Descriptions of how she was dressed, whether she was flirtatious, whether she had been drinking alcohol and was drunk have been used by defence lawyers to suggest that a victim may have, perhaps unwittingly, encouraged her attacker. This has bolstered a culture of shifting blame from the accused to the victim.

In the streets, pubs and clubs far beyond the courtroom, however, it is reflected in an attitude that women who wear revealing clothes or who have been drinking alcohol may be seen as contributing to their ordeal by “asking for it”.

The long battle waged against these attitudes by support groups such as Rape Crisis and Women’s Aid has had more

success in changing the law than in overcoming public prejudice, despite occasional controversial campaigns such as images of provocatively-dressed women with the slogan: “This is not an excuse to rape me.”

Two years ago, the Lord Advocate, Elish Angiolini, criticised the Scottish public for having more sympathy for drunken male victims of assault than for female rape victims. “A male who is hit over the head with a bottle is not indicted by society for having had 10 pints of beer, but a rape victim will be. There is a view of contributory negligence which is not there in law,” she commented, instituting a review of the law relating to rape.

That has resulted in the Sexual Offences (Scotland) Act which broadens the definition of rape, sets down the first statutory definition of consent and creates new offences covering sexual coercion and the sexual abuse of vulnerable adults and children.

In this context, any high-profile figure who makes a public pronouncement that women who drink to excess are putting themselves in danger of being sexually assaulted is risking considerable opprobrium. That did not deter Stephen House, the chief constable of Strathclyde, from warning that women who drink excessively are putting themselves in danger of rape. His remarks were prompted by the fact that there were seven rapes reported over one weekend in Strathclyde, with the common factor that all the victims had been drinking and was not, he insisted, an attempt to shift the blame.

That is the problem in a nutshell. Mr House will be criticised for reinforcing the idea that victims of rape are somehow to blame for a crime committed against them. That was clearly not his intention. The reality is that alcohol makes people more vulnerable to attack: it removes inhibitions, impairs judgment, and makes people more likely to take risks they would normally avoid and less alert to danger signals. At the most basic level, people who are drunk will be unable to run away from or fight off an attacker. They are also less able to give a coherent account to the police of what happened, and if the case gets to court may be unable to recollect it accurately. All this makes it less likely that the offender will be convicted.

That, in turn, is likely to increase the incidence of rape, which has risen from 607 to 908 annually in Scotland over the past decade. In a truly civilised society, vulnerability would provoke a response of protection instead of attack. We have not reached that stage and the chief constable’s warning should be heeded.