WHEN I was 18 and in my first term at university I made a very dear friend.

I’ll call her Grace, though that’s not her real name. One evening we sat up late at our halls of residence, talking about books and films and ambitions, as young folk do. As the night wore on, Grace told me about what happened to her that summer before we came to university. She’d gone to work overseas and been raped by her employer.

There are some events which change you forever. Listening to Grace was one such event for me. It wasn’t as if I was unaware of rape, or couldn’t imagine the dreadful effect the crime must have on a woman – or a man for that matter – but I’d never met someone who’d gone through what Grace had gone through, I’d never heard an account like this first hand.

As Grace spoke, I could barely breathe. I felt a mix of rage at the man who’d done this to my friend – I remember telling Grace that we could get on a plane that night and go and find him and kill him – and a flood of empathy and love for a young woman of such bravery and resilience. But at the back of it all, loomed a horrible realisation: that there were men, just like me, out there who could do such things to women, to fellow human beings, and shatter their lives forever.

Many folk think of me as some wishy-washy liberal leftie. And often that’s the case. But there’s one thing I’m not a wishy-washy liberal leftie about, and that’s violent and sexual crime.

I’ve spent the bulk of my career as a crime reporter. I’ve lost count of the dead, the broken and the monstrous. Thirty years reporting on the cruelties humans inflict on each other has left me with a few simple beliefs: firstly, our jails are filled with the wrong people. Get the sex workers, drug addicts and shop-lifters out of prison. They’re victims of circumstance – often poverty. There but for the grace of God, go I. Jail isn’t where they should be. They need social workers, not turnkeys.

Another belief is this: all crimes that cause deliberate, indelible, life-altering harm to another human being should carry a mandatory life term, just like murder. Shooting you takes your life away, but so does throwing acid in your face, so does torturing you, crippling you. So does rape.

Clearly, when we talk about ‘life’, it’s not in the American sense – of someone dying in jail, though there are many offenders who deserve that fate. The term ‘life’ is meant in the British sense, of courts doling out sentences averaging 16 years.

Rape in Scotland evidently doesn’t carry mandatory life imprisonment. A rapist can be given life, but the average sentence is under seven years. Many are treated much more leniently. And don’t forget: prisoners serving short-term sentences are usually out in half the time.

Let’s look at some recent sentencing in Scotland. There’s Bradley Booth, a 22-year-old serial rapist from Edinburgh, who targeted underage girls. He was convicted of 11 sexual offences against seven victims aged 13-15. He got six years.

Jason Graham was jailed for seven and half years for rape in 2013, but released in 2018. In 2021, while monitored as a registered sex offender with 23 convictions, he raped and murdered Ester Brown, aged 67, in her Glasgow home. He’d punched, kicked and stamped on her.

Luke Bertorelli was jailed for 45 months after admitting 11 offences, including three charges of rape, sexual assault and abusive behaviour.

Little wonder that Scotland’s Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain, the nation’s most senior law officer, has asked judges to create tougher sentencing guidelines for rape. She says “unduly lenient” terms have been handed down. Obviously, she’s right, though she should go further and begin a discussion around mandatory life terms for anyone found guilty of rape.

Those three decades as a crime reporter taught me another lesson: some offending is hardwired, particularly sexual offending. You cannot ‘cure’ rapists or paedophiles. You cannot ‘reprogramme' them. Could your sexuality be changed? Rapists take the most intimate act and use it as a weapon of power and destruction. The rapist has gone past the point of redemption and rehabilitation. There can be only punishment and containment in order to protect the public.

Currently, the SNP is considering the idea of abolishing jury trials in rape cases. There are concerns that low conviction rates are down to outdated views towards victims by some jurors. Dorothy Bain backed a pilot study. Unquestionably, there’s a problem: the conviction rate for rape and attempted rape in 2019 was 47%, compared to 87% for all crimes.

However, the removal of juries is a dangerous step. Juries are the bedrock of our democracy. Yet rape trials must improve. Better guidelines for jurors and prosecutors, and better use of expert witnesses, especially those who work with victims of rape, is surely a more safe and wise path to follow.

There’s no perfect solution to crime and punishment – all human life is flawed. Yet what we can do is recognise that there are certain acts that are so beyond the boundaries of society that the offender deserves the harshest of punishment and exclusion from the society they’ve offended against. Rape is one of those acts, as is murder.

I remain good friends with Grace, all these years later. She’s a high-flying woman in the field she conquered after university. I spoke to her this morning, asking if it was okay to tell her story. She gave permission. I asked how the events of that summer back in 1988 affected her today.

“There’s not one thing that’s changed, Neil,” she said. She still gets up every morning and puts on a mask for the world which allows her to keep going. But she remains indelibly altered by what a man did to her aged just 18. Even if the b*****d who raped my friend had received a ‘life’ sentence, he’d have been free from prison a long time ago. Nearly 35 years later, Grace’s imprisonment goes on.

You cannot break the bars of memory.

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