Drug-raped and no-one believed me

This is a story which will make every woman wonder how she would behave in the same situation. Would she be savvy enough to see trouble coming? And once the trouble had come, would she have had the persistence it takes to seek justice?

The latest statistics show, depressingly, that only one in 13 rapes reported to police achieves a conviction and more than 2,000 women said they were sexually abused after a night out.

According to the Rape Crisis Federation, 92 per cent of rapes are never even reported because women are afraid, ashamed or feel it is pointless. Clare, the rape victim in this story, is a victim of a growing type of rape which makes it more difficult to convict the perpetrators. She was targeted by a group involved in drug-assisted rape who picked her as a victim months before the actual crime. What makes this still more shocking is that the procurer for the rape was a woman.

The story which Clare tells is especially disturbing because of its surreal nightmare qualities. Like a sleeper waking from a terrible dream, Clare can only piece together her ordeal from fragments of memory. What seemed inexplicable and odd at the time is revealed, with hindsight, to be a deliberate pattern of targeting and victimisation.

Wider knowledge, which she has gained through her work with the Drug Rape Trust, shows that what, for her, was an individual and deeply wounding trauma was only one incident among many similar ones which involve the callous use of drugs to disable women like her - particularly older, less streetwise women, often very competent and successful, who could never imagine that they could become a victim. When Clare spoke at a police conference on drug-assisted rape last year, she learned that there were other such groups around the country. The image of the lone rapist slipping a powder into your drink is out of date.

Clare is a very attractive, articulate woman in her forties, elegant and superficially self-possessed. At the time of the attack, she was in her late thirties, 12 years into a happy second marriage with three children. She'd started working in the marketing department of a small local company as a training manager and a younger colleague, whom she refers to bitterly as "the female", made a special effort to befriend her.

"She was a lot younger than me, in her twenties, very attractive, very friendly, you wouldn't have suspected anything about her. But she soon began wheedling her way into my home and marriage. Initially, it would just be visits to talk about work and I fell for it. Then suddenly it began putting a strain on my marriage because my husband was disturbed by the amount of time I was spending with her and she started ringing him up too and wanting to meet him.

This is what they do, it's a pattern. They put a strain on relationships, or their victims are people who've just finished relationships. It's 'you're having a hard time, I'm in the same boat, let me buy you a drink', then - whack!"

Clare admits that everyone she knew told her she was acting out of character for the two months before the rape occurred and she is sure that she was already being drugged - something that has also happened to other victims. She was completely taken in by "the female". "I'd lost a lot of weight. I was ignoring the children and behaving in inappropriate ways: I became very pliable and accepting. We know that, worldwide, up to 66 different drugs are used in drug-related rapes. In Britain, we know 16 and they're all tranquillisers called benzodiazepines. If you are being given drugs which are quite addictive, one effect is that this person who's befriending you seems brilliant, you're pleased to see them. My husband and I didn't see any danger."

Then one night "the female" phoned and asked Clare to come out for a drink. Clare agreed, even though she doesn't drink alcohol, and they met in a pub. "She started talking to a guy at the next table, then she left me to go to the bar and he offered to buy me a drink. He was revolting, not somebody I would ever pass the time of day with, in his thirties, very thuggishlooking. And I was happily married with three kids. But she'd gone off and I thought there'd be no harm in accepting an orange juice. But by the time I left the pub with her I was starting to feel disorientated, not right, not drunk but buzzy, and I became more and more zombified. My drink had obviously been spiked. I let her take over driving my car, which wasn't me at all. We went to various pubs where she knew people and then, about one in the morning, she took me back to the thuggish-looking guy's house. I was completely under her control. You feel out of it, very drugged, as if you've had a pre-med, quite happy even."

The house was full of people, but had no party atmosphere. The windows were blacked out and people sat around in various states of drug-induced stupor. Clare was sat in a chair and pressurised into taking more pills which, given her already drugged state, wasn't difficult. She believes her colleague was part of a drugs-and-sex culture, centred on the man who later raped Clare, and was in it for the drugs she received in return.

"My behaviour was totally inappropriate. Later, when I went to the police, I said, yes, I went to the house, yes, I took drugs, so they said I went voluntarily, but I had no control. There was lots of drug-taking and I was in a state of suspended animation, talking completely openly about all kinds of personal subjects. It uninhibits you, you say things you wouldn't normally say. This is very hard to cope with psychologically afterwards. All women this has happened to become suicidal later because of the glimpses of what they participated in."

