This is only one of countless stories on my list, but it is the one that I think angers me the most. I was living in a shared house with two other girls. I woke up in the middle of the night – having gone to bed to an empty house – to feel a body behind me and hands on my breasts and between my legs. It took me a few moments to fully wake and realise it wasn’t a dream, and then I screamed and jumped out of bed – there was total stranger in it. It transpired that he had bumped into my housemates earlier on in a pub and was a friend of theirs. Later, after they had left, he had turned up drunk outside our house and asked to stay on the sofa, and naturally they let him. His excuse was he thought it was my housemates bedroom – we’d swapped rooms when I moved in – so essentially his excuse was he sexually assaulted the wrong sleeping woman by mistake. We kicked him out and eventually went back to bed. The next day at work I couldn’t stop thinking about it; I told a colleague and kind of laughed it off as a ‘these things happen’ but the look on their face made me think twice about it and I realised it just is not ok – I couldn’t ‘justify’ it in the way I had other assaults with ‘I was drunk’ ‘I chose to go home with him’ etc. I was literally just asleep in my own bed. So, I went to the police. And this is where I get angry. They believed me, they investigated, the man admitted it – which to me seems to be a fairly straightforward case. However, it never went to the CPS; the police said that the assailant had made a mistake and felt really guilty about it; that a court case would be traumatic for me and my sex life would be open for discussion, that I would be ruining a young man’s future just because of a drunken mistake. And I acquiesced. And this makes me angrier than anything else – the way the police prioritised his future over my well-being; the way they minimised what happened to me; the way they insinuated my being sexually active would make the case more difficult in court. Side note: Whilst in the instance above I think the police were appalling, I have more recently been involved in an investigation into sexual abuse I suffered when I was younger, and I really cannot fault the way the police have handled my case and dealt with me as a victim – so just like it is ‘not all men’ it is ‘not all police’ – but whether or not you get a man who isn’t rapey or a police officer who does their job should not be down to sheer dumb luck and while it is ‘not all xxx’ it is the whole system.