Tamil Nadu Police have just launched an initiative called ‘Spectrum’ (Sexual Offender Profiling, Evaluation, Classification, Tracking, Risk Assessment and Unified Monitoring System), which aims to reduce sexual crimes. Spectrum will cover 10 districts in the South Zone, and already has 15,000 known offenders mapped onto it. The colour-coded system has many salient features, including distinctions between the severity of offenses and the inclusion of increasingly relevant forms of abuse like dating app misuse as well as oft-neglected ones such as non-contact harassment.
Spectrum’s eight classifications identify especially dangerous known offenders, recidivists, cybercriminals, traffickers, juvenile delinquents, those targeting queer people, sexual harassers and stalkers, and those who have engaged in isolated incidents of low severity. The database is intended to primarily be preventative. The protocol will differ based on the category: counselling may be prescribed for juveniles, for example, whereas a history-sheeter will be monitored closely.
While the severity of a crime and the severity of resulting trauma or loss are not necessarily parallelled, an analytical methodology that does not treat all offenses in a single heavy-handed manner, or in a blanket dismissive approach, brings necessary nuance. While Spectrum is not a public database, its detailed announcement gives us an insight into how the justice system intends to operate better. We, as the general public, are collectively accustomed to baying for blood whenever horrific crimes happen and we are equally inured to justice never being served. This is more uncomfortable to process, and it requires less black-and-white a way of seeing, but forms of justice that are not strictly retributive, and which allow for the possibility of rehabilitation, are important considerations in imagining a better world.
We think of punishment — we dream of it in vivid technicolour, and Tarantino-style, or at least I do — but we don’t always have the capacity to consider reform. The truth is that reforming society also involves rethinking institutions of justice. That includes the Police itself, of course. Which is where an initiative like Spectrum becomes really interesting. The ranking of criminals, and the level of surveillance thereafter, demand recalibration both in perspective as well as in action.
Spectrum is clearly comprehensive, and introduces complexity that will both streamline police workload as well as make thinking about safety, rights, and risks more rigorous overall. India already has a National Database on Sex Offenders, but this state-led and more transparent initiative is to be commended. On the subject of transparency: Spectrum should remain internal and secure, and the public should neither be able to access it nor amend it. The privacy of people in the system and their families matters, especially wherever minors are involved. While the lists of the #MeToo movement were powerful, they were from beyond establishments, not within them, where the potential for misuse is higher.
We must also not fixate on unfamiliar threats. In 2021, the National Crime Records Bureau reported that 96% of rapes in India were committed by someone known to the survivor or victim: relatives, neighbours, friends, partners and workplace or classroom associates. It is here, in this personal and unnerving fact, that our own journeys towards engaging with the concept of justice really begin.