One of the central duties of the Director of Public Prosecutions is to inspire society’s faith in the criminal justice system. But through a number of wayward judgments, current incumbent Alison Saunders is hardly succeeding in that task.

Following the furore sparked by her refusal - subsequently overturned - to bring charges against Labour peer Lord Janner over serious allegations of child abuse, she finds herself embroiled in another row, this time over the incendiary issue of rape.

In a controversial statement this week, Ms Saunders urged that a woman who wakes up in a man’s bed with no memory of the previous evening should seek support from a rape counsellor and contact the police if there is any suspicion that an offence could have been committed.

Controversial: The director of public prosecutions has encouraged women to report rapes even when they can't remember what happened (file photo)

Loss of memory due to extreme drunkenness should be no bar to making a complaint, argued Ms Saunders.

‘We would encourage anyone who has thought they might have been raped and weren’t capable of consenting to go to the police,’ she said.

The hardline feminist lobby will no doubt be cheering her comments to the echo. But her dismissal of any idea that intoxication might play a role in an unfortunate or regretted liaison paints women as perpetual, helpless victims who are not to be held responsible for their actions.

Furthermore, it suggests that all men are dangerous predators eager to exploit them, and the only form of protection for women is the full rigour of the law. Common sense, restraint, self-preservation and rationality don’t come into it.

Alison Saunders’s contribution - in which she even argued that women should go to a support group ‘if they can’t remember what happened’ - is exactly in line with utterances of other feminists who see the judicial system as a vehicle for promoting their agenda.

Indeed, earlier this year, Dame Elish Angiolini QC, former Lord Advocate of Scotland, called for a change in the law so that a woman would be deemed incapable of giving any sort of consent to sex if she had been drinking heavily.

Others have demanded that men be required to obtain explicit verbal consent at every stage of sexual interaction, while women should be allowed to say ‘No’ at any point during the process.

As an author and academic, I think this approach is profoundly misguided, doctrinaire and counter-productive.

By saying that, I am not trying to diminish the horrific impact of rape, which is one of the darkest crimes in our society.

'Profoundly misguided': Director of public proseuctions Alison Saunders

Nor am I denying that memory loss can be caused by date-rape drugs administered by men intent on sexually assaulting their victims.

Of course, the full force of the law should be brought to bear in all such cases.

Indeed, it is precisely because rape and sexual assault are such serious crimes that I feel so strongly about this. Rape is simply too important to be left to radical feminists intent on ignoring the nuanced complexities of human relationships and the hard realities of behavioural consequences.

There is nothing pro-women about ignoring alcohol intake on the issue of consent. On the contrary, such an approach does women a terrible disservice — it paints them as vulnerable, infantalised victims, devoid of personal responsibility.

If a women gets so drunk that she has no recollection of how she ended up in bed with a man, then her problem is not one of consent, but of alcohol abuse.

The fact is that until the feminists began to dictate public policy, women were guarded by social convention. The biggest shield protecting women was not the heavy-handed intrusion of the law, but rather the mores of society.

Women were encouraged to avoid trouble by not going to bed on a first date, not getting mind- numbingly drunk, not dressing provocatively and not walking through crime spots alone late at night.

In the real world where men are physically stronger than women and 96 per cent of serious crimes are perpetrated by men, such precautions were just sensible, not really any different to urging householders to lock their doors and windows to avoid burglaries.

But to the feminists, such advice is an outrage. They want a world where women can do whatever they want and never have to deal with the consequences.

A classic example of their thinking occurred in April when the Sussex police distributed a safety poster encouraging women to stick together on a night out. Perfectly sensible advice, but the feminists reacted with indignation and the poster was withdrawn. The trouble is that a perpetually offended outlook is not promoting maturity, but self-indulgent recklessness.

In the hit movie As Good As It Gets, Jack Nicholson’s character, a misogynistic writer, is asked by a fan how he can capture women so well on the page.

‘I think of a man, and then I take away accountability and reason,’ he replies. Paradoxically, that is what the feminist lobby seems to be doing about consent.

There is also a huge element of hypocrisy about their stance. If a woman is considered to be incapable of giving consent because of the influence of drink, why should a drunken man be held responsible for his actions? Or does memory loss work only on one side?

Moreover, the feminists refuse to recognise the differences in the sexes. One of the central themes of their philosophy is that gender is a socially imposed construct, that women — when freed from the bonds of patriarchal expectations — should be free to behave exactly like men, from laddish drinking to serial promiscuity.

But this is fantasy land. Men are equipped very differently not just in physical terms, but emotionally, too, which means they can more easily have sex — even with people they don’t particularly like — without psychological damage.

In fact, there is little doubt that sex is more of an animalistic impulse and necessity with them, which is exactly why social traditions evolved to protect women.

Yet feminists want to ignore the lessons of history and biology. Nor do they allow any room for the subtleties of human exchange. Academic studies have shown that women have a wide range of non-verbal strategies for signalling their interest in sex, from gestures to looks.

Men are not always experts at interpreting these signals, but that is not entirely their fault.

One recent study at Texas University revealed that 61 per cent of sexually experienced female undergraduates had said ‘No’ when they really intended to have sex.

As Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, said: ‘What does a woman want?’ It is a question that has eternally perplexed and intrigued men. Yet it is precisely this intrigue and allure that the hard-line feminists want to destroy.

In their world, the sexual act between a man and a woman should be turned into a bureaucratic exercise where the male partner has to get verbal permission for every new step towards greater intimacy.

Even a woman eagerly stripping off her clothes and climbing into bed should not be taken as an indicator of consent.

But the big difficulty with this is that it diminishes the horror of rape. Where every misinterpreted fumble, disappointed coupling or drunken fling is classified as an assault, horrific, violent attacks that merit criminal prosecution are devalued.

It is the same pattern that has happened with the recent catalogue of child abuse scandals, in which false accusations from disturbed individuals are undermining the fight against real abusers.

The feminist lobby loves to point to the relatively low conviction rate for rape charges — currently 57 per cent — as evidence of a sexist judiciary that needs to change.

But it should be pointed out that at 2,581, the number of convictions for rape last year was the highest ever.

More importantly, the dogmatic feminists have undermined their own cause by pushing the question of consent beyond its logical breaking point. Unlike them, judges and juries still inhabit a world of common sense.