Norms are cultural phenomena that proscribe or prescribe behaviour in specific circumstances. Anyone with the determination to contribute towards the uplift of society morally and modernize it technologically, with self-conviction for personal growth, could not care more about good norms. On the other hand, if people adopt different norms in different sets of situations, favouring specific suitability indices, then the deterioration guarantees only what we call cataclysmic decline. The barbaric torture of a 14-year-old domestic worker in Islamabad by the wife of a Civil Judge is a dark blot on the face of everyone. Just as sets of mutually consistent norms help regulate behaviour, sets of inconsistent or rapidly shifting norms – a state of affairs leading to Durkheim’s famous anomie – are often regarded as a symptom, if not the cause, of social unrest (Berger 1998). Anomies germinate when perks trump principles. When you get the liberty to make irrational decisions and actions for personal gains, keeping all checks and balances aside, you slowly turn into an ogre, causing trepidation and spreading anomaly widely. The debate of good norms vs. bad norms is never-ending, but there are certain things on which a consensus has set its positions very clearly. The consensus on being true to others, showing kindness to everyone, being generous to the poor, and being tender with minors is never contrasted. In society, people have different aspirations. They choose different trajectories and ways of getting closer to their goals. Amidst all struggle, when someone deprives the other person of his ordinate share, the moral burden sticks with the former and continues to place moral pressures in consciousness to rescind their unjustifiable actions. Sadly, the moral bell diminishes because the lure of materialistic pleasures is too strong to resist. Our history books are full of literature on the class structure of Hindus, but they remained silent while the crueller version of the class system was brewing in our country. The gradual decline of human society, ours in particular, to the state of being haphazardly unethical, when it comes to the treatment of people who fall below in status, or excessive exploitation of natural resources serving as a basis for climate disaster, is pretty evident, daunting the soft and thinking souls everywhere. The recent event of torturing the domestic worker by the wife of a Civil Judge highlights two sociocultural and two socioeconomic aspects along with their far-reaching implications. In Pakistan, out of the total working population, 80 per cent has been engaged in the informal sector of the economy, and out of those, 50 percent are women. Among the working women in the informal sector, around 80 per cent are home-based workers, which make up a huge proportion of the economy of Pakistan. These Home-based women workers (HBWs) usually belong to the poor, lower or lower-middle-income background and form various age groups and possess very little or no education at all, have no social protection (According to the Punjab Domestic and Home-Based Workers Survey PD&HWS 2021-22). Talking about the socioeconomic causes, the first thing that comes to my mind is the concept of class superiority and class inferiority based not on intellectual tendencies but on the financial balances of people. Pakistani society has wrongly demarcated certain boundaries, one of which is the unequal distribution of wealth. Today, most of the people who are financially well have benefited from the rich real estate business. The most drastic and entrenching drawbacks of this business include no physical or mental effort to gain wealth. The mafia manipulates the prices of lands, and the people with investments get rich. This creates an undue financial dispensation that brings a lot of sins and moral lapses because it is a case of getting money with slackness. With this system, there comes the practice of buying social positions and social status called Sifarishi Nizam which saps the blood of people who are deserving. Such people enjoy the status of others who are more knowledgeable and skilful. These products of disproportionation give rise to norms and values that monetarily suit them. Consequently, they create their own meta norms regulation mechanisms that are above the law. To give credence and social traction to their set standards, they deploy only one tool i.e., terror through violence. This is what the wife of a Civil Judge has tried to do like so many other people among her frustrated lot do. She has sieged the law in the house of a judge that establishes severe questions about her mental state and keeps her husband judge in this job. The two sociocultural aspects of this event should also be discussed. It surrounds the mentality of the employer and the mentality of the parents of the abused domestic worker. The wife of the judge certainly has transgressive tendencies and phantasmagoria in her mind that prompted her to be a monster to her house help. Our history books are full of literature on the class structure of Hindus, but they remained silent while the crueller version of the class system was brewing in our country. So much so, this classist mindset has so deeply clawed itself into our society that any attempt to upend it seems worthless. The other mentality is of the poor parents of that domestic worker who still believes in having more children to work for their financial breathing and sustenance. Instead of bringing up their girl with love and education, they failed her by using their daughter as a source of monthly income. Yes, the state has many responsibilities to shoulder with its people, but the people are capable of improving their fates. This only requires will and self-conviction to bring change. We often conclude our conversations on such topics with some sentences on what needs to be done. Let’s rearrange this phrase. What can I do to avoid such mistreatment of the poor? On a private level, we just have to take care of the people around us. Forget who deserves what but help people when they come to you and lead them to a sustainable pathway by training and mentoring them. Instil moral consciousness and kindness in them by creating mutual trust and faith. Moreover, we should do our work ourselves. Employing house help more than needed to just maintain your status is a very pathetic idea. While I was preparing an assignment on the Home-Based Workers Acts, I concluded there are almost no differences among the HBW Acts in all four provinces in my comparative analysis. The only thing required is to take off the gloves and implement such acts lawfully across the board. The writer is a student at IBA Karachi. He can be reached at a.kaleem@khi.iba.edu.pk