Criminalising Desire: Criminogenic Risk Factors, Adolescent Sexuality, And The POCSO Regime In India
- IJLLR Journal
- Feb 28
- 2 min read
Mr. Prithvi Raj, Senior Research Scholar, National Forensic Sciences University, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India
Dr. Krishna Kumar Mishra, Associate Professor, School of Behavioral Forensics, National Forensic Sciences University, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India
ABSTRACT
The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012, was put into place with the mandate to protect the minors from sexual exploitation. In actual practice, however, the act's extensive criminalisation of any sexual activity with individuals below the age of 18 years - regardless of consensuality - has dragged innocent adolescent relationships into the net, and in the process turned a protective statute into a tool of coercion. This discourse draws on the results of qualitative interviews with forty late adolescents (in the age group of 13-18) in conflict with law for sexual offences to chart the criminogenic as well as demographic risk factors associated with sexually deviant conduct among Indian adolescents. Using reflexive thematic analysis, six key pathways of risk can be identified: peer affiliation and delinquent influence; pornography utilisation; vertical individualism and egocentrism; disrupted family structures; socioeconomic deprivation and antecedent childhood trauma - all of which come together via distorted antisocial cognition. The findings highlight an important legal- developmental disjunction, whereby although developmental criminology acknowledges adolescent risk factors as being amenable to psychosocial intervention, POCSO's inflexible framework requires prosecutorial responses to behaviours that have a trauma, poverty and peer influence background. This analysis argues for the use of principles of risk-need- responsivity (RNR), family-based interventions, as well as decriminalisation of consensual adolescent relationships as more effective pathways to protection and rehabilitation than the current paradigm of prosecution oriented. The manuscript concludes by suggesting legislative and institutional changes in light of evidence based juvenile justice and adolescent development tenets.
Keywords: POCSO Act, juvenile sexual offending, criminogenic risk factors, adolescent sexuality, risk need- responsiveness, developmental criminology, legal reform, etc.
