You & your colleagues may not, but judges still do allow use of sexual history in dubious circumstances. A good example was the recent case of the 13 year old, dubbed a sexual 'predator' by the prosecution:
'The girl is predatory in all her actions and she is sexually experienced.'
And the judge agreed:
'On these facts, the girl was predatory and was egging you on.'
Sexual history is supposed to be 'relevant' to be admissible, but that is down to interpretation. I do not see that a 13 year olds sexual history is 'relevant' to an incidence of abuse by a 41 year old man, and most certainly not the way it was used in that trial.
The rules were tightened in 2006 because the legislation introduced in 2000 was being 'ignored or avoided'.
But that's by the by...
As regards the OP's question, if my case is at all representative, two things you need to be prepared for:
- You're expecting to be accused of lying. Although I was prepared for it, I found that actually by far the most distressing aspect of the trial. I was prepared for the gruesome physical details, but I'd been over those with the police. It wasn't until I was in the witness box that I was directly accused of lying. And I got quite worked up.
What helped me was to remember that consent is the standard defence for rape, it's a legal tool rather than a moral judgement on you, & it doesn't mean that people in the court genuinely think you're a liar.
- The defence barrister will go over the details of the events in question with a fine tooth comb looking for inconsistencies, memory lapses, confusion, in order to cast doubt on the reliability of your testimony. It's very easy to be wrong-footed when you're stressed, because you don't necessarily say everything in sequence.
It helped me to write everything down so that I had it in my head in the witness box.
It also helped enormously to have someone you can go to at the end of each day of the trial & say X is what happened, Y did not. That kept me sane.