Apprehension, Bail and the First Steps

In one line

A child is not arrested and locked up; he is apprehended, produced within a day, and released on bail as a matter of course.

In exam wording: sections 10 to 13 of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 provide for the apprehension of a child alleged to be in conflict with law, the responsibility of the person in whose charge he is placed, bail, and information to his parents and to the probation officer.

Why the law has this at all

The most dangerous hours in a criminal case, for a child, are the first ones.

A boy taken to a police station and kept overnight in a lock-up with adults will not be the same boy the next morning, and nothing the Board later decides can put that right. Whatever else the Act does, it has to make sure that those hours do not happen. So it does three things at once.

It removes the police station from the sequence: the child goes to the special juvenile police unit or the Child Welfare Police Officer, and in no case to a lock-up or jail, section 10(1).

It shortens the interval to twenty-four hours, excluding the journey.

And it reverses the presumption about custody. Section 12 does not distinguish bailable from non-bailable, does not ask about the gravity of the offence, and does not leave bail to discretion. It says such a person shall be released, and then names three grounds, and only three, on which he may not be.

Notice also what section 12 offers instead of a surety. A child with no family and no money cannot furnish one, and if bail meant only a bond the poorest children would stay inside. So the section gives the Board two other routes: supervision by a probation officer, or the care of any fit person.

Some words this chapter uses

Apprehended, not arrested. The Act avoids the word "arrest" for a child throughout, which is the principle of non-stigmatising semantics at work.

Fit person is defined in section 2(28): any person prepared to own the responsibility of a child for a specific purpose, recognised as fit by the Board or Committee after inquiry.

Social investigation report is the report under section 13(1)(ii) on the child's antecedents, family background and other material circumstances.

Section 10: apprehension

Sub-section (1). As soon as a child alleged to be in conflict with law is apprehended by the police, he shall be placed under the charge of the special juvenile police unit or the designated Child Welfare Police Officer, who shall produce the child before the Board without any loss of time but within a period of twenty-four hours of apprehending the child, excluding the time necessary for the journey from the place where the child was apprehended.