Love on trial: India's age of consent controversy

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0:30so you can monitor and engage with the account while your teen learns how to invest and manage money. Learn more at schwab.com India has one of the toughest child sex abuse laws in the world, with strict definitions and mandatory minimum sentences. The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, or POCSO, has been hailed as a major success, helping expose abuse, trafficking and child marriage. But lawyers and campaigners now warn the same law is criminalizing young couples. with boys in consensual relationships facing charges that can carry sentences of up to life in prison. I'm Rishbhano Burua, and this is a documentary Love on Trial in the As Age of Consent Controversy from the BBC World Service.

1:17So roll back the clock to 2012 when a young 23-year-old woman in Delhi is attacked on a bus.

1:28The assault took place on a moving bus It was so brutal that it galvanized people to take to the streets She dies of her injuries and four young men are later executed for her gang rape and murder Thousands defied orders to participate in these demonstrations The case becomes news around the world The country demands change and POCSO, India's strict new sexual offence law, is born. But the push to reform had actually been gathering momentum for much longer. So it starts from, let's say, 70s, 80s, when there were feminist movements in different parts of India. Dr. Shailesh Kumar is an academic who specializes in the history of sexual offence law in India.

2:12Primarily around three significant cases. One was the Muthra case, another was Rameezha B case, and there were third one, which is a Maya Tyagi case. And one of these three cases, which is the Mathura case, which is where there was a minor girl, an agricultural neighbor, who was raped by two policemen inside the police station. And when these cases went to the trial stage, the judicial approach to deal with the trial of these cases were very conservative and very adult-centric and assumptions, which were against both women and children. that led to the Law Commission of India bringing up reports and recommended certain changes, both procedural and substantial changes to the law, to rape law primarily, related to women, indirectly related to children as well.

2:59Those recommendations were not followed by the parliament because an argument was that there is already existing law, including the Indian Penal Code as it then existed. Change only comes when children are treated as a group in their own right. In that 2001 census, India had around 40 % of its population as children. There was this concern on the part of the Ministry of Child and Women Development. So this Boxer Bill came in 2011 and for the next one and a half years this was debated and finally in 2012, this Protection of Children from Sexual Offices Act was enacted. In the aftermath of the gang rape and murder of Nirbhaya in 2012, Parliament moved unusually fast.

3:43Here's former MP Dr. Fauzia Khan, who served in Maharashtra's Legislative Council and later in the Rajasabha. We did see that there was a need for this act to come up because of the incidence of child abuse all around in the country. So a more stringent act came up at that time. It had a very large support all across political circles and even from civil society. So behind the scenes, a group of experts came together to work up the initial legislation. We've been speaking to Rinda Grover, a senior lawyer practicing in the Supreme Court of India, about writing those first drafts of the POCSO bill.

4:25So there were lawyers, there were academics, there were activists, there were psychologists, and each one of us brought to the table our expertise and experience. Prior to POXO, we did not have a law that was specific to sexual offences against children. So the whole idea was to both provide protection as well as to make the procedure much more sensitive for the child going through it. But some of the key recommendations ran into resistance. The age of consent was 16 years. It was when Poxo was passed in 2012 that it was raised to 18 for all children. Thereafter, there was an amendment in the penal code itself following the gang rape and murder of Nirbhaya in Delhi in 2012, which led to a series of reforms in sexual offenses law, including for adult women.

5:25And there also the age of consent was raised to 80. This was not a recommendation made at all by the drafting committee because the experience of all of us showed us very clearly. It was very commonplace to find adolescent young people engaging in voluntary, consensual, sexual relations. There is absolutely no disagreement that a child should be considered as being under 18 years of age. But what the government completely misunderstood was that the guiding doctrine of the UN Child Rights Convention is what is in the best interest of the child. It is not in the best interest of the child to criminalize voluntary, consensual sexual relationships.

6:25And the apprehension that was voiced by the drafting committee way back in 2012 has found an echo in judgments of high ports across the country and as recent as January 2026 by the Supreme Court of India, urging the government of India to review the matter because what is coming before the court is a slew of cases where there is voluntary sexual abuse. relationships. Rinda and the other original drafters of the new law also pushed for a built-in age exception. We recommended both that keep it 16 and consider having what is conventionally called the Romeo-Juliet clause and to have a clause in age exception because what we are seeing today is that if the girl is 17 years and the boy is also a minor but is then being sent to a juvenile home.

7:25Or if the girl is, say, 17 and the boy is an adult, then we see the boys being sent to prison. So the close in age exception finds absolutely no place in the statute. So what exactly does POCSO, the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, mean in practice in India? Kushi Kushalappa spends a working life helping children and families navigate the law. The sexual offences, which prior to the enactment was like a limited scope of sexual violence, was defined very broadly in POXO. It went into details of different forms of sexual offences against children, including penetrative sexual assault, aggravated penetrative sexual assault, sexual assault itself, aggravated sexual assault, sexual harassment, abetment to crime and other crimes, including attempt to offend.

8:21This is probably the first time that India had a law that defined sexual offences in that much detail. POCSO doesn't just define offences. It mandates people what they have to do if they suspect abuse. So school teachers, doctors, medical practitioners, it creates a duty on them. It imposes a duty on them. And this duty has already been imposed under the POCSO law on these stakeholders. And there is actually punishment if you fail to report this. It's this uncompromising approach that makes POC so one of the most stringent child protection laws of its kind anywhere in the world. And the punishments are severe.

8:59Under sexual offence laws in India, defendants can face years in jail, life imprisonment, and in the most serious cases, even the death penalty. Quotes take a very serious view of these crimes. Senior lawyer, Vrinda Grover again. The law is strict, the courts are firm, and there is clarity that we cannot allow any of these situations to go unaddressed. To understand the scale of the issue, Dr. Shailesh Kumar has gone back through the figures for the period from 2017 to 2022. In 2017, there were only 32 ,000 cases across the country. But then it doubled to 63 ,000, 64 ,000 in 2022. So in just five years, the cases got doubled.

9:48And he says a significant share of those are teenagers and consenting relationships. So 14 to 20 percent of the proxy cases are of de facto consensual nature. So these are the number of cases where you have people involved consensually in a romantic relationship, who still are facing charges of POXO offences and still are going through the investigation and trial. So what would that mean in physical numbers? The total number of POXO cases in a year would be, let's say, currently around 70 ,000 to 80 ,000. So at least we are talking about around 6 ,000 to 10 ,000 cases between those many young persons who are actually in the system now because they got involved romantically with a minor.

10:35In southern India, Kushi Kushalappa and Vidya Reddy are on the front line of POXO cases, and they are seeing exactly the trend Selesh has described. In Bangalore, Kushi leads support and rehabilitation at the Enfold Proactive Health Trust, helping children and their families navigate POXO cases from the first report through to the courtroom. Kushri says many of these cases don't even start as sex crimes. When a minor left home, then the parents would automatically register a missing person's complaint and the police would set off to trace them. And when they did trace them and they found them to be with a person of the opposite gender, then a case would be registered against the boy.

11:20More often than not, it was presumed that they had engaged in some form of sexual act. So the missing person's complaint would then become a complaint under the POCSO Act. She says there are all kinds of ways consenting teenagers can land in trouble under POCSO. He was just over 18 years of age and the girl was about 16 and a half at that time. The girl was arm twisted and coerced by her family into supporting the case of the prosecution. So in court, she actually said that she was forced into the sexual act. When she had spoken to us, when we met her in the hospital, she was feeling really bad.

12:00She was very concerned about her partner because it was very much both of them in a relationship together. At the time of the case being disposed, the judge found this young person guilty and punished them with a term of 20 years in prison. There are situations like that that have destroyed people's lives.

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13:14Rina, thank you for being with us. Today, at her office in Bangalore, Kushi is meeting up with a young woman who is now 18. Younger teenagers in India are getting involved in sexual relationships. And Reena, not her real name, was a vulnerable 14-year-old when she became friends with an older boy. And over time, they grew close. During the COVID lockdown, her parents were out working long hours and Reena would often have the house to herself. It was at that time she'd invite her new friend around to keep her company. And with the place to themselves, they began to explore.

13:57Reena is remembering the traumatic events with Khushi, who helped her through that period.

14:12from both the side. Over the months, she began to put on weight and her mom noticed a change. One night I was sleeping with my mom. Then she was like keeping her hand on my stomach and she felt like something is in my stomach, like very hard thing, okay. So next day morning, she got me a test tube and then she tested and I was pregnant. By the time they reached the clinic, she was already six months pregnant, just days short of the legal limit for termination. But before the family could decide anything, the police showed up at the door that same night They took him from the home to jail Would you have liked to discuss with your boyfriend what options you had before the abortion?

14:55Yeah, I wanted to but there was no chance at all Rina's father was terrified the case could destroy both of their futures And told her she would need to explain things in court I never wanted him to be like in struggling all these things I just told the lawyer that no, nothing happened to me. It was just my stomach pain and also I was not getting my period. So I told them like that, then they have left him for that reason. But the boy had already spent months in jail. But had Reena and her parents not intervened, he could have faced 20 years in prison. Did you know about the law and did you know what would happen?

15:31No, I was not knowing anything. Should there be a change to allow young people to be in legitimate, consensual relationships? Yeah, because at that time, they don't know anything. So it happens by mistake. So it should be changed. Kushi tells us Reena's story isn't unique in her experience. She says she's seen other cases where nobody realizes teenagers are in a relationship until the girl turns up pregnant at a clinic. A person is accused of getting their girlfriend pregnant, for example. The punishment for aggravated penetrative sexual assault is 20 years to life imprisonment. So for a young person who's in a consensual relationship with their girlfriend, and she gets pregnant, when she enters a medical facility and the doctor who does a urine pregnancy test discovers that she's pregnant, the medical officer is mandated to inform the police.

16:26and that sets the criminal justice system in motion. And in another case, Kushi worked on, even the girl's own parents were asking why her boyfriend should be punished. He was a little over 18 by then, but according to them, they were youngsters. Both these young people engaged in sex out of their own free will. So why should that boy be punished? The girl, of course, was trying to scream from the top of the roofs, but no one was listening to her because the law doesn't allow anyone to listen to it is statutory rape. But the parents in this situation also felt it was very wrong for that boy to be prosecuted.

17:01And even when a case doesn't end in a long sentence, Kushi says the impact on a family standing in their community can be huge. I don't think human beings know how to be confidential about these kind of situations. When there is an iota of curiosity, dude, what happened to my neighbor? And I saw the police come to the house we are letting our mind go completely haywire how long is a family going to say no my son has gone away somewhere i've sent my son away because he had a medical emergency medical emergencies last for one month two months three months then there is the other side where the girl's family out of anger maybe because the girl's life in their mind is destroyed because she's no longer fit for marriage because she's engaged in sex with somebody else so maybe they out the name of the boy.

17:58In Chennai on India's southeast coast, Vidya Reddy Etolir has been watching the same pattern unfold as Khushi has. She spent more than 20 years alongside children and their families as they navigate the police, doctors and courts. All their friends gather around them and throw rose petals and whistle and hoot and etc. And of course it was videotaped since this generation records everything for posterity. This video then went viral and then the local administrative authority said, oh my God, we can't have people thinking the young people in our area behave like this. Got the police to file a POXO case against this boy for tying a yellow thread around the girl's neck, which she brought, by the way, the yellow thread.

18:41He was then taken and sent off to the observation home. She was sent to the children's home. He went through a potency examination. She went through a medical examination. Her parents didn't know where she was for a month. The families spent so much money trying to get things sorted out. So you can imagine what it does. When the case finally reached the courts in Tamil Nadu, judges treated it as teenage romance rather than a sexual offence and threw it out. Another kind of case Vidya sees doesn't start with a complaint at all. It starts with a medical examination at a clinic. She had to go to the hospital.

19:16She had to tell the doctor she refuses consent to be examined. She's eight months pregnant for crying out aloud. This girl had gone off to her parents' place to have the baby that was far away from Chennai. And the police went herring off there looking for her. And then I had to call up and intervene and say, don't be ridiculous. The child is hardly like 10 days old. And you can't expect this girl to come to court and give a statement. it. Then they said, okay, we'll anyway file the charge sheet so the trial can start. I said, okay, do what you want. Do you want to prove the paternity? They even made the young man go through a potency test.

19:50He's fathered a child for heaven's sake. So that was a whole circus by itself. So what actually happens to a teenage boy in a consenting relationship when he's arrested on the POC soap? So let's say both persons involved are minor. It usually then goes through the juvenile justice system. There will be a juvenile board set up. And even when they are convicted and punished, they will have to go to the juvenile remand home until they attain the age of 18. And after 18, if the punishment is still left, then they are transferred to the adult prisons. The sentences are very harsh as well. And especially if, let's say, there is repetitive sexual violence, which is usually the case in consensual cases, because of course, you, let's say, have several sexual activities among yourself, then the punishment multiplies as well.

20:33certainly you won't get bail from the court. 90 % of cases do not get to the trial stage on time, which means you will be behind prison walls for a longer duration. It might take one year, two years, three years, five years just for your case to get on the trial stage. Bangalore lawyer Feeba Nisha has met young men in a special home for boys charged on the box show. From the age of 16, they are behind the bars. Now they are 18, 20, 21. Their entire time of studies, the entire childhood is gone for these boys. So it is very painful to see. We have been trying to put in petitions with the district legal service authorities to do something about it and to take this as a special case and let them go.

21:16Those boys aren't just losing a few months of school. For some of them, the sentence stretches across almost their entire young adulthood. But despite what she's seen happen to these boys, FIBA doesn't want POC so weakened. I think it's a very good law, much needed in the society, because I have seen very, very bad cases. Small babies, three years old child, four years old child. And it's most of the times known people to the children who are committing these things. Another complication is the sheer prevalence of child marriage in India. States like Assam and Rajasthan have begun aggressive clampdowns.

21:51Under Indian law, the legal age of marriage is 18 for girls and 21 for boys. Anything below that is a child marriage. And because POXO overrides all personal and religious laws, sex within a child marriage is treated as child sexual abuse. Surabhi Shippuri from Shakti Vahini works to stamp out child trafficking and child marriage. Legal action is taken against all the people involved in solemnizing of child marriage. Even the religious leaders who are involved in pushing children who are solemnizing their marriage, the people who are present, the wedding caterers, all of them are now being held accountable.

22:32In 2019, the Modi government strengthened India's child protection law, raising minimum sentences, expanding life imprisonment, and introducing the death penalty for most severe offences against children. The government also introduced fast-track special codes for sexual offence cases involving adults and children. and by early 2025, there had been over 750 of these in 30 states and union territories, covering more than 300 ,000 sexual offence cases. The Indian government has never directly responded to concerns about consenting teenagers being caught up in Poxo, but it continues to maintain that the law-stricted under-18 rule is essential and that any sexual activity involving a minor must be treated as a criminal offence.

23:21To hear from young adults who may soon be thinking about having children, I've come to IIT Guwahati in Assam, one of India's leading universities. I'm sitting on campus with three PhD students in the late 20s. Maitreyi, Manali and another student who's asked us not to use her name. So we call her Meera. When was the first time that you heard about this law? I think the first time we came to hear about it was during the Nirbhaya case, which opened up a discussion about rape laws in the country. I think what it meant is that there's definitely need for stringent laws, whether it's with child sexual offences or with adults.

24:00There are also complicated social realities which data cannot represent, especially when it comes to sensitive issues like sex. We are not being able to have a clear definition of the issues at hand, like what is consent, what do we mean by sexual offence. For most of us, we just have a very general idea of the fact that a law exists. However, if we look at the reality, I don't think we have ever heard of anyone in our vicinity using that law to get justice. I remember our sex education was just don't have sex. Our Indian schools are not sensitive when it comes to issues like this. The Modi government insists it is doing a great deal to raise awareness.

24:48Former MP Dr. Fauzia Khan says that silence is still a big part of the problem when it comes to awareness. There is a social taboo. People don't want to speak openly with their children about sex and other things. So the children get misdirected by their peers. We do have workshops on what is bad touch and good touch and things like that. But this is a subject which has to be handled very, very sensitively. The big question is, should India lower the age of consent so that consensual relationships between 16 and 17-year-olds, for instance, don't get dragged into POCSO? The whole idea is to project that we are what in India we call rhetorically zero tolerance for sexual violence.

25:30Senior lawyer, Vrinda Grover again. So instead of focusing energy there, there is a projection that is being made. And in order to appear as a strong state, the legislature does not want to pull the age back to 16. We need a uniform age, obviously, in terms of 18 years that is considered as the age of a child. Child rights lawyer, Surahe Shurpuri again. If we work around the age a little bit, sometimes it can lead to becoming a shadow over other crimes. When we talk about child sexual abuse or we talk about consenting relationship between children, we have to understand that it does not happen in isolation.

26:11These teenagers are being roped in by unknown people online and they kind of groom them as a consenting relationship. And then they traffic them and abuse them, push them sexual exploitation. So if we play around with the age of consent, it will act as a blanket over the other crimes that is targeting towards children. They should make a differentiation now. I know the law has to be strict, but I'm sure like at least when it comes to the evidence stage, if the judge is convinced that there was some form of consent and also with regards to bail with ages 16 and plus, they should be little more lenient.

26:50So when you ask whether the age of consent in India should be lowered to keep 16 and 17-year-olds out of POXO, people inside the system hesitate. One lawyer says the framework itself now has to be reviewed because it can't tell the difference between abuse and a teenage relationship. Another warns that changing the age would give cover to traffickers and older abusers. And a third says the real answer is better judgment from police and judges, not a new number on paper. On one point, though, they all agree. Right now, Poxo still treats every under-18 as a child and a victim, and every case of teenage sex as a crime.

27:34You've been listening to the documentary, Love on Trial, India's Age of Consent Controversy, with me, Brijmanu Burwa, in Assam. The producers were Ashley Byer and Andrew Edwards, and it was a Made in Manchester production for the BBC World Service.