There are interlocking ironies between the two bills that the minister of women and child development, Renuka Chowdhury, has been fighting for in recent months. She has been receiving hate mail after the Domestic Violence Act was implemented, and the wide reach of the proposed bill for the protection of women against sexual harassment is not going to make her any more popular among the menfolk when it is passed. The necessity of these laws to be wide in reach and flexible is underscored by the difficulties of demarcating spaces for violent or abusive acts. The sky marshal, who allegedly harassed a young woman within an aeroplane that contained a chief minister, has been charged with passing lewd remarks in a public place. That is fortunate; anywhere else it would have first been glossed over as a bit of “eve-teasing”. The high visibility of the act in a maximum-security area, and the irony of the “public place” being also a confined space have made immediate arrest possible.

Granted, that an aeroplane about to take off is neither a domestic space nor a workplace, but a public space. But when a niece is molested in her bed by her uncle, who enters her parents’ home with goons, and later drags her out with her mother to strip them, beat them and parade them naked, all because she refused his advances, in which space was this crime enacted? Law needs its black and white spaces, but its implementation would depend on the ability to negotiate between these, for the space of crime is also notional. It exists in the head of the perpetrator as well as in the places it is carried out. The irony of space has been best worked out in the proposed sexual harassment bill, which promises to include in its purview domestic help. A man who beats up his wife and also molests the domestic help is committing his crimes in two different spaces even if both are within the same house. The first crime is of domestic violence, the second that of sexual harassment in the workplace. The space of cruelty is unlimited.