Eleven-year-old girls, eh? You can’t trust the little devils. They’re either scrawling on their schoolbooks, playing with their dolls, or welcoming the sexual advances of grown men. That’s right: “welcoming” them. After all, a judge said that in a British court of law, so he must be right.

Yesterday, Judge Robert Atherton told Manchester Crown Court that 20-year-old Jon Dixon’s molestation of a minor didn’t deserve a jail term because his victim had the “sexual awareness” of someone much older. Which obviously makes it fine to touch up a child, right? But in Dixon’s defence, he thought she was 12, not 11, puffed his lawyers. Which, hmm, makes it all fine.

Atherton sentenced Dixon to a community order to the disgust of children’s charities like Kidscape, who called for him to be removed from hearing cases involving child abuse. Hear, hear, we say, as the case of Judge Julian Hall also creeps horribly into our heads, a man who claimed a rape case was “exceptional” last year because the 10-year-old victim was dressed provocatively. The law, eh? We despair.