Using a Child for Pornographic Purposes

In one line

Section 13 defines the offence of using a child in pornography, section 14 punishes it, and section 15 punishes the storage and possession of the material.

In exam wording: sections 13 to 15 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 define and punish the use of a child for pornographic purposes and the storage or possession of pornographic material involving a child.

Why the law has this at all

The harm here does not stop when the act stops.

A child assaulted in private suffers once, terribly. A child photographed suffers again every time the image is copied, and the copies do not decay. That is why the Act treats the making, the keeping and the circulating of such material as three separate wrongs, and why the 2019 amendment redrew all three.

The redrawing had a specific purpose. As originally enacted, section 15 punished storage for the purpose of distributing or transmitting with up to three years. That left the man who merely possessed a large quantity outside the section unless a purpose could be proved, and it made no distinction between somebody with one file and somebody running a trade.

So the substituted section 15 splits into three graded offences. Mere failure to delete, destroy or report with an intent to share attracts a fine and nothing more. Storage for transmitting, propagating, displaying or distributing attracts imprisonment up to three years. And storage for commercial purpose attracts a minimum of three years, rising to a minimum of five on a repeat. The gradation is by what the possessor meant to do with it.

Some words this chapter uses

Child pornography is defined in section 2(1)(da), inserted in 2019: any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a child, including images indistinguishable from an actual child and images created, adapted or modified but appearing to depict a child.

Use a child, by the Explanation to section 13, extends to involving a child through any medium in the whole chain of production and distribution.

Designated authority in section 15(1) is the authority to which the material must be reported, as may be prescribed by rules under section 45(2)(a).

Section 13: the definition

Whoever uses a child in any form of media (including a programme or advertisement telecast by television channels, or internet, or any other electronic form or printed form, whether or not such programme or advertisement is intended for personal use or for distribution), for the purposes of sexual gratification, which includes:

(a) representation of the sexual organs of a child; (b) usage of a child engaged in real or simulated sexual acts, with or without penetration; (c) the indecent or obscene representation of a child,