One man is found not guilty of a series of sex offences and half the population dashes to the keyboard to denounce the other half. After seven hours trudging through the quagmire of the papers, the blogosphere, legal websites, feminist websites, misogynist websites, the mud on my boots is so thick that I can barely move.

How did we become so cruel, so vitriolic, so bloody stupid?

Two years ago a 15-year-old girl and her mother went to the police to complain that the actor Michael Le Vell had raped the girl when she was six and sexually assaulted her on a number of other occasions over the next eight years. Le Vell was arrested the next morning and questioned for a number of hours. Once the police had completed their investigation, the file was passed to the CPS, which decided not to proceed with the case.