At some point, Clare's colleague left and she remembers being taken to a bedroom. She knew what was going to happen but there was no feeling attached to it, no horror and fear. "This is a big problem when you come to report a drug-assisted rape because you don't show the normal post-trauma reactions. You don't have fear. You can see the attack taking place but you're powerless.

I remember about 20 to 30 minutes of a five or six-hour ordeal. You can just see what comes into view. I was completely naked. People waved drugs under my nose. I remember a woman coming in, people coming and going. The other victims of this type of crime that I've met since this happened have all lost their jobs. Their close relationships are blown away because of the psychological impact of memory loss."

In the morning, still feeling drugged, she surfaced and ran to her car in fear of her life. She woke thinking, this is the end of the world if I don't get out now I'm going to die. She drove in a panic to her parents' house because they were away, and did what all rape victims long to do, which is wash and wash before going home to her husband and her children.

As soon as she walked through the door her husband could see that something devastating had happened. She looked terrible. She was yellow with the effect of the drugs. She didn't know what had happened. She said: "I think I've been with someone else."

That night they received threatening phone calls and a visit from the colleague who had befriended her and, terrified, they took the children and fled to friends who persuaded them to go to the police. Clare didn't return to her office again and the family shortly moved to a new house 30 miles away.

That was six years ago. In that time her life has been ruled by what happened to her and she has had a constant fight for some kind of justice. When they reported it to the police initially she was treated very seriously, but the case had to be taken on by the police on whose patch the crime had been committed, and at the next station the attitude was different.

Although Clare knew where she'd been and who with, and had evidence, her complaint wasn't taken seriously by the police. They told her that she had simply had a bad experience, it was a party which had gone wrong.

"At first I didn't know I'd been raped and it's over several days, in the state I was in, that you realise there was no consent because you're not forced, as such. It's the same with every victim of drug-assisted rape. You question and question.

I have no sense of time. The chronology is all muddled. It's not laid down in the memory, so you only get glimpses. A lot of victims fear being ambushed by flashbacks of memory, but it won't necessarily ever come back. People think that, because you're sedated, you don't suffer, but you do, even with the lack of horror, because of the memory loss and trying to remember what happened. For six years now I've clenched my teeth. I'm constantly bracing myself for attack. I've lost trust in everybody, in women. I've been suicidal. I suffer chronic depression. My marriage has survived but my husband has suffered badly because he blames himself."

Clare knows she had three big problems in making her case. First, she admitted to taking illegal drugs. Second, it was felt she had consented to sex. Third, she had waited three days to report it. Giving up on the police, she took her case to the Criminal Injuries Board and has spent £10,000 so far on pursuing her case to get the only kind of justice that seemed to be open to her, even though solicitors told her she had no hope of success.

Finally, a year ago, there was an oral hearing in which she could tell her story in person and, at last, she was believed and accepted as eligible for compensation. They are currently assessing what damages she should be awarded. It was a turning point. "When somebody at last accepted what was happening to me I felt that now I was allowed to feel the impact.

"I've since done a counselling course myself to help other victims, and it's a big benefit to have someone believe them because they think they're going mad. The Drug Rape Trust dealt with more than 2,000 cases last year, and I've since talked to at least 10 women, from nurses to lawyers, who've had similar experiences to mine. There was a girl of 18 who was raped and went to the police station. She was left sitting alone and eventually went home and took her life. It's very hard to confront drug-assisted rape, especially with older women who think this is something they'd never be involved in.

"Looking back, I think: was I naive? Was I letting my guard down? But it's perfectly normal to be friendly with a colleague, it's normal to accept an orange juice when you're driving. And yet it's ruined my life. I feel so angry because my two youngest children have had six years of having a different mother. Part of me has gone."

For the rest of us, Clare's story sounds more like a Stanley Kubrick film than real life. But I have to believe her. The Criminal Injuries Board does, and so does the Drug Rape Trust. But if her story is true, what is the moral?

Her simple advice to other women is not to accept a drink from a stranger, but the most disturbing aspect of this kind of assault is that, by the time the victim accepts the drink, her attackers have made sure they're not strangers.

The victims of this kind of crime lose trust, but if this crime is on the increase, then we all lose trust. Relaxed socialising among semistrangers over a drink, something we all do, could be a very dangerous way of spending an evening.

The Drug Rape Trust: 01702 317695.