Juveniles involved in crimes are not criminals. In fact, they are victims of society, the Madras High Court has said and set aside a Juvenile Justice Board’s (JJB) 2021 order detaining a 15-year-old boy for three years in a government special home for having allegedly impregnated a 17-year-old girl working with him at an exhibition hall on the outskirts of Chennai.
Justice A.D. Jagadish Chandira said the facts of the case show that an infatuation between two adolescents had been given a criminal colour and one of them had been penalised. The criminal complaint was lodged five months later when the boy, in an inebriated condition, questioned the paternity of the unborn child.
Lamenting that the JJB had not followed the inquiry procedures under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, the judge said the detention order had been passed merely on the basis of reported confession of the juvenile in conflict with law. The Board had not even ascertained the correct age of the victim.
“Had it been proved that she was above 18 years of age on the date of occurrence of the offence, the scenario would have been vice versa,” the judge said. Even otherwise, consensual sex between minors continues to be a “legal grey area” because the consent given by a minor was not considered to be a valid consent in the eyes of the law, he pointed out.
Noting that the age of consent for sexual relationship varies from 14 to 18 in different countries, the judge said the U.S. had the “Romeo and Juliet clause” which allows a person to have consensual sex with a minor provided they did not have more than certain number of years in age difference.
Under Canada’s Criminal Code, a 14-year-old adolescent could give his/her consent to have sexual relationship with an adult and a 12-year-old could give his/her consent to sex with other adolescents provided that he/she was not more than two years old than the other. In U.K., the statutory age of consent for heterosexual sex was 16.
In India, the JJ Act had been enacted to apply a liberal approach aimed at reforming and rehabilitating juveniles in conflict with law. “Therefore, punishing a minor boy for entering into a relationship with a minor girl, when both are in the grip of their hormones and biological changes, is against the principles of the best interest of the child,” the judge said.
