By Ila Ananya

In a shocking case, videos of a woman being beaten up by her colleague after she showed up late for work, has been doing the rounds. Nasreen, who works at Sindhanur City Corporation in Raichur, Karnataka, and was fasting for Ramzan, was reportedly late for work on a Saturday (neither being late, nor anything else can ever be a reason for such abuse), and her colleague believed the apt response was violence.

The accused, Sharanappa, who can be seen kicking Nasreen in the video, was reportedly a contractual employee, and since it was a Saturday and a holiday at the office, there was no staff around — Nasreen and Sharanappa had been asked to work to complete some back logs. Hindustan Times reports that there was a brief conversation about her being late to work, after which Sharanappa started kicking her. The CCTV footage also shows him following her when she left the office, and assaulting her a second time.

According to Times of India, nobody in the office had known about the incident until Nasreen decided to complain to the police about it. What we don’t seem to understand is how this matches with the police saying that Sharanappa was a repeat offender, and that this isn’t the first time this has happened. As of now, a case has been registered against him, and he has been arrested.

We’ve heard of infinite number of instances where women face all kinds of pressures in their workplaces that seem intent on not letting them get ahead. Sometimes they are less overt factors; very often they are cases of sexual harassment or assault. Often, the debate has been about safety of women in workplaces when they work late nights (especially after multiple horrifying cases of women being murdered in their offices), but what about dealing with such physical violence happening within the office space itself? For instance, why hadn’t any action been taken against a man who’s been accused of assaulting his colleagues multiple times?