"What was the point in going to court? I wish I'd never gone through with it - all it did was bring

HER nails are bitten and, as we talk, she nervously plays with her hands, as if wringing the tips of her fingers dry.

Her owl-like eyes are hollowed by sadness. Her voice is quiet, yet when she speaks there is a bitterness and resignation that is nothing short of tragic.

She is 22 and should be about to embark on the best years of her life: going out with friends, falling in love, settling down.

Instead, she is stuck in the past, reliving a terrible night two years ago when a family friend raped her in the bedroom of her home - with her mum and dad asleep next door.

Julia - not her real name - didn't tell anyone to begin with. Her first concern was for her own health: what if she now had HIV or another sexually-transmitted disease? She booked into the York GUM clinic for tests, but faced an agonising three-month wait before discovering she had not been infected.

But when she did share her ordeal, first with her boyfriend, then her mother - they insisted that she went to the police.

The three-day trial came six months after the rape - and forced Julia to relive her ordeal.

"The first couple of months after it happened were really hard. But I put it to the back of my mind and tried not to think about it. Then, a couple of weeks before the trial, I started having nightmares about it happening again. I was dreaming about going to court and he had hired somebody to kill me."

Julia, who lives in York, says she had a sense that the trial wasn't going to go her way. "I felt the judge believed me but I didn't feel like anyone else did."

One of the worst moments, said Julia, was when the defence tried to suggest it was her father who had attacked her rather than the family friend.

Julia couldn't bear to be in the courtroom for the verdict, she sat in the car while her mum stayed to hear the outcome. When she came out of the court house in tears, Julia knew her worst fears had been confirmed.

Her attacker had been acquitted.

"What was the point in reporting it?" she said. "What was the point in going to court? I wish I'd never gone through with it - all it did was bring it all back."

In the aftermath, Julia found it impossible to get her life back on track.

"I went through a stage of not wanting to go out and socialising, of not wanting to go to work, then of going out and drinking a lot. If I was drunk then I didn't think about it.

"My boyfriend and I split up about two weeks after the trial, mostly because I had changed so much."

Almost two years on and Julia is still having nightmares.

"It's all happening again. This time, I've got a knife by my the side of my bed and I stab him and kill him, or I see him in the street and I attack him."

She added: "I'm not as confident as I used to be, I don't really want to go out and my sleep is quite bad at the moment. I think about it all the time, unless I am busy at work or watching TV. But if something comes on about rape or I read in the paper about it, it makes me think about it all again."

Julia and her mum believe that she desperately needs counselling or therapy to help her move on from her terrible experience.

After she reported the rape, the police gave her the number of Victim Support. "I didn't ring them because I didn't want to talk to anybody about it," said Julia.

She has had counselling, which was arranged through work, which helped for a bit. In desperation, she visited her GP recently who suggested she contact Rape Crisis.

"I telephoned them on the Monday and got a voice mail saying they could only open on Thursday between seven and nine in the evening. I left a message, but no one rang me back. I think it's appalling."

Julia says there must be lots of women in a similar situation to herself; who have been raped but kept it secret or had an unsuccessful court case. She believes as a matter of urgency there needs to be more welfare support available for women who have been raped.

She said: "I feel like I've come to the end of the road. It's as if no one has any time for you. I need help, but I don't know what to do or where to turn."

Her mum said: "She used to be bubbly, outgoing, laughing and joking and really playful - but that's all gone. It's like being with a different person. There needs to be somewhere we can go, someone we can talk to. I just want my daughter back."

If anyone has experience of rape or could offer Julia advice on how to cope, you can write to her in confidence c/o Maxine Gordon, Evening Press, 76/86 Walmgate, York YO1 9YN

For the victims, rape can be a traumatising, shattering experience - even more so when they are forced to relive it in court, only to see their attacker walk free. Now the Government is providing more support for rape victims and taking steps to ensure more rapists are punished. MAXINE GORDON and STEPHEN LEWIS report.

THE statistics are shocking. In 2004, more than 14,000 victims - mainly women - came forward to say they had been raped. That is 14,000 traumatised people who found the courage to tell a complete stranger intimate details of a shocking and humiliating assault, in the hope their attacker would one day be punished.

Yet in that same year, only 791 rapists were convicted. A mere 5.6 per cent of rape allegations led to a rapist being punished, in other words.

It is a worsening trend. Over the past 20 years, the number of people reporting they have been raped has soared - from a little over 1,100 in 1985 to 14,000 two years ago. Over that same period, convictions have hardly risen - up from 450 to 791.

There are a number of reasons why it is difficult to prosecute rapists. Rape, notoriously, is a crime which often pitches the victim's word against that of her attacker - making it difficult to secure a conviction.

"These are offences often committed out of the sight of witnesses and a successful prosecution usually depends on a traumatised victim being able to come forward and give evidence," says Robert Turnbull, chief crown prosecutor for North Yorkshire.

There is more to it than that, however. Home Office researchers admit that there is a "culture of scepticism" towards rape victims among police and prosecutors, which leads victims to lose confidence in the system.

The consequence is that rape "remains one of the most under-reported crimes," according to a 2005 Home Office report.

Now ministers are acting to provide more support for rape victims - and to try to ensure more rapists get punished.

Home Office Minister Baroness Scotland yesterday announced £2.5 million in new funding to support victims of domestic and sexual violence.

At the same time, Solicitor General Mike O'Brien unveiled a consultation paper suggesting a number of measures designed to ensure more rapists get convicted.

The proposed measures include:

Juries being allowed to see police videos of interviews with rape victims - interviews which may have been conducted within a few hours of the offence being committed and that show how traumatised the victim was

Allowing experts to give evidence about how a rape victim's behaviour can be affected by an attack, which would help explain, for example, why many victims do not report a rape for weeks or even months

Redefining the law on consent to sex. At the moment, prosecutors can argue that a victim who was asleep or unconscious could not give consent. The consultation asks whether this should be extended to victims who are drunk or on drugs as well.

One young York woman who was raped and endured the trauma of taking her attacker to court, only to see him walk free, welcomed the measures - but said they did not go far enough.

"I think they will help, but I still don't think people are going to come forward," she said.

"I still think the jury are going to do whatever they want. If they think you have had a few to drink... the jury are still going to say yes, you did consent. You can't convince them. In my case, it was 'oh, she was drunk. She must have asked for it'."

Liberal Democrat legal affairs spokesman Simon Hughes welcomed the measures, but added: "Perhaps even more useful would be to make reporting crimes for women easier, more confidential, less traumatic."

Updated: 10:21 Thursday, March 30, 2006