- The trip
- BBC News-Delhi
Although premarital sex is taboo in India, surveys show that many teenagers are sexually active.
10 years ago, a new, tougher law was passed in India to address cases of child sexual abuse.
But the law, known as the Child Sexual Offenses Protection Act, criminalizes all sexual activity by anyone under the age of 18, and many teenage boys who enter into consensual relationships fall under the law.
Currently, there are growing calls to reconsider the “age of consent” or “age of sexual consent” – the legal age at which a person becomes eligible to consent to sexual intercourse, and to decriminalize teenagers who have sex.
A few years ago, while reporting on the deployment of female police officers in a notorious Delhi neighborhood to improve women’s safety, I went to meet a 16-year-old girl who was said to have been raped.
The policewoman who took me to see the girl said, “She’s a rape victim.”
But when I asked the girl about her story, she denied being raped and said, “I went with him of my own free will.”
As the girl’s mother screamed and scolded her, the policewoman escorted me out of the house.
The policewoman said that the girl’s parents had filed a complaint against the boy who lives in the same neighborhood and that the police had arrested him ahead of trial on charges of rape.
While the policewoman agreed that the boy’s relationship with the girl appeared to be consensual, she added that the police had no choice but to file a legal action against him.
The case I witnessed years ago is just one of thousands of similar cases involving Indian teenagers who engage in sexual intercourse that amounts to rape every year.
A strict law such as the Child Sexual Offense Protection Act was needed due to the high number of incidents of child sexual abuse. According to a 2007 government study, 53 percent of children said they had experienced some form of sexual abuse.
But the law also provides for raising the age of sex from 16 to 18, which effectively means turning millions of teenagers into criminals if they have sex.
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Indian courts have recognized that relationships between minors or between minors and young adults are normal, resulting from biological attraction.
India has a group of 253 million teenagers, the largest in the world, and although premarital sex is taboo, surveys show that large numbers of these young people are sexually active.
More than 39 percent of women in the most recent National Survey of Family Health, the most comprehensive government survey of its kind, reported having had sex before age 18, while 10 percent of those aged 25 to 49 reported having sex before age 18. claimed to have done this before. the age of 15.
There are currently calls to lower the age of consent or sexual majority to 16, as is the case in other countries around the world, including many South Asian countries.
Children’s rights activists say parents often use the criminal justice system to control girls’ sexuality and discourage them from entering into relationships, especially with young men from a different religion or social class.
They also say the criminalization of sexual activity destroys many lives and further burdens an already overburdened criminal justice system.
Now, for the first time, there is data showing the scale and extent of the problem.
Researchers at Enfold Proactive Health Trust, a children’s rights charity, studied 7,064 judicial sentences handed down under the Child Sexual Offenses Protection Act between 2016 and 2020 in three Indian states: West Bengal, Assam and Bhutan , Maharashtra. About half of the cases involved girls between the ages of 16 and 18.
The researchers’ report, released earlier this week, found that 1,715 numbers — or one in four — fell into the “romantic relationship” category.
The report indicates that if cases from across India are monitored, the numbers will be much higher, as tens of thousands of cases reported each year indicate that the defendants were “friends/friends via the Internet or partners living with girls with the pretext of marriage.” .
“The criminalization of minor sexual activity, which is quite normal, shows that the law is in a state of disconnection from reality,” Unfold senior researcher Swagata Raha told the BBC.
The report said that most of the lawsuits were filed by parents or relatives of girls who fled their family homes or who were found pregnant, and in most cases, police filed rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment or kidnapping.
Then “boys and girls enter the criminal justice system,” says Raha, who adds that such criminalization can have “serious consequences” for both girls and boys.
“Girls are subjected to humiliation, scandal and stigmatization, and if they refuse to return to their parents’ homes, they are placed in reception centres. As for the boys, they are treated as children in conflict with the law or denounced against them and many of them they are locked up in controlled houses or in prison for long periods.”
He adds: “Then defendants are forced to undergo investigation, detention and trial, and can face prison sentences ranging from 10 to 20 years if convicted.”
But there is a glimmer of hope, as most of the 1,715 “romance” cases Raha and her team studied ended in acquittals.
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India has the largest number of teenagers in the world
The report states that “the majority of romantic relationship cases ended in acquittal of the defendant, as 1,609, or 93.8 per cent, of those cases were dismissed, with convictions being an exception , as they were decided in only 106 cases (6.2 percent).”
The reason for the low conviction rate is that in 87.9 percent of the cases the girl confessed her love to the accused and in 81.5 percent of the cases she said nothing that could incriminate the accused and, in some cases, he has indicated that he was pressured by their families.
The high acquittal rate also shows that courts are lenient towards defendants when it comes to “romance” cases. In recent years, India’s highest judicial body has expressed concern about the criminalization of consensual sexual intercourse among teenagers.
In 2019, a judge of the Madras High Court, V. Parthiban, overturned a teenager’s belief that the relationship between minors or between minors and young adults “is not something contrary to nature, but occurs following a natural biological attraction” and recommended a revision of the legal age for sex.
Recently, the Chief Justice of India Dhananjay Chandrachod gave his contribution to the matter, asking the Parliament to reconsider the age of sexual consent.
UNICEF has also urged India to decriminalize teenage sex. “Children have a right to protection and to be treated fairly and with dignity, including when it comes to their personal relationships,” Soledad Herrero, director of India’s child protection organisation, told the BBC.
He added that “it is necessary to balance protection with respect for their growing autonomy” and that the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has underlined the importance of this need.
Raha says there is an “acknowledgement” by the judiciary and those in the criminal justice community that these “romance” cases should be viewed differently, and there is a need for parliament to revise the law.
“We call for the decriminalization of consensual sex for teenagers. We could look at a model for India, but we need to recognize that teenage sexuality is normal.”
