The collapse of the recent rape trial in South Wales over the issue of whether an unconscious female could remember giving consent to sexual intercourse followed the ICM poll on rape published earlier in the week.

According to the poll, most people in Britain had no idea how many women were raped every year in the UK (12,867 on last year's figures) or that only six per cent of reported rapes result in a conviction. If these facts weren't disturbing enough, even more worrying was the finding that a third of the 1,000 people questioned believed that a woman is partially or completely responsible for being raped if she has behaved flirtatiously.

In the proceedings in Swansea Crown Court, a 21-year-old student from Aberystwyth University attended a party at the arts centre on the university campus. Before going to the party she drank vodka with some friends. At the party she became ill and a member of staff asked another student, who was working part-time as a security guard, to walk her home. The guard, the victim claimed, raped her in a corridor outside her room. Although the woman had passed out through drink, the guard's claim that she had consented was sufficient for the judge who ordered the jury to return a not guilty verdict by stating that "drunken consent is still consent".

This worrying ruling by Mr Justice Roderick Evans chimed with the findings of the ICM poll which also found that over 25 per cent of the 1,000 people questioned thought a woman was at least partly to blame if she has worn revealing clothes or been drunk.

Although the Director of Public Prosecutions commented that the idea that "a third of people think that if a woman flirts she has only herself to blame if she is raped is, I think, quite shocking," it is not inconceivable that amongst that third you might find one or two High Court judges.

In 1982 Judge Bertrand Richards said that a woman "was guilty of contributing negligence" because she had been raped when hitch-hiking home. Over a decade later, in 1993, Judge Ian Starforth Hill commented that an eight-year-old victim of a sexual attack was "not entirely an angel", while four months earlier Judge John Prosser let a 15-year-old rapist go free, ordering him to pay his teenage victim £500 "for a good holiday".

It is uncertain whether a female judge would have committed any of the judicial outrages listed above, and as the current figures stand, there is little chance that we will find out soon. As at October 1 there were only 13 women in the top 154 judicial posts in the country. In a 21st century justice system which has to deal with the rigours of date rape, drug rape and those presented in the Swansea case, having more female judges won't serve as a universal panacea in rape cases, but it may well go a long way to making the system of British justice more fitting for its users and one of which we may one day be proud.