THERE are no easy answers in the debate over how the law should change with regard to rape.

The issue is highly complex, hugely sensitive, and has to be considered with extreme care.

The statistics, however, demonstrate that something has to change. If between 80 and 90 per cent of rapes are going unreported, there is something seriously wrong.

It takes immense courage for a rape victim to stand in a courtroom and go into detail about a sexual attack. It will always be traumatic, but somehow the ordeal has to be eased. There has been progress, with questions about a woman's sexual history rightly being excluded from evidence, but the drive towards greater sensitivity must continue if more victims are to be encouraged to come forward.

And yet it would be dangerous to allow the balance to shift too far by transferring the legal responsibility to the defendant to prove that the woman consented to sex.

That would simply turn one of the basic principles of justice - that someone is innocent until proven guilty - on its head and is to be resisted.

This difficult issue has, of course, been brought into sharper focus by the claims by Ulrika Jonsson that she was the victim of a date rape by a television personality 14 years ago.

While we have sympathy with Ulrika's concerns about going through with a court case, her decision to raise it so cryptically, at a time when she has a book to sell, is questionable.

The alleged attacker has not yet been identified in newspapers, but his name has reached The Northern Echo and is known by thousands of people across the country with media connections. His reputation has therefore already been seriously damaged.

Ulrika should either have found the courage to make a formal complaint to police or kept silent.

This half-way house simply serves to create a media frenzy and sends out the wrong message to other rape victims who are trying to find the courage to bring their attackers to justice.