UK Paramedics Specialize in Nightclub Service

Peter Jones has a habit of going up to strange girls in nightclubs and asking them questions.

Only last week, when he spotted an attractive brunette staggering outside with a young man, Peter stopped them at the exit and asked the woman to concentrate.

'Look at me,' he demanded. 'Tell me if you know that man.' The young woman was taken aback, but peered at her companion, then turned back to Peter and shook her head.

'The sad thing is I am no longer horrified by such occurrences,' says Peter.

'I pushed the man out of the club, gave him a ticking off and took the girl to sober up in my treatment room.

'If I hadn't spotted her, who knows what could have happened? There will always be someone ready to take advantage of a drunk woman.' Peter, 38, is a trained paramedic who has spent the past ten years treating alcohol and drug casualties up and down the country. His experiences make for depressing reading.

'The truth is these women do lay themselves open to date rape,' he says.

'The real problem is that they aren't in any position either to consent or not. They're so drunk that they're barely aware of what is going on around them, let alone whether they want to have sex or not.

'I know where these things can lead, so I feel it's my job not just to treat alcohol and drug casualties but to prevent any further horrific eventualities.

'The majority of people I treat, particularly on student nights, are girls who have all been drinking excessively.' And that, it seems, is the problem.

A recent survey released by the European School Survey Project revealed that young British adults are the world's worst binge-drinkers.

Britain and Ireland are the only European states where girls drink more than boys - 29 per cent of

British and Irish female students admitted to drinking excessively more than three times a week, compared with 26 per cent of male students.

Similarly, women of all ages in Britain have doubled the amount they drink over the past 15 years (an average 12 units a week, compared with six in 1992).

Last week, the Mail also reported that an investigation by the Association of Chief Police Officers of 120 alleged rape victims, who had all supposedly been slipped a date-rape drug, showed no forensic evidence of either the drugs Rohypnol or GHB. Instead, 119 of the cases admitted to drinking alcohol - many of them heavily.

Does this mean women are to blame if they are raped? Outraged feminists on a radio debate last week argued that if women drank themselves into oblivion and consented to sex, with no memory of doing so, the man had no right to act on that consent. They argued that while you may have said 'yes', you were not exercising free choice when you did so.

Peter Jones vehemently disagrees.

'I'm not trying to be sexist, but men can't shoulder all the responsibility,' he says. 'These girls are choosing to fill their bodies with alcohol until they collapse. They think they're invincible, but they're not.

'I've seen groups of girls lighting sambuca shots, downing them and then inhaling all the fumes. They're having a great time, nobody is forcing them to drink - but the state they then get in is dangerous.

'Only last week, at a student night in Birmingham, a girl was carried over to me by her friends. They'd found her collapsed in the toilets - they didn't know how long she'd been there - with her knickers round her ankles.

'She was barely conscious and they didn't know what to do with her.

Unfortunately - and this is the hardest thing about working with drunk people - there is very little you can do except monitor their progress until they are sober enough to go home or, in the worst case scenario, have to go to hospital.

'Thankfully, this girl had her friends with her and they were able to take her home at the end of the night, but what of the girls who have become separated? They are the most vulnerable. I often stop girls on their way out to check that the person they are with is known to them.' And Peter is certain it is the fault of alcohol and not drink spiking.