Around 20% of women experience some type of sexual assault after the age of 16, according to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, yet around five in six victims of all genders don’t report their experiences to the police.

It’s hardly surprising – just a quick glance at recent stories about sexual assault and rape paint a dark picture. There’s the decision to ask rape victims to hand over their phones to police, or risk having investigations into sexual assault dropped. There are the comments made by a UKIP candidate about raping Labour MP Jess Phillips, which are being treated as a “joke”. And even in fiction, there’s the way that Game of Thrones continues to use rape as a tool to make its female characters stronger, as though they couldn’t have succeeded without being attacked first.

But all these things mean it’s all the more powerful when a victim does speak out, as author Kiran Millwood Hargrave has done. In a Twitter post, Millwood Hargrave written a letter to her rapist, 10 years after he attacked her.

YA author Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s letter to her rapist is powerful and inspiring