Next, we need to look at the way the police deal with rape. The big problem here, as with so many other areas, is statistics-based policing. This is the politically popular wheeze whereby the police are “marked” on how many crimes they clear up. Rape has an abysmal clear-up rate. The trouble is not so much the conviction rate, which is decent enough; it’s that so few cases make it to court in the first place. If you take reported rapes, the conviction rate is about seven percent and, if you use the far larger number of estimated unreported rapes, it is less than two percent.

By way of comparison, if you kill someone you stand a 65 percent chance of going down for murder or manslaughter – and murder is the more likely of the two verdicts.

Personally, I’d like to see the end of all target-based policing. It doesn’t work and it means the police focus on crimes which are easy to solve rather than those which are worth solving. If the police could solve 14 per cent of reported rapes instead of seven per cent, I wouldn’t care if they never, ever bought another mobile phone thief to justice. I’m sure many police officers would agree with me when I say their job shouldn’t be to generate numbers which make the Home Secretary look good.