It can take a lot to make Flavia Agnes cry, she is not the pushover she used to be when she was married and being beaten to pulp by her husband. She took it until she was in her late-thirties, and then she decided to become a lawyer. She left her children at her husband’s home, a very tough decision but one that had to be executed since she was leaving penniless to live in a slum, educate herself, start afresh but with every intention of reaching out to her children as soon as she could. She threw away her husband’s surname, she rejected the idea of using her father’s surname, she simply took a second name which would stay with her unalterably. Her fortieth birthday was very special—her first year as a qualified lawyer. Today advocate Flavia Agnes is fifty-one, a grandmother of children settled all over the world; right now she is standing and crying in the hustle and bustle of the Bombay High Court.

A civil case was listed as coming up only much later in the day; perhaps it would be well past lunch before it did. Advocate Agnes accordingly went to deal with the divorce aspect of the same case in the court at the suburb of Bandra during the morning. But by the time she could reach the High Court in the city centre for the afternoon session, there had been a board collapse; the term used when cases listed on the board are dealt with dizzyingly quickly though not necessarily for the obvious reason. Advocate Agnes’ case had come up and gone in the morning. It was that of the daughter of the mother seeking a divorce. Advocate Agnes’ contention was that the child not be forced to spend time with her grandfather because he had sexually abused her; it would go against the best interests of the child. The court would not believe that the grandfather could do such a thing and the grandfather’s battery of lawyers were working overtime to secure weekend visitation rights of the girl to her grandfather’s house.

Mulls Flavia Agnes, ‘When the case has several connected aspects to it like this one, I am not sure whether the answer lies directly in taking the child’s sexual abuser to the criminal court. But then again, the onus of proving that the child has been sexually molested by a person from her own house in practise falls on the child in a civil or criminal court. Sometimes I wonder about whether it is even worth dragging mothers and their children through such cumbersome and lengthy court procedures. But then if you don’t believe in the courts, what do women and children have for themselves? Then: only might is right. Neither women nor children have that male physical might, so they must look to the courts for the rule of law.’

The rule of law goes completely against the best interests of the child in the time taken by the judicial system. Of what use are the best laws in the land if they cannot be applied with alacrity? For instance, the average time taken for a case of rape to find its way from the lower courts to the Supreme Court can be between ten and fifteen years. Correlate this with the forty-eight cases of Child Sexual Abuse reported between 1992 and 1994 in the newspapers. The children averaged between eight and ten years of age, incidentally, the youngest of these children was six months old. By the time the cases come up for their initial hearing, bar the six-month-old child, the rest would most probably no longer be minors.