Another day, another depressing serial rape story.

Only weeks after taxi driver John Warboys was convicted for a series of rapes that the police had failed to act on, another serial rapist emerges who was left free to attack women for years due to shoddy police work. As with the Warboys case, police believe that dozens more women may have been attacked who have not, as yet, come forward.

I am of the opinion that we barely know how many sex attacks take place every day. I know a number of women who have been raped - and those are only the ones who have told me about it, I am sure there are others amongst my acquaintance who haven't shared their stories with me. They were all raped by people they knew - though not necessarily people they knew well - and not one of them reported the attack to the police. Either they did not wish to relive the experience or they didn't think they would be believed.

Then there is the category of 'sexual assault'. How bad does an assault have to be to be considered a crime? I have no idea. I do know that I've had a number of deeply unpleasant experiences that it would never have occurred to me to report:

1. Walking down the street, a passing man reached over, grabbed hold of one of my nipples, and squeezed. I had the presence of mind to shout at him.

2. While I was in a queue in a restaurant, a man put his hand between my buttocks and pressed his finger against my vagina. I was so shocked and embarrassed that I laughed, and it took me years to forgive myself for it.

3. In a bar, a man pushed me down on a table and, holding me down by the head and the small of my back, proceeded to lick all over my bare back above the top of the strapless dress I was wearing, while the people around laughed and clapped. But hey, I knew him, so that's OK, right? Right? On this occasion I tried to get away but he was too strong, so I just gave in and waited until he'd finished. Oddly enough I had a very similar experience in my first ever job, when a senior producer took it upon himself to lick my sunburnt back. But he was gay, so that doesn't count, right? Right?

4. I was surrounded by a group of young men in the street who made a series of threatening comments about the smell of my "unwashed c*nt". Who knows what they would have done if I hadn't seen a couple on the other side of the road and ran away towards them. This happened in Australia: I told an Australian friend, and she was astonished that I was upset about it. This may have been the most troubling aspect of the whole experience.

5. I interrupted a man masturbating in the street who then chased me.

6. I was flashed at outside my school.

7. As a young child, I was followed by a strange man around WHSmith until I went and found my mum.

Which is not to even begin on the more everyday occurrences of having my bum felt in pubs, clubs and on crowded tubes, of having sexually explicit comments shouted at me in the street on a fairly regular basis, of drunk men grabbing me and shoving their tongues in my mouth for some spurious reason (England scores), and, of course, of being sexually propositioned - though fortunately no more than that - by the very cab driver I was trusting to get me home safe. There seemed little point in complaining about any of it.

I would say that my experiences are by no means atypical. In fact, I would actually count myself as lucky that this is all that I have had to endure. My guess - and it has to be a guess, because this is something which is rarely openly discussed - is that most of the women reading this will have a set of similar stories to share, whereas most of the men will be horrified because they have no idea that this is daily life for women, especially young women.

If we are going to understand rape, and why men like Warboys and Reid get away with it for so long, we need to understand the entire picture of sexual harassment and intimidation, which means that women - and for that matter men - will need to start talking about their experiences of sexual bullying. Rape, sadly, is part of a continuum, and some of the people who get away with this type of lower-key intimidation will carry on to do much, much worse. Equally a woman who has been subjected to a lifetime of minor sexual assaults without anybody - including themselves - taking them seriously may simply not see the point of reporting a rape.

No doubt the Warboys / Reid cases will result in an overhaul of police approaches to rape, but I would argue that it's time consider whether we have the right approach to assaults at the other end of the scale.