KOCHI: The Kerala High Court has observed that there was an urgent need to create awareness among school children about heinous crimes, including rape, and sought the state government’s views on including provisions of the POCSO Act in the curriculum. Citing the “alarming rise” in the number of sexual offences committed on school children, Justice Bechu Kurian Thomas said on Wednesday that in many cases, the perpetrators of the crime were either students or young persons and the alleged crime was a “result of relationships that went beyond platonic love” out of biological inquisitiveness of adolescence.
The court observed that young children, irrespective of gender, indulged in such acts, unmindful of the drastic consequences awaiting them. The amendments brought to the Indian Penal Code and the enactment of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012, envisaged very harsh consequences for such offensive acts. Unfortunately, the statutes did not distinguish between the conservative concept of the term rape and the sexual interactions arising out of pure affection and biological changes, the court said.
“The statutes did not contemplate the biological inquisitiveness of adolescence and treat all ‘intrusions’ on bodily autonomy, whether by consent or otherwise, as rape for a certain age group of victims,” observed the court. Unmindful of the consequences, teenagers and adolescents indulge in sexual relationships. By the time the children realise the consequences, it would be too late. A meaningful life could practically be snuffed out by an immature or negligent act arising out of human curiosity or biological cravings, which psychologists regard as natural, the court said. However, the statutory diktat, on the scope and purport of the terms sexual assault, aggravated sexual assault and penetrative sexual assault apart from minimum punishments are most often unknown to the students and youths, the court observed.