Kat met her rapist face-to-face in prison. Now she wants others to do the same

At 29 years of age, newlywed teacher Kat Khan was living the life she'd always dreamed of.

But in an instant it was torn from her.

"It was about four days before Christmas and I decided to take a jog around the block," she told A Current Affair.

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"By the time I'd come back about 20 minutes after I started, a man had come in to the home and laid in wait for me before beating and raping me."

Bloodied, bruised and half naked, Khan escaped her home and ran to the neighbouring property.

Her attacker fled, stealing her car and leading police on a high speed chase across the Gold Coast before he was Tasered and arrested.

"He took everything. We sold the house. The marriage deteriorated so I lost a family," Khan said.

"It took a long time for me to even go outside and run again.

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"[I lost] a sense of safety, a sense of being carefree that I will never, I will never get back again."

Khan's perpetrator was sentenced to 13 years behind bars. 

But she said it didn't feel like justice.

"We know that once people enter the system, they're more likely to reoffend and remain in that system, so for me, that was my sort of motivator into I don't know this person, at the very least, I need to speak to this person," she said.

Khan spent six months lobbying the prison to allow her to sit in front of her rapist and speak about what happened.

"I wanted him to know that I wasn't just a faceless nobody. This was a person, a person with a marriage and a house and a life," Khan said.

"He was very apologetic, yeah. He has apologised on several occasions, through letters and phone calls.

"After that conversation, it really lit a fire under me where I thought there has to be more to this."

Now, she's hoping her fight will serve as the catalyst for change in the justice system.

Driven by her own trauma, Khan created BRAVE, a program that stands for Building Restoration and Victim Empathy.

The restorative justice program forces some the worst criminals to confront the human cost of their crimes.

Backed by Magnus Health, BRAVE has been trialled in two Queensland prisons.

"We've had a range from like petty crimes like drug possession or drug dealing, and then we've had more heinous crimes, such as rapists, murderers, pedophilia," Khan said.

She's hoping further funding support will help expand the program further.

For more information about the BRAVE project, click here.