A young girl lies in a dark alley, her clothes torn and her battered face covered in blood. She has been attacked, raped and left lying unconscious. This isn't a scene from a hard-hitting drama being screened after the watershed but from the country's most-loved soap, Coronation Street.

Toyah has become the victim of a mystery attacker - and the latest round in the soap ratings war.

EastEnders scored with the Who Shot Phil? storyline, gaining massive media coverage and some of the highest TV ratings for years. So this latest Street saga could be seen as an attempt to regain the soap crown from the Walford contender.

But it would be wrong to accuse Street producers of retaliation with the Who Raped Toyah? plot as this particular storyline was almost certainly being planned before the Phil Mitchell shooting became known. But it does signify the upping of the stakes in the soap war and the increasing use of violence and gun crime to keep viewers watching.

But is this entertainment or exploitation? Soaps rely on gloom and doom as their characters reach new depths of depression and misery. There might be a bit of light relief from the Dot Cottons and Jack Duckworths, but happiness doesn't make good soap. They don't make dramas out of a crisis; these crises are the staple diet of dramas.

While most viewers are happy to accept murder, the idea of rape being used in this way leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. This is too close to real life for many. Murder, or attempted murder, is much more acceptable as a soap crime. It seems more remote from our normal lives. Besides, the victim doesn't suffer - they're either dead or lying unconscious in a hospital bed while other soap characters talk over them - but the emotional turmoil caused to a victim of rape is all too visible. With Who Shot Phil? we can play games and place bets on who the guilty party might be, just as we play detective with the board game Cluedo, and no one will bat an eyelid.

Brookside went down the same route when actress Karen Drury wanted to leave the Liverpool-set soap last year. Her character Suzanna Morrissey toppled down the stairs and the usual suspects were wheeled out on breakfast shows and chat shows to confuse viewers as to whodunit.

Playing the same game, trying to identify Toyah's attacker from those with a motive, seems both heartless and in poor taste. This is not to criticise the Street's sensitive handling of the episode although the run-up seemed as contrived as the weeks before Phil's shooting as one by one characters were provided with a motive for the crime.

What some see as obvious trailering of the crime-to-come, others see as great drama. One critic wrote that "the Street's evocation of brutal male edginess in the hours before Toyah's rape, as though dark forces were abroad, knocking even the wildest man off his usual moral balance, was immensely powerful. It has something of the foreboding of Dickens in it". Reading that, all you want to scream at the writer is: "It's only a soap".

The Street isn't the first to feature rape but suffers coming in the wake of the Who Shot Phil? saga. It looks, wrongly I'm sure, as if they're trying to go one better.

The pre-watershed timing too presents problems for the writers. They are severely limited in what they can say and show. Channel 4's Hollyoaks manage to dodge that dilemma when it broke one of the last TV taboos and included male rape. The actual incident and events leading up to Luke's ordeal were confined to a special late-night edition, when youngsters were tucked up in bed.

And the Street special on the Freshco siege, which ended with the shooting of one of the robbers by a police marksman, was scheduled much later in the evening than usual episodes of the Weatherfield drama. Choosing to put the Toyah rape in the usual 7.30pm timeslot prevents the writers from covering it as explicitly as they might have wanted, or as such a subject demands. They risk not doing justice to a serious topic

The Street is only reflecting a general toughening up in soapland. Gang warfare in EastEnders and Brookside is commonplace, making the Krays look like pussycats compared to the Mitchell brothers. Shootings, sieges, arson and murder seem as natural as ordering a pint and packet of crisps in the Rovers.

Coronation Street was criticised for lagging behind the others. With armed robbery, rape, sex change Hayley and underage pregnancy, it has finally grown up.

Weatherfield is no longer a cosy Northern place where time stands still and the modern world passes it by. Whether Street admirers will welcome the changes remains to be seen.

Published: Friday, April 20, 2001