Offences Against Children

In one line

Chapter IX creates its own offences, and they are committed by adults against children rather than by children at all.

In exam wording: sections 74 to 85 of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 create and punish offences against children, including disclosure of identity, cruelty, employment for begging, the sale and procurement of children, corporal punishment, and their aggravated forms.

Why the law has this at all

Everything before this chapter is procedure. This is the only part of the Act that is a penal code, and it is worth asking why a child protection statute needed one.

The answer is that the injuries children suffer are mostly not the injuries the general penal law was drafted around. The Indian Penal Code punished hurt, wrongful confinement and kidnapping, and punished them well. It had nothing to say about a man who employs a child to beg, or who takes his wages, or who runs a home in which children are beaten to keep order, or who hands over an orphan for adoption without any of the procedure the previous chapter sets out.

So the Act supplies the missing offences, and the shape of the list tells you what it thinks the real dangers are. Three of the twelve sections punish exploitation for money: begging, employment, and the sale of children. Two punish intoxicants, one for giving them to a child and one for using a child to carry them. Two protect the child inside the very system meant to help him: corporal punishment in an institution and cruelty by a person having charge. And section 85 doubles every one of them where the child is disabled.

Some words this chapter uses

Actual charge of, or control over, a child, in sections 75 and 81, is wider than guardianship; it covers anybody who in fact has the child.

Corporal punishment is defined in section 2(24): physical punishment involving the deliberate infliction of pain as retribution for an offence, or for the purpose of disciplining or reforming the child.

Mutatis mutandis in section 84 means with the necessary changes.

Section 74: disclosure of identity

Sub-section (1). No report in any newspaper, magazine, news-sheet or audio-visual media or other forms of communication regarding any inquiry, investigation or judicial procedure shall disclose the name, address, school or any other particular which may lead to the identification of a child in conflict with law, a child in need of care and protection, or a child victim or witness of a crime, involved in such a matter under any other law; nor shall the picture of any such child be published.