Draft Bill on Sexual Offences Against Children

AS though the young didn’t have enough laws to entangle their private lives with, here comes one more! A Draft Bill on Sexual Offences Against Children fixes 16 years as the age for consent. The bill is aimed at bringing under the legal purview a growing variety of sexual offences against children, like child pornography, trafficking, abuse by paedophiles, sexual exploitation by persons in authority, and checking communicable virus like AIDS being transferred through sex without consent. The intension seems to be good in principle.
However, the bill apparently makes confusion more confounded. The age of consent is the minimum age at which a person is considered legally competent for consenting to sexual acts. Though often it does not appear in statutes, it varies in societies, cultures and time. In many countries of West Asia it does not apply because any sexual activity outside marriage is banned under the law. The father of our nation got married at 13. It had social sanction for conjugal relationship then. In modern India, all cases of sexual abuse against children have been tried under Sections 375 and 377 of the IPC. While Section 375 has also fixed 16 years as the minimum age of consent, there is no specific mention of offences against children. Section 377 fixes a separate age of consent for other kinds of sex — homosexuality, etc. Then there is conflict for the age of consent in foreign territories; even within the country, Manipur has fixed the age of consent at 14. In this confusing, contrasting and confounding scenario, it only adds to the puzzle!
The bill, which is expected to be tabled during the upcoming budget session, needs to answer a few queries. India is among those societies where the age of marriage is higher (18) than the age of consent (16). According to UNICEF’s “State of the World’s Children-2009” report, 40 per cent of the world’s child marriages (outlawed in India in 1860) occur in India. Most of these marriages take place in rural areas and the age of the married couple is less than 16. Like Brunei, where a married couple’s consent is an accepted matter, irrespective of age, the same is applied to a large population of India. In the case of a marital dispute in such cases, which age will define violation of rights? And, will the young mature at different age for different kinds of sex? It just leaves one more bewildered!