Misuse of the POCSO Act: False Accusations and Legal Ramifications
Misuse of the POCSO Act: False Accusations and Legal Ramifications Introduction: India is home to 19% of the world’s children, accounting for 42% of its overall population. India is a country known for its multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious population but there exist economically and socially downtrodden groups which face a wide range of challenges. Children are consistently the most vulnerable members of these groups. While it is true that girls are slain before they are born, those who survive are exposed to a variety of atrocities. Furthermore, India has the greatest rate of child sexual abuse in the world, with rape of a child under the age of 16 years occurring every 155 minutes, rape of a child under the age of 10 years occurring every 13 hours, and one in ten of these children being raped at any given time. On May 22, 2012, the Indian parliament passed the ‘Protection of Children Against Sexual Offenses Bill, 2011’, which ended years of a lack of explicit...