THE horror of domestic violence is that it takes place in private places, behind closed doors and the veil of common decency that supposedly safeguards individual and household privacy.

“A person’s home is their castle”, maybe — but that is not to say such places haven’t been known to feature dungeons, cells and torture chambers. With so much earnest effort being made at the highest levels to shepherd bilateral relations between Malaysia and Indonesia to less choppy waters, it is unconscionable that another fit of brutish madness in what would otherwise appear to be a perfectly ordinary household has sent yet another Indonesian maid to a horrid and untimely fate.

Martika Hani’s death in hospital, after being found hideously battered and locked in a toilet, is all but guaranteed to stir the barely dampened embers of outrage in her homeland. Frankly, it is an outrage that must be seen here, too.

We have been too defensive against the upset in Indonesia over the treatment their nationals receive here. We respond that there are illegals among them; there are snatch-thieves and armed burglars; there are even maids like the 27-year-old who beat up her employers’ children and ran off with cash and a laptop last Friday, the day Martika had been locked inside that toilet.

The truth is, such incidents are as vile to Malaysians as they are to Indonesians, as indeed they would be to all decent human beings. What both peoples alike need to see is unequivocal action against the perpetrators of such domestic atrocities: no prevarications, no mitigations of circumstance, no appeals to an understanding of “human nature”.

Brutality such as that which led to Martika’s horrible death, even if demonically resident in human nature, is intolerable in human society.

Examples must be made of both these cases. For the abused as well as the abusive domestic worker, the law must operate in all its blind dispassion.

Those who immolated Martika must be made to face their own fate at the hands of the judiciary, while the vicious little thief who was not content to run away with her employers’ belongings but had to beat their children too must be tracked down. Given the murky shadows into which foreigners can so easily melt in this country, that won’t be as straightforward as prosecuting the case against Martika’s former employers. But what can be done must be done, and with obvious and unquestionable resolve.