TANYA MALIK was fleeing her abusive husband when she was raped in the lavatory of a woman’s refuge by a stranger on Christmas Day.

The experience, on top of what she had already suffered, was so traumatic that she felt unable to see her two daughters for weeks. She also suffered from depression. But she was determined to force her attacker to face justice.

Ms Malik, 30, gave evidence against her rapist six months after the attack and he was sentenced to 2½ years in prison in 2002.

Yesterday, she told our correspondent that facing him and his defence barristers in court was worse than the rape itself:

“I wasn’t ready for what I would go through in court. You fix yourself up, you go through counselling so that you are really strong. You prepare yourself, but you’ve no idea. Whatever you say is open to misinterpretation.

“My solicitor said to me, ‘It would be good if you could shed a tear’. I looked at her in amazement, I said, ‘Why would I need to fake it?’ She told me to wear dark colours, not too much jewellery, to look like the world has given me a hard time. I thought, steady on, if my own solicitor is saying this, what does the jury think, what will the judge think? “The defence barrister made out I was a man-hater, that I deliberately led this man on because I couldn’t get back at my husband, all sorts of things.

“They built up such a horrible picture of me. Why did I say ‘Hello’ to him? Why, when he had mistletoe in his hand, did I agree to kiss him? Why, when he came to my door, had I opened it? It was all rubbish, untrue. I hadn’t opened the door. He got me when I went to the bathroom. I had bought sweets that day — it was Christmas Day, my daughters were at a friend’s place and I wanted to eat some sweets — and they said it was because I was lonely.

“They twisted and turned all of my words and sneered at everything I said. It was horrible. They asked me, ‘Why didn’t you use the other bathroom?’ It went on and on.

“His barrister painted me in a really bad light. At one point he held up a map of the refuge to ask why I used a particular staircase on my route to the bathroom and I could see that the map was wrong because he was holding it the wrong way up. It didn’t make sense to the jury. Before that I had a timid voice, I was nervous and I looked only at the judge. But I said, ‘That’s wrong, you’re holding it up wrong’. He said, ‘Oh, you want to teach me?’ “I looked at the judge and the jury for the first time, and I said, in a normal voice, ‘Yes, I will teach you, you’re holding it wrong’.

“The defence even called my ex-husband to the court to give evidence against me. I wouldn’t go into the room when he was due to give evidence. I couldn’t. But the police officer told me that the the judge had thrown it out and she had said that it was not relevant.

“I was lucky. The judge was brilliant. But many women who take a stand are not so lucky. Often the victims don’t get justice.

“I reported the rape right away and I wanted to take a stand. But it takes a lot to go into a courtroom and to look at a person who has done what they’ve done to you. It’s very hard. He was allowed to come right next to me and that wasn’t fair. The experience in court was worse than the rape itself.

“If the jury could see the first police interview, then I think it would make a difference. I was in a complete state then, I was crying, I was falling apart.”

• Tanya Malik is not her real name

  LANDMARK CASES

• On March 13, 1986, three men broke into an Ealing vicarage. Jill Saward, 21, was raped. She testified in the trial where Mr Justice Leonard said her suffering “had not been so great”. He gave the gang leader, who had not taken part in the rape, a sentence for burglary and assault nine years longer than the five years the others got for rape
• The 1991 case of R v R, when a wife claimed her husband had raped her, was the first time rape was adjudged to have taken place inside a marriage
• In 1993 there was uproar after Judge Ian Starforth Hill did not jail a sex offender who abused an eight-year-old girl on the ground that “she was not entirely an angel herself”
• In 1995 the Court of Appeal quashed a conviction for rape of a man who failed to pay a prostitute. Judges ruled false pretences did not override the reality of consent
• In 2003 the Solicitor- General said a judge had been “unduly lenient” in the case of a man who repeatedly raped his sister-in-law and doubled the sentence to ten years
• In November a student in Wales said she had been too drunk to remember whether she had consented to sex with a fellow student. Justice Roderick Evans ordered a not guilty verdict, on the basis that drunken consent was still consent

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