In 2011, a 48-year-old man indulged in a “tawdry affair” with a 17-year-old girl. She was a schoolgirl infatuated with the world he represented – of money and parties and glamour. He was successful, well-known, wealthy ... and very married at the time.

Four years later, accounts of the affair differ between the parties because, whatever happened, the end was acrimonious. The ends of these relationships often are. Where a sexual frisson is generated in this kind of man by young, beautiful girls, it fades with a painful realisation that the relative powerlessness of penniless kids just doesn’t stay sexy.

The affair to which I refer been subject to a court proceedings this week. It is, of course, that between the disgraced AFL player agent, Ricky Nixon, and Kim Duthie, who is now 21.

The exposure of Nixon’s involvement with Duthie resulted in the suspension of his player agent’s license. His marriage has since ended. He served 200 hours of community service after pleading guilty to bashing a subsequent fiancee.

Now, Duthie has lost her bid to prevent the release of an autobiography by Nixon that devotes two chapters to the contested story of their intimacy. This week, the court heard that Nixon’s book depicts Duthie as a “temptress, wicked woman and seductress”. He actually calls the teenage girl from Frankston a slut and a prostitute. Her barrister argued that if the book is published, her reputation will be fixed, damaged and irreparable. Nixon, for his part, announced to Twitter “Game on tomorrow ass wipe rag” the night before Duthie’s proceedings commenced.

Even though Duthie has lost her injunction attempt, the moral victory should surely belong to her – and not the powerful and influential man who exploited a minor, abandoned her, thumped another woman and is now trying to turn a buck destroying a 21-year-old’s reputation. After all, Australian male enthusiasm to affirm newfound, woman-friendly credentials went so far as painting white ribbon symbols on RAAF warplanes among this week’s plentiful commemorations of the white ribbon campaign to end male violence against women.

But just as a white ribbon decal on a warplane’s tailfin exerts no special protection over any woman unlucky enough to live in a warzone, neither do facts nor reality oblige moral consistency in the social judgment of women and their abusers. A report released by the Australian government – amid both noble sentiment and quite a bit of self-congratulatory hoo-haa of White Ribbon events this week – revealed that victim-blaming attitudes that attribute the cause of gendered violence, harassment, discrimination and abuse remains “firmly entrenched” among Australian men and women, adults and children.

The research firm TNS spent 400 hours in workshops with 255 people to compile the report. Hypothetical situations and events of gender inequality and gender aggression were presented to the workshop participants, who were told that the male and female characters were unknown to one another. Then they were asked what they thought had provoked the incidents.

“The response from the majority of influencers (male and female) was to automatically question the role of the female before rebuking the behaviour described,” said the report. Boys and young men were apparently fast to “externalise” blame, particularly towards women – a phenomenon that the researchers found was already present in boys as young as 10.

Girls and women absorb the dominant instruction of the culture and are “consistently fast to internalise, or blame themselves when presented the identical scenarios”. The attitudes are fostered by “influential others” in the lives of young people – parents, teachers, community leaders, role models and a near constant cultural repetition that “boys will be boys” and girls should just shut up and deal with it.

Apparently, the report’s findings have surprised people. Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said the research painted “a disturbing picture”. Maybe still anyone expressing shock should try being a woman on the internet, or a woman who walks down a street, jogs through a park, goes to a nightclub, holds down a job, or who has been raped: we have been painted and repainted with the visible reality of these attitudes our entire lives. Just ask Kim Duthie – 21 years old and yet the object of a grown man’s blame, in a culture that just might, even now, excuse him for it.