| Hello and welcome to Mind the Gap. Needed to protect children from sexual abuse, the Pocso law has been in the news recently. Why? Read on... THE BIG STORY: Teenage sex is a crime with a 10-year prison sentence. This is the law Anjali* was 15 and was being raised by her widowed mother when she met 19-year-old Shahid. She was drawn to his soft-spoken nature and the fact that he had a steady job at a fast food outlet. She knew her mother would never accept her relationship with a Muslim man. So when she decided to marry him, it was in a civil court but with tampered documents that put her age at 18. Soon after, she converted to Islam. Three months after her marriage, Shahid was arrested for kidnapping and raping a minor under the Pocso (Protection of Children from Child Sexual Abuse) law on a complaint filed by Anjali’s mother. Anjali, now Asifa, was packed off to a shelter home where a bone ossification test eventually put her age to be around 18 and she was allowed to return to her husband. She remains estranged from her mother. The need for Pocso Nobody disputes the need for a law that protects children from sexual abuse in a country where it is rampant: 53% of them had faced some form of sexual abuse, according to a 2007 government survey. On Children’s Day, November 14, 2012, the Pocso Act was brought in to deal specifically with this abuse. It recognised various offences against children from sexual assault to pornography. It made the failure to report such cases a punishable offence. It set out procedures on how to record a child’s statement and how special courts are to conduct trials.  Source: Unsplash line And, for the first time since 1940, it increased the age of consent for girls from 16 to 18. The punishments under this law are tough. In 2019, the death sentence was brought in for aggravated sexual assault. Jail time was increased from seven to 10 years; 20 if the girl is under 16. Under this law, sex with a girl below the age of 18, even if she consents to it, even if she’s your wife, amounts to statutory rape. In October this year, the Allahabad high court rejected bail to the husband of a 17-year-old girl in jail since June 2021. “Her consent is of no significance,” Justice Sudharani Thakur said. The original draft of the act recognised this conundrum and suggested some wiggle room for consensual sex involving adolescents over 16. But when the law was finally passed, all sexual activity with a girl below the age of 18 was termed illegal. The numbers One in five Pocso cases in Karnataka (21.8%), Delhi (21.5%) and Andhra Pradesh (21.2%), were in fact ‘romantic’ cases where the girl said she was in a consensual relationship, finds analysis by the Centre for Child and the Law, National Law School of India. In some cases, the girl had even got married but that didn’t stop her disapproving parents from filing police complaints against their husbands. An analysis of 7,063 Pocso judgements in Assam, Maharashtra and West Bengal by the Enfold Proactive Health Trust with UNICEF India finds that one in four of these cases, or 1,715, are romantic cases. It was parents and relatives who had lodged complaints in 80.2% of these cases. The time taken from the filing of an FIR to disposal of these cases can vary from a year to over three years even though 93.8% of such cases ended in acquittal, finds the report. Until then, relationships are disrupted, men and boys can be jailed and girls packed off to shelter homes. In November, the Karnataka high court asked the Law Commission to rethink the age of consent in order to “take into consideration the ground realities”. The court was hearing a case where in 2017, a 17-year-old girl had eloped with her boyfriend. Her parents then filed a police complaint but a lower court acquitted the boy. The state then filed an appeal against that acquittal. By the time the high court dismissed all charges, the girl and boy, now woman and man, had married and had two children. Judicial concern A rash of such cases has led to some introspection and questioning by the judiciary. Last week, Chief Justice Dhananjaya Chandrachud weighed in by asking the legislature to address concerns about the age of consent. On Thursday, former Supreme Court judge Indira Banerjee said some Pocso provisions such as that of a consensual sexual relationship between minors needed rethinking. This year alone, Pocso judgements have been making news with an increasing number of high courts around the country overturning convictions by lower courts. In November, the Meghalaya high court said “acts of mutual love and affection between a young couple will not amount to sexual assault”. Also in November, the Karnataka high court quashed a Pocso case against a man for impregnating his 17-year-old wife. The case was reported by the hospital where the woman had gone for a check-up. But, just two days earlier, another judge from the same high court ruled that the marriage of a Muslim minor girl, even if allowed by her religion’s personal law, is invalid as it violates Pocso provisions. It said this while denying bail to her 19-year-old husband. In one case, the mother who had filed a case against the husband of her minor daughter who had run away to marry, told the Madras high court in 2021 that she wished to let “bygones be bygones”. She had, she told the court reconciled herself to the marriage and wanted the case dropped. Fortunately, for the family, the judge agreed. *Anjali’s story is cited in Why Girls Run Away to Marry, a report by Partners in Law and Development. | 
