Late on the night of November 1, a 22-year-old woman employee of a BPO centre in Pune, Jyotikumari Ramnand Chaudhari, was allegedly raped and murdered by the driver of her office transport vehicle and an accomplice.

Like the rape and murder of Pratibha in Bangalore in December 2005, the story grabbed headlines. Despite several other attacks on women workers, and the subsequent assurance by BPO companies that their safety norms were being tightened, these norms are not enforced strictly enough.

Under the law, an employer is liable for the safety of an employee on night duty while he or she is commuting to work or back. But in both cases, company officials have sought to evade responsibility by casting blame onto the victims. In Jyoti’s case, company officials allegedly said that she erred by getting into a cab alone with the driver, which is against the safety norms.

The rule is, ‘No first pick up and no last dropping of female employees’, and if a woman is travelling alone a security guard should be present. The night she was killed, Jyoti was second on the pick-up list. The male employee, who was first, was absent — a fact that the driver took advantage of to abduct Jyoti.

According to a company spokesperson, Jyoti, seeing the situation, should have called the central help desk and asked for another car with an escort. However, Jyoti may have thought that the second person in the cab was in fact a male employee, who had been picked up first. Whatever actually happened, the remarks allegedly made by official spokespersons suggest that the company is more concerned about protecting itself than about the fate of its worker.

This is not the first time that BPO companies have attempted to evade liability for employee safety by casting responsibility for vigilance onto employees themselves. The employer has reportedly denied negligence in Pratibha’s case, saying that the accused was not an employee of the company.

Of course, there is nothing new about blaming the victims of rape — young women are constantly warned not to ‘provoke’ attack by their dress or behaviour. But in the case of call centre workers, this tendency is reinforced by the general air of opprobrium that attaches to them.

Popular representations of women BPO employees as ‘bold’ and sexually permissive make it easy for companies to deflect the blame onto the victims. Immediately after Jyoti’s murder, a senior BPO executive said that many employees are ‘guilty’ of not behaving ‘professionally’ with drivers — by talking too much or ‘being too friendly’.

Such views allow employers to be absolved of responsibility. For instance, some press reports highlighted the fact that Jyoti did not notice that the car was taking the wrong route because she was ‘talking all the while on her cellphone to her boyfriend’ — suggesting that her carelessness was compounded by moral laxity.

Although the two, accused of Jyoti’s murder, have been arrested, it remains to be seen what action will be taken by the government, the IT industry, and the company itself. Attempting to divert attention from the real problems facing BPO workers, and to evade responsibility for such tragic incidents by accusing them of being irresponsible, will only tarnish the reputation of ITES companies themselves.

(The writer is a sociologist at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore)