Students discuss grim reality where sexual violence is rife

"We are a house of five girls and three of us have been raped," the student told me. It was the way she said it that took my breath away, with no shock, just acceptance.

- KATIE WHITE

This is part of just one of the many testimonies from students that I have gathered in the more than 12 months in Bristol that I have spent researching sexual assault among them - to launch a social deterrent to rape.

"I wish it had been in a conventional way," one survivor said.

"Violent, a stranger, completely unprovoked. Then I would have openly been a mess and have reason to be." The students described a grim reality - where sexual violence is a common, yet largely unaddressed part of their first experience of adulthood. Eighty-five per cent of the time, the perpetrator is known to them. One told me: "It was my boyfriend's best friend.

He offered to walk me home. I should have been safe." The taboo and outward invisibility of the issue create shame: "As a survivor, you feel like you've slipped through the cracks, unnoticed," she said, a sentiment echoed by another of the students I met. "At uni, everyone is just trying to have a positive experience," she explained. "You don't want anything big and bad to override that, so you just bury it." Last weekend, home secretary Shabana Mahmood called violence against women and girls in Britain a "national emergency" and on Thursday the government unveiled its strategy to halve such offences in a decade.

It is a national emergency, but one that even its devastating figures do not bear out - because so many rape survivors do not report what has happened to them.