The POCSO Act: Object, Scheme and Definitions

In one line

POCSO is a gender neutral, child specific criminal law with its own offences, its own courts, its own procedure and its own presumptions.

In exam wording: the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 protects children from sexual assault, sexual harassment and pornography and provides for Special Courts for the trial of such offences; section 2 defines the expressions used in it.

Why the law has this at all

The obvious objection to POCSO is that the Indian Penal Code already punished rape, assault to outrage modesty, and obscenity. Why a separate Act?

Because the Code's provisions were written for adults, and each of them failed a child in some particular way.

They were gendered. Rape under the Code could be committed only against a woman. A boy who was penetratively assaulted had no equivalent offence.

They were built around consent and resistance, concepts which make sense between adults and none at all where the victim is eight years old and the offender is a person he trusts.

They punished the act, not the relationship. The Code did not care whether the offender was the child's teacher, doctor, policeman or relative. POCSO does, and section 5 makes that the whole basis of the aggravated offence.

And they left the child in an adult courtroom. No provision required the child not to see the accused, or the trial to be in camera, or the evidence to be recorded within thirty days, or the statement to be taken at the child's home by a woman officer not in uniform.

So POCSO is not a re-enactment. It is a complete parallel code: offences in Chapters II to IV, reporting in Chapter V, the child's statement in Chapter VI, Special Courts and presumptions in Chapter VII, trial procedure in Chapter VIII, and miscellaneous provisions in Chapter IX.

Some words this chapter uses

Penetrative sexual assault, sexual assault, sexual harassment and their aggravated forms are all defined by cross-reference in section 2(1) to the sections that create them.

Shared household, section 2(1)(k), is a household where the person charged lives or has lived at any time in a domestic relationship with the child.

Armed forces or security forces, section 2(1)(c), are those specified in the Schedule.

The Preamble: what the Act says it is for

The long title. An Act to protect children from offences of sexual assault, sexual harassment and pornography, and to provide for the establishment of Special Courts for the trial of such offences and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto.

The recitals, and there are five.

First, clause (3) of article 15 of the Constitution, inter alia, empowers the State to make special provisions for children.