Protecting minor children from sexual abuse is different from criminalising consensual adolescent relationships. Yet the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, intended for the former purpose, is often used for the latter end. The Supreme Court has asked the Centre to decriminalise adolescent relationships under POCSO while also formulating a policy for sex education. The call to decriminalise youthful relationships is not new; courts and legal experts have been asking for it and for a nuanced reading of the law. The use of POCSO to penalise young people strengthens the hands of families, which often wish to break up relationships of which they disapprove. This not only destroys the possibility of natural inclinations during adolescence and hurts emotional development but it also tends to stigmatise and criminalise young people who should be treated with empathy and wisdom. POCSO has become an instrument in the hands of an authoritarian society just as the lack of a consistent policy of sex education, which would help young people understand their responsibilities, is the mark of a backward-looking one. The Supreme Court’s pairing of the two is telling.

The call for a nuanced and, in a way, different understanding of POCSO is especially important because of the complicated nature of the situations that occasionally underlie its application. Some of these are test cases for the meaning of true justice. For example, recently, the Supreme Court refused to sentence a man convicted of sexually assaulting a minor girl in 2018. The girl’s mother had rejected her. The survivor is living with the man and their daughter, determined to complete her own education and give the daughter a good life. The Supreme Court felt that the only way to deliver justice to her was not to separate her from her daughter’s father since they were leading a peaceful life together. To do so would traumatise her further. Society, family and the legal system had failed her. The Supreme Court’s sensitive understanding of the complicated situation and of the best way to deliver justice displays the care with which POCSO cases must be addressed. The mother’s rejection is representative of society’s still customary condemnation of rape survivors, which in this case ironically led to the perpetrator becoming the protector. What POCSO cases need is the humane approach exemplified by the Supreme Court.