I HAVE BEEN READING books about sexual violence for more years than I can remember. I have looked at books by survivors, rapists, journalists, criminologists, evolutionary biologists and feminists, and have written about the Yorkshire Ripper myself.

Weirdly, there appears no correlation between expanding our knowledge of the subject and reducing its extent; in the period I am talking about, beginning with a new wave of feminist writing in the 1970s, many more women have reported rapes, while fewer attackers have ended up in prison.

The statistics are a national scandal. The conviction rate for rapes reported to the police has dropped from one in three in 1977 to one in 20 today. If you have the misfortune to be raped in Essex or Gloucestershire, so few reported rapes result in a conviction (about one in 33) that there is, arguably, no longer a penalty for sexual violence. We are entitled to ask why the criminal justice system fails British women so badly when a majority of prosecutions end in convictions in Finland, Germany, Hungary and Iceland. I am sick of the misogynist lie that most rapes are made up by British women who, for some unexplained reason, are peculiarly prone to making false accusations of rape.

This is a subject where the dominant popular discourse — that innocent men live in perpetual fear of being falsely accused — is an inversion of reality. Rapists know that even if they are unlucky enough to be apprehended, widespread “rape myths” will incline the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and juries to regard them with sympathy. The serial rapist Ian Huntley exploited these myths and avoided prosecution until he got a job as a school caretaker and killed two young girls in Soham.

The latest author to enter the crowded field of rape literature is Joanna Bourke, professor of history at Birkbeck College, London. The author of acclaimed histories of fear and killing — her An Intimate History of Killing won the Wolfson History Prize — she is ideally placed to analyse the unpleasant material such a task throws up. Bourke sensibly widens the definition of rape, as the criminal justice system now does, to include acts beyond the penetration of the vagina by a penis.

Her motive for writing is anger, her approach scholarly — there is a mass of material here, documenting sexual violence in the Vietnam War, the American prison system and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. She demolishes several myths, arguing that “robust examinations of rape cases actually reveal low levels of deception” — victims don't make it up — and pointing out that women are capable of sexual aggression.

But the problem comes in two parts. First, Bourke challenges the feminist theory, popularised by the campaigner Susan Brownmiller, that sex crime is always about power. Rape is about lots of things, she says, and at different points in history rapists have had different motivations. This is, I think, a misunderstanding of the classic feminist argument which recognises rape as a sexual act but sees it as a graphic assertion of male dominance. This explains why rapes of young women, often involving alcohol and some form of deception, are so widespread even though consensual sex has never been more widely available.

Secondly, Bourke's language is dense, academic and stuffed with abstract nouns. It seems a long haul before the reader arrives at her somewhat impractical call for “a future in which sexual violence has been placed outside the threshold of the human”.

Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present by Joanna Bourke

Virago, £25; 566pp

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist