From Indias largest newsroom, I'm Arun George and this is the
Times of India podcast. Just a warning.
Today's episode deals with themes of online sexual abuse
and abuse. If you know a child who has
faced online sexual abuse, you can call the Merry Trust Line on
636-317-6363. I'll repeat that it's
636-317-6363. Two cases have recently brought
the spotlight on those under the age of 18 when they're accused
in criminal cases. The 1st and the one that's made
more headlines is the Pune case where the son of a builder
resulted in the death of two people while driving a sports
car. The 2nd is the case of an
Uttarakhand teen who was put in an observation home after a girl
he knew committed suicide because he had shared explicit
videos of her. In today's episode, we're
looking at both cases in terms of what is the way forward in
dealing with children who find themselves facing the criminal
justice system. My colleague Ambika Pandit at
The Times of India spoke with experts to examine the issues
with having children accused of crimes being treated as adult
criminals and punished accordingly.
She also examines online abuse involving teenagers and what the
problems are with how we, the adults, deal with such cases.
She also looked at whether teenagers accused in such cases
are beyond redemption. That is, they're destined for a
life of crime. But first, the Uttarakhand case.
The Uttarakhand case made headlines after the Supreme
Court went against the norm of granting bail to juveniles in
retention. The boy in this case had
allegedly circulated obscene videos of his classmate, a 14
year old girl, which her father said drove her to die by
suicide. The boys plea for bail was
rejected by a juvenile justice board and the Uttarakhand High
Court. The Supreme Court also rejected
his plea, seeking that he be released from a reform home and
into his mother's custody. The High Court had rejected his
release on the ground that he was an undisciplined child
keeping bad company and that he required disciplining.
One of our guests on today's episode doesn't agree with this
order. What worries me is the reasoning
behind the bail sort of not being given to the juvenile in
the Uttarakhand case. In the Uttarakhand case, I read
the judgment and I think the court takes an extremely
parental stance. And I think it's sort of like
the same reason, like, why a lot of parents who corporally sort
of punish a child give, you know, this sort of punishment
will improve the child's behaviour.
And I think the reasons given are not extremely viable.
And I think the court is sort of taking a very parental stance
and not looking at it in terms of how is this materially going
to affect the case, right. The court cites such sort of
things as the boy will fall into bad behaviour.
He has behaved previously like, you know, badly in school.
I'm not here to issue like a character certificate on like
the child in conflict with the law.
But I don't think these are sufficient grounds to deny bail
to like a 15 year old. There can be cases where bail
can be denied, but I don't think those conditions are being met.
That's Siddharth Pillai who's the Co founder and director at
the Rights Action Technology Inclusion or Rathi Foundation.
The Mumbai based organization works to address the issue of
violence against children and women online and its effects
offline. The RATI Foundation also runs a
helpline called the Merry Trust Line that helps children facing
online harm. That's the number we dread out.
At the start of today's episode, Sinak Pillai tells Ambika Pandit
that one big problem in such cases is that most victims of
online sexual abuse struggle to talk about the incidents even on
an anonymous helpline. Because of the shame associated,
they find it very difficult to share, right?
So our helpline, basically we take cases of cyberbullying,
which may not involve sexual content and cases of intimate
content that has been released or threatened to be released
without consent, which is in this case.
So even when a victim who's reaching out for intimate
content, they introduce as themselves as oh, I'm suffering
from cyberbullying, unless you sort of like build a rappo, the
victim will not be able to disclose or, you know, Wiz be
hesitant to disclose that Oh, my content has been leaked.
And I do think that, like, you know, other systems that the
victim could reach out, they do have a trust deficit.
Siddharth says that in such cases, the child who may have
shared explicit material first has to reveal to an adult that
they have shared such photos or videos.
Then they have to face the blame or may be shamed by various
adults they seek help from, including possibly their parents
or the police. And all this happens while they
are dealing with the threat that the photos or videos are being
widely shared on the Internet. When the victim calls her
counselor, she constantly tells her counselor, I am sorry, I am
sorry. So a large part of what a
counselor does is convince the victim that see, what you did is
perhaps like, you know, like normal for your age, right?
You sent across an intimate photograph and not all of them
will be completely nudes as well, right?
So we will tell them you sent across an intimate photograph
and it's not your fault. So I think from the victim's
perspective, one of the things that really drives their
emotional upheaval and why they feel stressed is because they
feel it is their fault. I would like you to also tell us
about what happens in this case, you know, with the accused,
because he's also turning into this bully now who's not just
indulging in the crime but is also now trying to remove the
victim away from being a complainant and whatnot.
Most cases, victims are girls and the perpetrators are boys.
And in many of our cases they have maybe a previous
relationship or they have got into a relationship online,
right? So I think girls are aware that
if you send content, it may be stored on his phone, it may be
used to leak. So that guard is extremely up
even in like high profile cases, like you know, like you can see
the Prajwal Revana case, right? It's mostly a screen recording.
So what victims will consent to is like, I won't send you
anything permanent on your phone because they are aware that this
is an issue, but I'm still in love with you.
I may have a relationship with you.
So let's get on a video call or I will send you a one time
message. Or like, you know, they take a
promise that the content will be deleted.
But what the perpetrator does is that they don't keep this
promise and they break this promise.
It's also a power dynamic that once I have someone's
photograph, if I need them to do anything, I can give them the
dum key of, you know, I will leak your photograph, Meet me
today in the evening. Girl refuses.
I'll say, OK, I'm gonna release your photograph, right?
And then that power dynamic is established and then it slides
progressively into abuse. So in most cases, one of the
threats is that if you tell anyone, I'll leak, and then
there is a demand that if you don't want me to leak, send me
more content. And then again, it goes back to
if you tell anyone you leak. So then you entrap the victim in
the cycle of isolation and cycle of abuse.
And then it becomes extremely difficult for the victim to
break it, you know, because now there is much more content than
before. So in this manner, it's very
similar to how financial fraud is, right?
Like you get blackmailed, you send something, then they
blackmail you again. How many minors do you get on
both sides? Or is it mostly a grown up adult
abusing a young victim? What is the age profile?
Do we see a lot of minors involved in this?
In the developmental sense, right, You get into a risk
taking age like, you know, you know, I'm going to get into
trouble, but I'll still do this, right?
It can be like smoking or like doing a stunt on bikes, but you
will still do it. So that is your risk taking age
where your brain is still developing very clearly.
Our data shows that children between the age of 13 and up to
like, you know, young people till the age of 25 are the
majority of our cases, you know, 85%.
And I know like legally this becomes a bit weird because
those under 18 are regarded as children and 19 to 25 will be
regarded as young adults or perhaps adults.
Now, if you look at only 18, under 1830% of our cases have
minor victims. And if you look at like
perpetrators once again, like you know, around 25 to 30% are
minor perpetrators, right? Most of the perpetrators are
known to the victims. Like I think also in the
Uttarakhand case, right, they are in their immediate
neighbourhood. So in terms of like the profile
of perpetrators, like let's say about only 48% are strangers.
So people they've met online and 52% are known individuals.
Mostly they are ex partners. See that Pillai says that in
most cases involving teenage boys, it's mostly entrapment in
sexual extortion cases. Those are the sort of cases
widely prevalent right now and involve morph videos, messages
and calls on chat apps like WhatsApp and others.
There's an international research that young boys get
groomed within 20 seconds. And we thought it was like, you
know, a slightly exaggerated research, but then we started
getting screenshots, right? Like, so it's just like, are you
sex interested? Are you sex interested three
times and the boy has already got on a call.
But for like to groom a girl or to fasao a girl, you first get
into a relationship, then you demand the photographs.
So the process is longer. So I think in most of these
relationship abuse cases, the victims are largely women and
the perpetrators are boys. But in sextortion cases, which
also involves child sexual abuse material, the victims are more
boys, but the perpetrators are like organized criminals.
Siddharth Pillai says that there are things we can do to make
things easier for the victims of online sexual abuse.
He says the starting point is how police and online platforms
hosting such videos react to complaints.
We've had cases where the police is looking at the content in
front of the girl, then the girl is expected to give a statement
in front of that same police. The police has looked through
her entire phone. So I think it's not very easy
for the victim to even register a case.
The police must be more friendly.
I think like, you know, the police, like in a lot of our
cases, even when the victims approach the police stations,
the cases are not taken on board, you know, because
sometimes, like, you know, in online, it's like, oh, we don't
know where the perpetrator is, so we will not register the
case. Second, the biggest pain point
is the content must come down, right?
So who does it? So currently, it's vague.
A lot of people believe the police will issue content
takedown orders, but the police does not do it.
So there is a lack of communication from the police to
the platforms as to like, you know, remove this content.
Even the platforms need to do more, right?
Like we've had a case of cyber bullying where the perpetrator
kept making new accounts on the same platform for over a year.
So can the platform take like a bigger cognizance of the issue
and ensure that this guy never makes it really challenging for
him to make another account because just udawing our account
means that guy makes another account and continues troubling
the girl. But given that many of the cases
targeting teenage girls involve boys of their own age, Sinaat
Pillai says that we also need to be talking more with boys about
how to handle relationships. I think we need to 1st
acknowledge that largely many of them are boys and I think there
is a real failure. I think, and I don't want to
sound like an older person, but there's a real failure in
handling breakups. You know, if somebody likes a
girl or if somebody they just don't know how to approach and
you know, they, they feel like, you know, coercing the girl or
like, you know, using the girl to, you know, like entrapping
the girl in abuse is a good way of like, you know, building
intimacy with the girl. And I think these two points
have been conflated. So it's a very toxic sort of
scenario. So I think that whole that men
connect and talking to the men and boys.
And I think even like, you know, the educational department has
mentioned it needs to be done. And I think, you know, because
sometimes when we get cases where the perpetrator are boys
and we go to the police station, I think we do feel like, you
know, bad that like, you know, like he's just 15, but he's done
this horrible thing, you know, and can it be avoided?
So I think that the boy should do better is also a feeling that
we experience right? Siddharth Pillai tells Ambika
Pandit that while victims are very traumatized by such cases,
even the teenage perpetrators who are caught in such cases see
a massive upheaval in their lives.
What happens when such an incident occurs is that it
disrupts your entire life, right?
It disrupts your education, it disrupts your family life.
It disrupts your emotional life. It disrupts many aspects.
It's not just this one issue. The effect spreads to all
corners of your life. And I'm sure when a perpetrator
is caught and he's 14 year old, his education is disrupted, his
emotional life is disrupted. Is there a way in which we can
look at this comprehensive solution, rehabilitation or
like, you know, reformation doesn't mean he will never do
this again. It has to be like, you know, can
he come out of this as a better individual?
And whatever disruption and has occurred in his life, can we
solve for it? Because otherwise he has no
chance of reforming If you only focus on one aspect.
If you only take this minor and tell that like, you know, kalse
tirko mobile nahi milega, you're never going to have access to
mobile ever, right? I don't think that solves the
issue. I really believe it's like a
symptom of something as large as patriarchy and something as
large as like, you know, not being able to handle his own
emotional sort of issues. And because we deal with a lot
of cases and lot of cases involving exchange of content is
the abuse and romantic relationships, right?
So the boy has been kind to the girl before and now, like, you
know, he's descended into this toxic type.
So could he have made a better choice?
So I think those things need to be examined.
And I feel like sweeping judgments on like 14 year olds
that affect other 14 year olds based on one case should be
avoided. You know Agana thuri B News
follow karte hai to Pune Porsche murder case ke baare me abhi Tak
to janhi guy honge. Is there any reason why this 17
year old eight-month boy should not be tried as an adult?
He knew exactly what he was doing.
The. Accused was initially booked.
For only death. By negligence.
Why was the police so? Negligent in filing that FIR.
Builder Vishal Agarwal son had allegedly gone out to party with
his friends to two bars on the night of the 19th of May, where
he was allegedly served alcohol despite being under the age of
18. After leaving one of the bars,
he drove a sports car into a motorcycle and ended up killing
the two riders, both of whom were adults and workers in the
tech industry. He was initially charged under
various sections of the law, including negligence and
culpable homicide. The miner was then taken for a
blood test and produced before a juvenile justice board.
He was granted bail within 15 hours of his arrest.
He was told to work with Punes Yerwada traffic police for 15
days composer 300 word essay to undergo treatment for alcohol
dependency and to submit a report after the treatment.
But since his detention on the 20th of May, the role of adults
in the case has been as problematic as the incident
itself. An NCP MLA from the Ajit Pawar
faction is said to have delayed the teenagers blood test to
ascertain the blood alcohol levels.
The teenager's father and grandfather are accused of
trying to get the family's driver to take the blame.
His father was on the run and has since been arrested.
Two doctors who collected the teenager's first blood sample
have been arrested for disposing of the sample and preventing an
accurate assessment of whether he was intoxicated at the time
of the accident. Criminal cases involving
underage accused like in the Pune case often spark public
outrage. Whether it is the recent Pune
case or the Delhi gang rape case of 2012, there is public outrage
over an UN aged accused dealing with juvenile justice boards
instead of courts and jails. After the Delhi case, India
modified the law to allow juveniles to face trial as
adults in cases where crimes are deemed heinous.
In the Pune case, despite the police first sending the
teenager to the Juvenile Justice Board, they have now said that
they will attempt to ensure he faces trial as an adult.
Geetanjali Prasad at the Azim Premji Foundation and has worked
in the realm of juvenile justice, tells Ambika Pandit
that the Pune police's actions aren't really a surprise.
In the context of this case, the first sort of relevant narrative
that rears its head is this idea that the law is designed for
young criminals to evade punishment and evade the
rightful consequences of the law.
Geetanjali Prasad says that since the change in the law,
there's been a change in the intent of the law.
In the Pune accident case, many adults acted to try and subvert
the full extent of the law. However, in the case of poorer
children who have little family or institutional support, this
change in the law works against them.
The law was changed in 2015 after the Nirbhaya rape case,
where there was a complete reversal, as it were, of
juvenile justice law, where the law now says that children
between 16 and 18 can be tried as adults after completing what
is known as a preliminary assessment under Section 15 of
the ACT. And what becomes relevant here
in the experience of anyone who has engaged with the JJ system
as a lawyer, as a social worker, as a child who goes through the
system, as their family, they will see that despite
constitutional safeguards and despite procedural safeguards,
the law does not treat children equally.
There's a very beautiful section of the the JJ Act that contains
the principles of the ACT. And there is a principle that
covers this idea of equality and non discrimination based on
caste, class, background, disability.
And it calls for equal access to opportunity and treatment under
the JJ law. But you know, like with any
other laws pertaining to the criminal justice system, whether
we're speaking about adults that go through it or children, there
is an inequality in how people are treated.
And so, you know, this is coming out in different ways.
You are understanding the you're getting a glimpse of the the
social economic power that this family has because then our
reports of alleged coercion of the family's driver to take
responsibility for this accident.
And that has come out in the media and the police is
investigating it. So I think just as far as
context goes, it's really important to remember that
different children are treated differently under this law.
Geetanjali Prasad said that in the Pune case, the Juvenile
Justice Board, while roundly criticized in the public domain
for its seemingly lenient punishment, was actually acting
as per the law. The case filed by the police was
not under a section of law that could be classified as a heinous
offense. But while the Pune teenager was
set free by the board. Geeta Anjali tells the case of
another teenager she worked on who was charged with the same
sections of law as the Pune teenager but faced a fast
Richter punishment. This was a case of a boy who we
met in Dasna district jail in Ghaziabad in 2015 and at that
point the boy had already spent four years in prison.
He was charged under exactly the same section.
He was apprehended by the railway police for the death of
a person who had fallen out of a train when a crowd was gathered
at the door of the train. This boy worked as a vendor on
the train and he had grown up on trains.
You can ask him about any train that passes through any of the
stations across the state of Uttar Pradesh.
He'll be able to tell you the timings.
He'll be able to tell you where they run to and from.
He remembers all of this like the back of his hand.
And. He was brought to our attention
not because there was some great concern around this idea of
minors possibly being in jail, but because he had mental
illness and he had been diagnosed by the mental hospital
in Banaras. He had been sent there for
treatment, had real extremes of emotion and so was clearly, you
know, a nuisance in the prison. And that's why his case was
brought to our attention. The police official had said to
him, I know you're a child, but if you go through the DJ system,
you'll be stuck there for many years.
Just go to jail, and you will get out on bail as quickly as
possible. You know, just tell them you're
a child and you'll get out of jail.
But he had been there for four years, and he had no family that
was concerned about him. We made a family visit to his
home in Pratapgarh and we learned that his brothers were
trying to take over his part of the land that had been left to
him by their father. And so they had no interest in
getting him out and he had left home because of the
discrimination he faced from his older brothers.
In looking at this case, he finally gets out.
He's finally free. We asked for a bone ossification
test to be done. The sessions judge is still not
willing to transfer the case to the JJB.
So this is an example of differential treatment.
There isn't the security net of a family and certainly the state
has no concern for a child like this other than if he or she
creates a nuisance in whatever institution he is in and then
there's some movement around it. There are certain safeguards
created, including how the preliminary assessment should
take place under the new law. But there have to be enough
procedural safeguards and rules built in that ensure that
children from poor families or children who are marginalized by
by way of their caste or class or religion are treated equally
by the law. Monica Kumar is the Co founder
and a clinical psychologist with the Manas Foundation, which
works with teenagers and children who are accused in
criminal cases. She tells Ambika Pandit that a
big problem with the system as it stands is that there's too
little focus on preventive programs that speak to teenagers
and young adults. The whole system is geared for
redressal the moment something happens.
If a police comes to us late in the night and says OK, there has
been a rape victim and you do the counseling or this is the
juveniles who has committed a hideous crime, what do you do at
that time the person is close. Disclosure is very difficult.
We are a system of silence, but the effort towards preventive
work, which is, you know, the conversations about gender, the
conversations about what we need to do as young people, what as
parents we need to do, what is society we need to do, so that
preventive work is, I think completely missing.
And we are again every time addressing this.
Monika Kumar says another issue with juveniles facing cases is
that regular counseling just isn't enough.
Within the reform homes we are of course looking at long term
engagement, we are looking at workshops, we are looking at
working with them. In reform homes simple
counselling doesn't work. So you need other kinds of, you
know, whether it is a career counselling, whether it is them
doing any kind of work which gives them some kind of a piece
or some kind of engagement. So well we are suggesting all
this. The question is that has your
counselling yielded any result? The person's behaviour is the
same, so I have no answers for that because it requires
patience. It requires a change not only in
the person, but in the system. So what I've understood, Monica,
is the fact that what you're saying is that consistency as of
now is lacking prevention. When we talk, instead of
qualitative, we are looking at quantitative results, which you
feel should not be the way to look at it, but it should be an
ongoing process where the counseling should be made a
primary factor in the entire healing process.
Is that right? Is that what you're trying to
say? That's what I'm trying to say.
So don't start on a knee jerk reaction every time there is a
case and when it gets over we forget and we go back to because
we have so many files to deal with, so many things to answer
to so many other things. And mental health is just a
priority on a paper which is not really how it should be.
I mean it should be made as a holistic intervention which is a
plug in intervention to all other critical interventions
which are happening and not just whenever there is a crisis.
Another popular perception with juveniles in conflict with the
law is the belief that they are destined for a life of crime and
there's no scope for reformation.
Monica Kumar, who has worked with many teenagers in
observation homes, says that's not the case.
As a mental health professional, you know, we know that anybody
who comes with conduct or personality issues or where
there has been a serious crime, it's a long term work and
everybody has a right to reform. It's not just with one person.
And you know, you don't see the change just in one person.
But let's say that you reach out to 102 will change and who are
we to label this as somebody who's not ready?
And sometimes, you know, you keep working and the day comes.
It's like with the autistic child now you start teaching
that child and there is no language.
And one day you want to give up. And suddenly they're speaking
the line. So do we wait for that line or
do we just give up? It's something that I won't give
up on. And I feel that, you know, you
have to hit the cord and you have to figure that person out.
There is a human part of it that nobody has actually had the
conversation with them. That person also is rejecting
the system and we are rejecting him.
So we need to come and understand and adapt to each
other and figure a way out. Geetanjali Prasad was part of a
research project that found that close to 10,000 underage
prisoners were moved from jails to juvenile homes between 2015
and 2021. This was because they were
wrongly sent to jails and kept in custody with adults.
Geetanjali says poorer children who face the criminal justice
system are often clueless about what to do and don't even get
good lawyers appearing for them. She says that many lawyers don't
want to represent these children because they are poor and are
seen as having no future. She says we need a system that's
accountable to the children and to society at large.
It is this idea of, you know, why should we fight for these
kids? Which is not to say that legal
aid doesn't exist. Legal aid exists.
There are, you know, many legal aid lawyers in, especially in
metros that are now working on some of these matters.
But is it a system that has, you know, where people are willing
to fight with principles of legal aid and justice that are
confrontational, you know, that will demand of the system that
it is equally accountable to all children?
That is what remains to be seen. That is the larger vision of
what legal aid should be, not a meek system that just does
what's easy, but a system that pushes the law to, you know,
work in its best possible way for the rehabilitation and
reform of all children. But how does all of this connect
to the Pune case? What connects the case of an
economically backward teen accused of pushing someone off a
train and wrongly sent to a jail to build a son whose family did
everything possible to get him off the hook?
Geetanjali Prasad says one needs to look at the idea behind the
juvenile justice law. She says the Pune case should
open our eyes to the problems that lie within the juvenile
justice system. It was put forth with this idea
that juveniles committing crime happens because of harsh socio
economic realities. And that therefore, you know,
based on the fact that these children don't have an
environment that is supporting them to be responsible, take
decisions maturely, you have to have a situation that gives them
a law that gives them the chance for rehabilitation.
And my point on this is just here you see inequality acting
out in the system to use the best parts of this act in an
exceptional case, in a preferential manner, right?
And that's what I find very, very egregious about it.
I think the fact that the juvenile was given bail
immediately is again, another question.
The mother of of the person killed is saying it's taken over
50 hours for me to cremate my son, but it's taken, you know,
under 15 hours for this juvenile to get out on, on bail.
So yes, certainly it it raises questions, I think not about
whether the ACT in itself is good or not and and whether it
should have harsher provisions. Certainly, I don't think it
should have harsher provisions if this incredibly high number
of children, just as as one data point, are ending up in prisons
when they shouldn't be, most of whom would not have committed
heinous offences, right? They're just in for petty
offences. But but I think the more
critical question it raises is about the inequality in
accessing the criminal justice system, including the JJ system,
and how people are allowed to use muscle power, money power
for preferential ends. And if it hadn't been reported,
then, you know, this kid could probably be out Scott free.
So this is where the role of society citizens comes into
play, that we all have to be concerned about these questions.
We all have to engage. It cannot be a momentary outrage
when there's an exceptional case in the JJ system where a rich
child is getting off easy. There has to be a constant
engagement by civil society, by concerned citizens.
It cannot be a knee jerk one time response in asking for
accountability. That accountability should be
asked for in every case that goes before JJ BS in this
country. And I know that's it's quite a
leap to ask demand something like that, but that is what that
is what a just system would look like.
This outcome would never be allowed to happen if the same
degree of care goes into every case that comes before JJ BS.
And if every child has equal opportunity before the JJB, it
would never happen. Today's episode was produced by
Jayaraj Singh and Sahil Gupta. For a daily spotlight on people,
ideas and stories that matter, subscribe to us where available
on the Times of India website, Spotify, Apple, Amazon or
wherever else you get your podcasts.
For any news, tips or feedback, mail me at
arungeorge@timesgroup.com.