What do you think of women who date online? Do you a) wish them luck and then lose interest, because it’s none of your damn business b) worry, because it’s tough out there with the threat of sexual violence, blocking of ethnic groups (known in non-tech speak as racism), misogyny and people who think the way to your heart is with a tiger selfie or c) think it means they will sleep with anyone. If you answered c, you are at best woefully out of touch, at worst an old-school sexist. And, quite possibly, a British judge.

According to Helena Kennedy QC, speaking at London’s annual Bar conference, there are judges who think women who date online “would have sex with anyone”. Let’s take a moment to digest this double whammy. First, the view that women who date online – it is estimated that one in five people now meet their partners via the internet – are a bit desperate and would thus have sex with anyone. Second, the victim-blaming that goes hand in hand with this particular brand of retrograde sexism. The next step? Dating online makes you responsible for what happens to you.

These are the kinds of judgments being upheld right now in our courts of justice. The place where, as Kennedy stated, society’s “poorest, the abused and battered” wind up. Where women meet further stigma instead of the rule of law. Where the number of rape cases being charged by the Crown Prosecution Service has plummeted to the lowest in a decade. The views may be dated but the rulings are achingly now. Take this month’s criminal trial in Cork, Ireland, in which a woman’s thong was used by the defence as a sign of her consent. “You have to look at the way she was dressed,” the barrister reportedly said. “She was wearing a thong with a lace front.” The man was acquitted.

Last year a report described the lack of diversity amongst UK senior judiciary as a “serious constitutional issue”. The proportion of female judges in the UK has been deemed among the lowest in Europe. A 2016 survey found that 74% of top judges were privately educated. It’s when we get small but telling glimpses into the long, casually held views of judges that we see the impact of sameness and all the unchecked beliefs that tend to accompany it in action. The fact is, nobody rises to the top of our judiciary system with such ease and certainty as a privately educated white man. There is no other profession, barring, perhaps, that other bastion of privilege that is our political system, that demonstrates Britain’s founding principle of elitism quite so persuasively. And no one is failed by it more systematically than vulnerable women.