Kate Spicer: I’ve woken up in strangers’ beds knowing I didn’t consent

I bumped into some friends that morning. They teased me, the fact I’d had a one-night stand was obvious, and I brazened it out, laughing with them.

Yes, I was doing the ‘walk of shame’, a phrase that suggests a mildly embarrassed morning swagger after a fun night of sex. I felt none of that.

I tried to walk strong and proud, with my head up in my Gucci heels and a tight, white, borrowed and now rather grubby, designer dress. But, in fact, I felt a wretched mix of horrible shame, stinging regret and physical discomfort. Plus a burning hatred for the man I had just spent the night with.

Drunk, I had miserably allowed a man to roughly force me to do what he wanted. I’m pretty certain he registered my dull and mechanical lack of enjoyment. Perhaps my discomfort energised him. It was horrible, but it remained, I must grudgingly acknowledge, technically consensual.

When I passed out in his bed, it was because I was too miserable and knackered to go home. I woke up hours later with him having sex with me. This time, no consent. Unless the fact that I was in his bed implied to him, he could do what he wanted with my body. In law, this looked more like assault.

I removed myself and dressed in silence, nauseatingly hungover, fumbling alone to pull up the zip that went all the way down that beautiful dress. He said nothing. What a whirlwind of utter misery the entire event was. It’s not enjoyable to recall this. I don’t think I’d ever care to discuss it publicly were it not for two things.

First was hearing the actress Emily Atack describing her own gamut of drunken – and as she now sees it, criminal – sexual encounters on a podcast called Great Company.

‘I went through life thinking if you wake up after a night out and something has happened, but you don’t really remember it, you just have to suck it up.

‘I’ve woken up so many times and been like, “I definitely didn’t say yes to that.” We’re taught that was normal. Now we’re all having the conversation more, and people are coming out and going, “Oh right, well, I was raped then.”’

Now 34, and blissfully happy with scientist boyfriend Alistair Garner and their baby son, Atack’s experience is borne out by government rape data that shows 11.3 per cent of girls between 16 and 19 have experienced some form of sexual assault. Reflecting on her youth, the Rivals actress said she ‘can only count on one hand [the times] I’ve actually enjoyed sex’.

‘As a teenager, there were no barriers or boundaries. Boys didn’t know how to be with girls; girls didn’t know how to deal with those situations.’

Which is my second reason to share such an uncomfortable memory of my younger self. I don’t want the younger generation – my nieces, god-daughters, my friends’ daughters, any young woman – to make the mistakes I did.

The thought that they might or may already have breaks my heart. I don’t think it’s an extreme thing to say that non-violent rape is quite the rite of passage for a woman.

The only person I blamed on that day was myself. It was the mid-2000s, and I was in my mid-30s. I’d gone to a party where a man I’d been seeing had rather painfully spurned me by turning up with another woman, and feeling sad and vulnerable, I’d let myself go home with someone else I had no interest in.

‘I was known as a confident, sassy, successful writer, and that’s the image I projected that night, even as I drank too much. But the truth is, I wasn’t seduced – I’d submitted.

That night in Chelsea was not my only unpleasant, uncomfortable sexual experience. What I can tell you for sure is that the disinhibiting agent of alcohol was regularly present in them all.

Indeed, it’s a factor that shows up in 50-75 per cent of all sexual assaults, according to the data.

And what those figures mean, sadly but inevitably, is that we have to tell our daughters that intoxication and men can be a very dangerous combination, in much the same way we warn people not to drink and drive.

This is very much not to make women responsible for what men do, but to be practical and realistic about the situation as it is now.

Atack feels strongly about it too – and wants to change that situation as the face of a campaign to overhaul the consent laws in Britain. ‘Consent, or the lack of it, is at the heart of so much sexual harassment and violence that women and girls experience, yet the current law still fails to protect those who don’t say the word “No” outright,’ she says.

‘Make things simple – only a “Yes” should mean “Yes”.’

This is what’s known as affirmative consent: sex without this form of consent is rape in Spain, Sweden and Denmark. ‘A common rape myth is that survivors who were inebriated at the time of the assault were somehow responsible or “asking for it’,” says Dr Charlotte Proudman, a KC and leading voice in the campaign to change the law.

‘We believe what’s called “affirmative consent” – emphasising clear, enthusiastic agreement – can help combat these harmful assumptions by reinforcing that lack of resistance or an impaired state never implies consent and should never be accepted as such in a court of justice,’ she says.

Writing this piece, I cast my net wide to ask if anyone else had experienced this. The responses came in thick and fast from women my age who had just shut up and put up with men helping themselves when they were out of it.

‘I knew then that it was wrong,’ said one. ‘I liked the guy. So I wasn’t upset exactly – just bothered. And I continued to be bothered. It was only years later I watched I May Destroy You [Michaela Coel’s brilliant BBC series about a woman coming to terms with being raped while drunk] that I realised what had happened to me. It was rape.’

The Sexual Offences Act 2003 states that individuals cannot legally consent if they are incapacitated by alcohol or drugs to the point where they cannot make a rational decision, so you’d think it’s already written into law. But it’s not. The problem, says Proudman, is: ‘The acceptance of the implied consent model, which assumes consent can be “inferred” from non-verbal cues or a lack of resistance.’ What the law doesn’t say is that ‘yes’ has to be clearly said and meant.

