Gap-year travel: 'We were lucky to get out alive. But I'm glad I went'

No one watching the news this week can fail to have been moved by the deaths of five young British women in Ecuador. The four teenage gap-year students and their team leader were travelling to the village of Puerto Lopez, where they were to build sanitation and a crèche for the villagers. They never arrived: their bus was hit by a lorry. After the terrible news reached Britain, families and friends spoke of their loss. Perhaps most poignant was the selfless reaction of Robin Logie, father of Rebecca, 19: "We do not want other young people to be put off going on gap-year experiences because of this. Thousands of people go travelling and do this kind of thing – this was just an accident. People, parents get scared; they want to protect their kids, but these adventures are so important."

In an unhappy coincidence, this week also marked the sixth anniversary of the murder of Caroline Stuttle, a 19-year-old York woman who was travelling in Australia when a drug addict robbed her and then pushed her to her death from a Queensland bridge. Her mother, Marjorie Marks-Stuttle, marked the date by finally braving the journey to see where her daughter died. She told Yorkshire TV crews this week that travel meant so much to her daughter, that there were no regrets over Caroline living her dreams, and that the family had since set up Caroline's Rainbow Foundation to advise young travellers on safety.

Similarly, Gregory Swann said of his daughter Indira, who also died in Ecuador: "She was independent and she travelled with our full blessing, with our knowledge of the risks, which are quite minimal, because the company she went with we€vetted very well." He explained that he had "no regrets, apart from the final outcome".

Indeed, many students do have the means, and more sixth-form leavers than ever before are taking advantage of this chance to explore the world before loans and exams lock them into years of debt and drudgery. The worth of the gap-year market in the UK is now reckoned to be £2.2bn, with some 230,000 under-24-year-olds taking part. Sixty per cent of gappers are female, spending an average of £4,800 each on their overseas adventures. Most are joyful affairs to be remembered for ever, but a small minority end in tragedy. And though the stories were unconnected, it was hard not to connect the deaths in Ecuador with that of Scarlett Keeling, the 15-year-old murdered in Goa, and even that of Meredith Kercher, the undergraduate murdered while on a study year in Italy. These stories all stir a similar feeling: that travel is dangerous; it's a nasty world out there, and shouldn't we be keeping our teenage girls safe at home?

Well, no – and I speak as somebody whose own gap year, a decade ago, ended in horror. We were lucky: my best friend Nicola and I escaped relatively unharmed, while the two potential rapists who held us at knifepoint went to jail. The experience toughened me up, though, and woke me from the happy daydream in which many naive travellers exist. It taught me more about the inner workings of a society than two months of smoking dope on beaches ever could, and, if anything, only increased my desire to see the world. I have since been to Brazil, Cuba and China alone.

The irony was that, aged 18, we were trying incredibly hard to stay out of trouble: staying in at night and avoiding the dodgier parts of the towns we travelled to on our two-month journey around North Africa. So a nice stroll near the beach one sunny afternoon seemed safe, until it became apparent that two young men were following us.

They tried to chat us up; we asked them politely to leave us alone. They hassled us more aggressively, and physically, so we tried to head home, at which point the bigger man pulled out a foot-long knife from his trouser leg and clutched me round the waist, holding the knife to my throat. He switched from the French we both spoke fluently into Arabic, saying menacing things I could not understand. I could hear screaming and at some point realised it was coming from my mouth. This wasn't fear, but a whole new emotion, a feeling of utter certainty: we were going to be raped, followed by death. They say that your whole life flashes in front of your eyes but all I could think of was my father, and the knowledge that he really couldn't save me this time.

Somehow, incredibly, we escaped. I think Nicola pounced on the guy. I think the shock made him jump. I think he lost his grip on me and while his friend was panicking we girls ran, screaming, falling, across the hills to a Berber farmhouse, whence somebody accompanied us to a police station where we thought we would be safe. In fact, the real trauma was just beginning. The police did at least catch our attackers, only to make Nicola go into their cell with them to identify them. When the police had to put us in a car, the assailants sat with us.

In two months of haggling in souks, learning Arabic from friendly waiters and drinking mint tea with welcoming local families, I don't think I had felt homesick once. But I was now appreciating Britain like never before.

A kangaroo court was summoned that afternoon, during which the assailants changed their statement as they went along. We insisted that real justice had to be done, at which point I was taken on to a balcony by the chief of police, who whispered to me in French that if I was serious then we would have to go to Tangier, where they would be tried for attempted rape, which could see these poor boys sent down for five years. I knew that we were probably spending more money on our two-month jaunt than either of these men made in a year, and that our lives back home were easy, privileged, spoiled. It was tempting to do what the whole village now wanted us to do and just make ourselves scarce. Nothing in Nicola's philosophy A level and my French A level course unit on the post-colonial politics of the Maghreb had quite prepared us for this.

But how could we leave the impression that it was all right to assault women at knifepoint? We felt that if we, who could, didn't make a stand, what chance would a Moroccan woman have? So on we fought, and within days we had a hearing in Tangier. I had contacted my father on the phone, and after I declined his kind offer to fly out to me, he had gone straight into full-on efficiency mode, going through every guidebook, every phone number he could find, eventually getting hold of the British consul herself. When she walked up to us in the courthouse and asked, "Which one of you is Sophie Heawood? Your father sent me," I promptly burst into tears.

We still had to go through with being asked if we had wanted to have sex with these men, and much other nonsense. It was made all the worse by seeing the boys in the dock covered in cigarette burns and bruises after spending a few nights in the cells. By now, I felt nothing but pity for them. In the end, we lost the court case due to lack of evidence: one of our statements went missing and we were refused access to a local boy who said he had witnessed the whole thing from the beach. Still, the two men were sentenced for that little-known crime of "damage to the tourist economy", since it was reasoned that we would tell our friends not to go to Morocco.

Yet we didn't tell our friends not to go; indeed, I went back shortly afterwards with my father. Why? Because the beautiful things stay with you too. As Gregory Swann said: "Travel broadens knowledge, understanding. I think it is one of the best educations you can have. I would say to any student with the means to travel, do so."

Caroline Stuttle 19, from York, was on her gap year in Australia in 2002 when she murdered. 'Caroline was a wonderful daughter, so full of fun and energy,' her parents Alan and Marjorie said after her death.

Lizzie Pincock 19, from Taunton, Somerset, was to study English at Loughborough. Her mother, Jill Pincock, said: 'She was determined to be self-sufficient. She worked as a gap-year teacher to fund her trip.'

Indira Swann 18, from Maidenhead, Berkshire, was to have started an English and classics course at King's College London. 'Her motivation was to help people and support people and enjoy life,' said Gregory Swann, her father.

Rebecca Logie 19, 'was the kind of girl who lived life to the full and wouldn't let her fears get in the way of doing anything', said her father, Robin. Becci, from Chorley, Lancashire, was the driving force behind a local college TV network.

Sarah Howard 26, from Northwich, Cheshire, was a freelance tour guide on her first expedition when tragedy struck. 'Travelling was her passion. She was the kind of person that everybody loved,' Daniel Howard, her brother, said.

Emily Sadler 19, from Northwood, Hertfordshire, was due to study history at Manchester University in September. Her family said: 'She was a beautiful, bubbly girl with her whole life ahead of her. Her loss is indescribable.'