A WOMAN subjected to 90 minutes of "abject terror" as she was raped and threatened with a knife has waived her anonymity in the hope that speaking publicly will help other victims of sexual crimes.

Tracey Wilson, 40, was raped by John McKeown, 23, after he entered her home in Livingston through an unlocked side door last year, armed himself with a knife and threatened her, her 48-year-old former brother-in-law and nine-year-old nephew.

Ms Wilson was so traumatised that she lost her voice for around five weeks after the rape and said she had feared she would never recover fully.

However, after she attended the High Court in Edinburgh as McKeown was sentenced to six years yesterday, she revealed she had forgiven her attacker and took the brave decision to speak out about her ordeal.

She said: "If I can help somebody else who has been through an experience like this, maybe they'll seek support."

Explaining her decision to forgive her attacker, Ms Wilson said: "It's a bit strange. I sometimes think: 'Why do I feel like this?' But it's just how I feel.

"I think it's got a lot to do with my upbringing probably. We're not a religious family, but we've always been brought up to forgive and not hold grudges and there's never been any real hatred.

"So it's probably helped me a lot. I don't think you can move on if you're carrying a lot of hatred, I think it probably holds you back."

Ms Wilson had screamed and struggled with McKeown after he walked into her bedroom on November 6, armed with a knife. Her brother-in-law came out of another bedroom but McKeown told him to stay where he was "or she gets it". The attacker then told Ms Wilson's brother-in-law that if he heard his bedroom door open he would kill him and the boy.

McKeown took Ms Wilson downstairs. She said: "We spoke for about half an hour. He sat and spoke about his parents, his girlfriend, about Christmas, about how he had just been diagnosed as a diabetic – he was telling me how upset he was at that and the fact that if diabetes didn't kill him, a prison sentence would.

"I don't know, perhaps I was naïve, but I never thought anything. I had been thinking: 'This is a vulnerable guy, he's got himself into something he shouldn't have and he's going to walk away'.

"He was chatting away and then all of a sudden he got up and came towards me and that was it. I think it probably went on for 10 or 15 minutes, but it felt like forever."

After raping her, McKeown put his head in his hands and said: "Phone the police, I've done the worst thing ever."

Ms Wilson called for her brother-in-law, who came downstairs. She said: "He didn't know what had happened. So I said: 'John's just leaving.' And he said: 'Is everything OK?' And I said: 'Yeah'. The man picked up his two knives and took them with him.

"When he was leaving he said he was really sorry and he would come back tomorrow to apologise for what he had done."

Ten minutes later, McKeown knocked on her door to return her mobile phone. Afterwards, when her sister arrived home, Ms Wilson broke down and told her brother-in-law and sister what had happened and the police were called.

At a hearing in February, McKeown admitted abducting and raping Ms Wilson and threatening to kill and her and other occupants of the house. Ms Wilson said this was "massive" for her, as it spared her and her family the ordeal of having to go through a court case.

She added: "During all of this my thoughts have always been with Mr McKeown's family. Not only my family have been involved in this, Mr McKeown's family have been through hell as well. It is not their fault.

"I know what my family have gone through. Hopefully we can start to move on."

She has since moved house and said that, though she is more fearful than before, she is "getting back to what I was before the incident".

She said: "That's the one thing I feared the most – that I would never go back to the way I was – but gradually I am."

Ms Wilson said she and her family still asked themselves whether they could have overpowered McKeown.

"That is something we think about every single day," she said. "But he had these two knives and my nephew was there. You can look back now and say I wish I had done this or that, but even at the time, when the lad burst out crying and told me to phone the police, I couldn't. I was absolutely numb. All I wanted him to do was leave the house.

"The police asked that – why didn't you phone us there and then? And it was because I just wanted him out of our house. You just don't know how that lad's mood could have changed if he'd seen police cars arriving.

"So we did what we did and got out alive. And that's the one thing that has stayed with me the whole time, the fact that we got out of there alive and if I went through what I went through, it's not a small price ... but it's is a small price to pay for three lives."

Lord Stewart rejected imposing a life sentence on McKeown, of Livingston, saying he was not persuaded the necessary risk criteria were met. He told him he would have jailed him for nine years but for his guilty plea.