domestic abuse, but most of the available statistics measuring prosecution rates focus on violence against women and girls.

Somewhere between 15% and 20% of physical and sexual offences against women and girls are reported to the police, of which 6% will result in conviction. In cases where the offender is charged, that figure rises to around 73%. Convictions in rape cases fell to 56.9% last year. The most common reason these cases fail or are dropped is attrition – victims are so worn down by the process that they decide to abandon the pursuit of justice altogether. When Keir Starmer was head of the CPS from 2008 to 2013, he saw a huge problem in these low reporting rates. Victims of violent crime overwhelmingly don’t trust the criminal justice system: “If you’ve got a system where most victims don’t come forward and most victims who do come forward say they wouldn’t do so again, then you’ve got a system that needs improving.”

“When you report a burglary, the first series of questions by the police are not usually, are you telling the truth, are you sure you locked the back window? The starting assumption is: listen to what is being said. Violence against women and girls is not historically treated in that way,” Starmer says.

Senior figures in both the police force and the CPS, including Starmer and his successor, Alison Saunders, have introduced new training programmes and policies to tackle systemic victim-blaming; a record number of people are now being convicted for crimes against women and girls in England and Wales. But, there are around 120,000 police officers in the UK, and the CPS processes hundreds of thousands of cases a year. It can take one misplaced comment at any stage in the criminal justice process to dissuade a victim from pursuing a conviction.

One former social worker, now working for Victim Support, told me about her own experience a few years ago: “My partner decided to try to kill me with an axe. The initial police officer was great, the Public Protection Unit was great, but I was called from the police station by the custody sergeant, who said they needed to release my then husband on bail and would I be able to receive him back into the house? I said: ‘Of course I can’t, he tried to kill me with an axe.’”

In my experience, every officer I came into contact with said my case was being taken very seriously – it was important that I attend a lineup and testify in court to protect other potential victims. At no point was I given any indication that my character or behaviour might be scrutinised. I wasn’t told anything of what to expect when I arrived at court, whether the CPS would provide me with a solicitor, or what lines of questioning the defence might pursue. But because my case failed to satisfy CPS standards for reasonable hope of conviction, I didn’t get that far.

Florence Burton did. She was also encouraged by the police to make a statement and go to court after she and a friend were beaten up on a night out. Unlike my case, the assault they suffered was public, their injuries well documented and the perpetrator well known to police.

“When I got to court, I met with my lawyer for a couple of seconds then went into court with really no idea what to expect at all. It turned out this guy [the defendant] had quite a good lawyer because he was in witness protection for something else he’d done. I was shredded,” Burton says.

“I had no idea that the fact I’d been drinking would discredit me. There were other witnesses and there were photographs of my injuries, but the case was struck out because it was ruled there wasn’t enough evidence.”

Siobhan Blake, deputy chief crown prosecutor, admits the CPS could improve their witness briefing. “The CPS is running pilots looking at the way we discuss, with victims and witnesses, the court process. We’re intending to roll out next year an enhanced system of explanation to victims and witnesses. We’ve identified that as a key area. It’s not meant to be a memory test. Or in any way a situation designed to trick people or trip them up.”

Yet several criminal lawyers I spoke to were amazed that I didn’t anticipate my case stumbling on the grounds that I’d been drinking. Only an “idiot witness”, one told me, wouldn’t work out for themselves that their alcohol intake would be an issue. In cases dependent on witness testimony, our adversarial legal system pits one person’s word against another. The defence is not allowed to hector or harass a witness, but the victim of an assault must expect their character to be scrutinised and their choices interrogated. How much could they really remember? Did anyone think they seemed drunk that night? How often do they drink and how much?

In cases of sexual assault where proving or disproving consent is the critical issue, cross-examination can be particularly traumatic. But the system sees its purpose to convict the guilty and acquit the innocent, regardless of the vulnerability of a witness.

Sarah Vine, a criminal barrister who specialises in sex cases, explains that her approach to questioning a witness “is not about you being discredited, regarded as a liar. It’s about the forensic, almost objective, reliability of your evidence.”

The low conviction rate of sexual assaults in Britain, Vine suggests, is not a failure but rather evidence of a robust, effective criminal justice system. The stigma that comes with a conviction for sexual assault or domestic violence is so great – a “mark of Cain”- that Vine is adamant it must be proven to the highest possible criminal standard. The worst outcome is the conviction of an innocent. “You can’t have a system where you can just walk in and go, I demand this happens because I said so,” she says. Another senior barrister explains: “When we come to assess a witness, all of us take into account certain parts of their behaviour. If they are a 50-year-old charity worker who has led an unblemished life, we are more inclined to believe them than a 23-year-old with 50 drug convictions. I wouldn’t want to go through it,” she adds. “It’s not a pleasant process. It’s uncomfortable even when there’s not much at stake. But what’s the alternative?”

On 25 January, Keir Starmer, now Labour MP for Holborn and St Pancras, will launch a Victim Support bill. If it becomes law, this will be the first piece of governance around victims’ rights in the UK, providing a framework for victims’ services and a legally enforceable code for victims – including the right to question the CPS on a decision not to pursue a case.

Shortly after I was mugged, a concerned middle-aged man of some considerable intelligence and seniority asked me: “What could you have done differently? Had you been drinking?” Well, I could have drunk less or nothing at all. I could have taken a taxi home rather than the night bus. I could have had a more organised handbag and found my keys more quickly. But I didn’t. So?

Two years later, I still get vivid flashes of the person who mugged me, mostly when they’re least helpful. I feel uncomfortable walking home alone late at night. I’m generally a lot jumpier than I used to be. It is, of course, possible alcohol could have prevented me from remembering details of that night but in my case, sadly, it didn’t.