A decade after the government passed the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act 2012, the judiciary and activists have urged the Parliament to take a relook at the age of consent prescribed under the Act.
Speaking at a two-day national consultation on the POCSO Act on Saturday, Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud said there were growing concerns related to the age of consent for sexual activities under the Act, especially in cases of adolescent love affairs.
CJI Chandrachud said that the POCSO Act criminalised all sexual activities for those under the age of 18 even in 'romantic' relationships without considering that consent is factually present between the minors. “Because the presumption of the law is that there is no consent in the legal sense below the age of 18,” Deccan Herald quoted the CJI saying.
This “category of case poses difficult questions for judges”, the CJI said.
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In June, a study conducted by Bengaluru-based NGO Enfold Proactive Health Trust and UNICEF-India found that 25 percent of the cases registered under the POCSO Act in West Bengal, Assam and Maharashtra were “romantic cases”, in which the victim was in a consensual relationship with the accused.
In 2018, a similar study conducted by the Centre for the Child and the Law at the National Law School of India University (CCL-NLSIU) found that romantic cases constituted 21.2 percent of cases in Andhra Pradesh, 20.5 percent in Maharashtra, 21.5 percent in Delhi and 21.8 percent in three districts of Karnataka, The Hindu reported.
Researchers Swagata Raha and Shruti Ramakrishnan, who authored the June study, analysed all 7,064 POCSO judgments between 2016 and 2020 in the three states and found that 1,715 cases were “romantic cases” where the complainant admitted to having a consensual relationship with the accused.
The study also revealed that in 46.6 percent of the “romantic cases” the girl was between the ages of 16 to 18 years. The researchers also said that the Act was creating problems for tribal communities as well where marrying below the age of 18 is not taboo.
The researchers termed such incidences as romantic cases where the victim, her family or any prosecutorial witness revealed that there was a romantic relationship or in cases where the court concluded that the relationship was romantic in nature.
The number of cases “would be much higher if we draw inferences from court decisions”, Indian Express quoted Shruti Ramakrishnan as saying.
According to the study, the court took a lenient view of such cases by recording convictions only in exceptional cases and acquitting most involved in “romantic cases”.
The POCSO Act raised the age of consent for sexual activity to 18 years from 16 years in 2012.
(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)
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