The stories kept on coming and from the most unexpected sources. A successful and now senior woman in business told me she woke one night to find herself being anally penetrated by a man she knew, who had come home with her.

She said she wanted to speak up not just for herself but for all the other women it could happen to – but couldn’t face a single stage of the process. ‘I didn’t even confront him.’

My generation might feel regret, perhaps anger, but there is no inclination to report a historical crime. Events like these – rapes like these – were part of normal life.

I remember mentioning what happened to me to a male friend at the time and him saying: ‘If a girl’s in your bed, she’s up for it.’ That’s another ‘rape myth’. But what we really don’t want is to see our daughters doing what we did.

‘Like a lot of teens, my daughter Lara went through a stage of getting really drunk and falling over,’ says Beth. ‘I was pretty angry. I didn’t say this to scare her, but I told her she had to wise up, that getting that p***ed is dangerous, as I knew only too well.

‘When I was staying in a backpacking hostel in Greece, I got blackout drunk and woke up in an unknown bed with no bottoms on. When I went to get my passport from my reception, I saw my knickers pinned to the wall behind the counter.’

One mother recalled an experience, aged 19, with her boss. Asked to join his drinking party after work, she felt excited and privileged. By the end of the night, however, she was too drunk to give meaningful consent to the sex he wanted – and later realised she’d essentially been assaulted.

‘My daughters know not all men have good intentions. I’ve been very clear with both them, and my son, that consent is super important and is not ambiguous.’

Every 40 or 50-something woman I spoke to described the experiences they’d shrugged off, albeit miserably, as adding a layer of urgency to their need to protect their daughters. And indeed their sons, who need to know precisely where boundaries lie.

Among my friends is thirty-something Tina who had been a problem drinker in the past, but managed to quit. She started drinking heavily again a few years ago, egged on by an admirer – known to her – who twice got her horribly smashed while drinking nothing himself. Twice, she woke to find herself naked from the waist down, and clear signs he’d had penetrative sex with her.

Formal complaints of rape to the police are rare. However, Tina did report the crime, and underwent all the indignity of the examinations.

They were supportive; she felt believed. ‘But they actually said to me, “Unless you were pulled into an alley at knife point and the rape is on CCTV, it’s always your word against his.”

‘What that means is even if you go to the hospital or police right away, and get a swab done that shows the presence of semen and abrasions, it’s still close to impossible to prove it was rape as the other person can always claim that the sex was consensual.’

Tina gave up drinking and slowly set about putting her life back together, but she did not get any kind of justice.

In the last few years, following something called the Rape Review, the police approach has started to change. Chief Constable Sarah Crew is lead for Adult Sexual Offences at the National Police Chiefs’ Council, and oversees Operation Soteria, which has switched the focus to perpetrators’ behaviour rather than the victims.

‘We have seen encouraging improvements in the last two and a half years under Soteria… [where] intoxication is not seen as a barrier to prosecution,’ she says. ‘Rather the police approach would be to rely on the intoxication as evidence that consent was not given.’

This radical cultural shift in the way police forces view assault investigations was called a ‘game changer’ by the independent body that assesses its effectiveness.

But is it, really? Only 10 per cent of sexual assault crimes are ever reported to police or indeed support services. When we do go to the police, the process is so brutal, less than half of rape and sexual assault survivors in England and Wales say they would report their crime again, according to a survey published this month by City St George’s University on behalf of Operation Soteria.

According to ONS figures, 194,400 sexual offences were reported to police in the year up to June this year, with 36 per cent of them rapes. Charges have been brought in 2.7 per cent of the rape cases, which means fewer than 2,000.

Some 85 per cent of men in court charged with sexual assault plead not guilty – yet 75 per cent are indeed found guilty. What should we take away from this?

Many of the women I have spoken to remember being told by their parents that if we got drunk, sexual assault was our fault. I was certainly told that. No young woman I have spoken to thinks this now.

But truly, that is not enough. It sounds old-fashioned, it sounds alarmist, but we need to teach our daughters that being incapacitated with a certain type of man leaves them open to exploitation.

They need to know that even inside a relationship, a man being drunk or you being drunk doesn’t mean anything goes. Boys must be taught this, too.

I bought feminist books when I was in my late teens and early 20s as I tried to nurture a bit more confidence as well as adding to my understanding of the world.

At the time, only The Beauty Myth (Naomi Wolf) and Fat Is A Feminist Issue (Susie Orbach) really struck home. A lot of it felt very academic, and to be honest, not much fun.

One of those books I owned but never properly read was Intercourse by the late Andrea Dworkin, who argued that penetrative sex was, by its nature, violent. Of course, she was widely dismissed as a fat, man-hating militant.

Rather than Dworkin’s campaigning feminism, I was more keen on the emerging third wave in the 1990s, which would blend women’s rights with the sexual revolution. That let us be sexy and flirty and behave as freely and as badly as we pleased.

The lifestyle, I suppose, that underpinned the advent of so-called ‘ladette culture’. There was so much drinking, it was pretty pathetic really.

And the booze laid me open to a number of unhappy sexual events that I would not wish on any woman.

As I grew older, I saw that the sort of feminism-lite I enjoyed was a feminism that too often served men better than it did women. I’m not a man-hating separatist. I love my male friends and family members with the same compassion and respect I do the females. But I do read Andrea Dworkin now and think she had a point.

And to any young women reading, I hope you never have to do the hideously named ‘walk of shame’ on anything other than your own fully consenting terms.