How would you react if you were raped? With rage? Distress? Misplaced shame, perhaps? All these would be understandable. One way I bet you wouldn’t react is to leave it for a year, before bumping into the same man in a bar and only then deciding to report it to police, telling Facebook friends: ‘It’s going to be so fun.’

Yet that’s precisely what one young woman did, thereby putting 21-year-old trainee accountant George Owen through 19 months of hell before he was acquitted by a jury last week.

He is the latest among an ever-swelling number of young men – students, usually – whose drunken fumbles have seen them charged with the vilest of crimes.

In case after sorry case, juries more often than not resolve that if the evidence amounts to ‘he said/she said’, and alcohol has been a factor, then it is not enough to send a man to jail.

George Owen, pictured, a trainee accountant accused of raping a college student during a night out but was cleared of wrongdoing

For some feminist campaigners, that is a betrayal of justice. For most of us, I suspect, it is little more than common sense.

There is just such a case at the heart of the ITV drama Liar, whose female ‘victim’ is shown again and again on the night in question drinking in a bar, then pouring huge glasses of red back home, and is therefore not believed when she cries rape.

We will have to wait to see how this story will play out, but it would be both brave and surprising if the writers made the accused man the true victim of the plot, and his accuser the villainess. I’m not holding my breath.

No matter how many young men like George Owen get acquitted in the real world, it remains the accepted wisdom on campuses around Britain that it is male students who must change their behaviour while women deserve only sympathy and understanding.

That is why, last week, Bristol University found itself accused of ‘downgrading’ its sexual consent workshop to an online course – a decision that has provoked inevitable outrage from women’s groups on campus. In the name of research, I took a look at the online course and found myself watching a short film about making tea for a woman.

Here’s what I learned: ‘If they don’t want tea, don’t make them drink it. If they are unconscious, don’t make them drink it. Make sure the unconscious person is safe.

George Owen, pictured, a trainee accountant accused of raping a college student during a night out but was cleared of wrongdoing

‘Just because you made a cup of tea, don’t make her drink it.’

It was hard to know whether to laugh or cry. Actually, it just made me furious. The truth is, we don’t need consent classes, online or otherwise, about tea-drinking. What we do need are urgent lectures about drinking alcohol more responsibly – and high on the curriculum should be the role it plays in giving women misplaced confidence.

I once spent a Friday night in Warrington, Cheshire, a university town notorious for the number of girls in the gutter come September, like so many fallen leaves, felled by 30 vodka shots for £30.

The girls might have looked as sexually confident as Rihanna, but they had inferiority complexes as tall as their shoes.

I found out that a female student who’d made the front pages because she was photographed asleep on her handbag in the gutter was, in reality, cripplingly shy, and mortified. ‘She got a bit silly,’ her friends said. The saddest thing I heard all night was from Joanna, who said: ‘I feel I’ve got nothing to say sober.’

It may be taboo to admit it, but alcohol lubricates the libido of women with low self-esteem. And men aren’t solely the predators; we can be that, too.

In my teens and 20s, I never got to the terrifying point where I took my clothes off, given I was teetotal until my 30s, but I ached for male attention.

Is it any wonder then that men sometimes struggle to work out whether the sozzled flirt who’s agreed to go home with him ‘wants a cup of tea’ or not.

Of course I know that unwanted attention from a man is frightening and should be punished.

I’ve been stalked by a huge, pugilistic neighbour, which meant I changed my behaviour: lock the door, never wear shorts, don’t engage with him in any way. I would never have asked him in.

The lesson we should be teaching young women is that while rape is never the victim’s fault, if you drunkenly invite a man into your bed, then change your mind, you cannot be certain where your story will end. Chances are it might be in a courtroom with a sceptical jury and two young lives in tatters.

And believe me, that’s not ‘going to be so fun’.