If you had been standing on the streets of Pimlico in London this time last week, you would have seen a troop of journalists milling around outside the Office for National Statistics. Had you been there you would have learnt that 1 in 20 women under the age of sixty have been seriously sexually assaulted. That is 800,000 women. Yet the 78,000 rapes a year result in just 1,070 convictions.

Now get on the train and speed down to the enchanting building of the Oxford Union. Here you might see busy student officers, in the midst of a smaller crisis as a result of its decision to invite Julian Assange to speak there. After - although purportedly not related to - protests from the Cambridge University Students Union Women's campaigners, Assange had to cancel his talk at the Cambridge Union for 'technical reasons'. He did a video link elsewhere the next day. The issue here is much more complex than the ONS statistics, but the fact remains that Assange is wanted because he has been accused of rape.

Whilst your mind ponders over the merits and demerits of giving Assange a platform at the Union, fly now to the streets of Delhi. In perhaps the most publicized international story of the last few weeks, you would see the streets filled with angry, vocal protestors. They have no cohesive aims; instead they have united in their anger at the brutalization of a woman who has now died. All India, and most of the world, agree on the atrocity of the crimes committed against this woman. Sexual crime in India is an all-pervasive phenomenon. If you open any local newspaper, there is practically a daily column for reporting  sex- and gender-based violence: 'daughter  gets beaten by father for fleeing with lower caste man', 'mother-in-law enslaves son's wife', 'girl and her father hang themselves as they fail to afford dowry' and so on.

Rape has been around for millennia. In Sumerian mythology Enlil brutally rapes Ninlil as a punishment. However, for the vast majority of the period between then and now, there was no definition of what counted as consent and subsequently no definition of what rape really was. We must not delude ourselves, therefore, that this notion is centuries old. Indeed it is only within the last half century that UK law has evolved to the point where it is possible for a man to rape his wife, previously rape within a marriage was not recognized. Indian law has changed only within my lifetime.

Rape has been used, systematically, as a tactic of war and oppression. In 2008 the International Criminal Court (ICC) heard that Sudan's president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, organised the systematic rape of women in any tribe who challenged his authority. They did not need to murder; they could wipe out tribes by forcibly impregnating the women of oppositional groups, and leaving them with sexual scars to ensure they are unlikely to ever reproduce again. In the moving film, Nil By Mouth, Ray Winstone beats, batters and rapes his wife on mere supposition that she is having an affair. The scene is 1990s London.

The importance of these instances and themes ought to be obvious, although they are probably not to most. More staggeringly, we delude ourselves that an issue like rape is an atrocious phenomenon that affects others around the world, but not us, not here in Britain. India is the world's largest democracy, and about half of the electorate is female. Yet there is a menacing gulf between the de jure situation of women in India and the de facto reality. The sexual inequality of India is not some abstract concept, with little relevance to our lives. 800,000 women alive in Britain today have been sexually assaulted too. Think about the actual act of rape itself, and what this humiliating and tortuous degradation felt like for 800,000 women. Then you might begin to appreciate the importance of these numbers as something more than a newspaper headline.

We men have failed to heed these statistics for too long. Most of us have, and never will, rape anyone. But there is still plenty men can do. Support campaigns like http://www.everydaysexism.com. Recognise that rape is not a joke; it is a form of violence and degradation. Women must be free to wear what they like and behave as they want; if a woman says no, her clothes are irrelevant. No, must mean no.