They met before the law could name their feelings, before statutes learned the grammar of the heart. What they called love, the law renamed as violence; What they lived as choice, the State recorded as crime.

This article examines the paradox at the heart of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 (POCSO): a statute crafted to shield children from sexual harm, yet increasingly invoked to punish consensual adolescent relationships. Through constitutional analysis, judicial trends, comparative jurisprudence, and sociological insight, the article interrogates whether child protection can coexist with adolescent autonomy. It argues for the urgent adoption of a narrowly tailored Romeo-Juliet clause, one that preserves POCSO’s protective mandate while preventing the criminalisation of youth, desire, and emerging selfhood. In doing so, the article situates adolescent consent at the intersection of law, morality, and constitutional conscience.

When Adolescence Meets the Criminal Law

In William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the tragedy of young love unfolds not because affection itself is immoral, but because social structures refuse to accommodate it. Feuding families, inherited prejudices, and rigid notions of honour transform intimacy into defiance and affection into rebellion. In contemporary India, adolescent love encounters a similarly unforgiving force, not feudal lineage, but statutory law. The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 (POCSO), enacted with the noble objective of safeguarding children from sexual exploitation, has increasingly emerged as a site where adolescent romance is reclassified as criminal conduct.

Over the last decade, Indian courts have witnessed a steady rise in prosecutions under POCSO involving consensual relationships between teenagers. These cases often follow a familiar pattern: two adolescents enter into a romantic relationship; parental or community disapproval ensues; a First Information Report is lodged alleging kidnapping or sexual assault; and the criminal justice machinery is set in motion. What begins as youthful affection culminates in arrest, incarceration, and long-drawn trials. The law, rather than acting as a neutral protector, becomes an active participant in regulating intimacy.

This phenomenon raises troubling questions about the role of criminal law in governing adolescence. Is the State justified in treating all sexual activity involving minors as inherently exploitative? Can a legal framework designed to protect children simultaneously recognise their evolving capacities and autonomy? Or does the refusal to acknowledge adolescent consent reflect a deeper anxiety about sexuality, choice, and social control?

The re-emergence of the debate around a so-called “Romeo–Juliet clause” signals judicial and societal discomfort with the current operation of POCSO. Such a clause, recognised in several jurisdictions, seeks to distinguish abusive sexual conduct from consensual relationships between adolescents close in age. Its consideration in the Indian context marks a critical juncture, one that compels a re-examination of childhood, consent, and constitutional morality.

This article situates the POCSO debate within a broader constitutional and socio-legal framework. It argues that while child protection remains an indispensable State obligation, the criminalisation of consensual adolescent relationships undermines principles of proportionality, dignity, and autonomy enshrined in the Constitution. By interrogating statutory design, judicial trends, gendered enforcement, and comparative practices, the article makes a case for nuanced reform, one that saves the law without sacrificing love.

The Genesis of POCSO: Purpose, Promise, and Protective Intent

Before the enactment of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, sexual offences against children in India were prosecuted under the general provisions of the Indian Penal Code, 1860. This framework was widely acknowledged to be inadequate. The IPC neither defined child-specific sexual offences nor recognised the full spectrum of abuse experienced by minors. Non-penetrative sexual acts, sexual harassment, exploitation through pornography, and abuse within ostensibly consensual contexts often fell through doctrinal gaps. More critically, the law was largely indifferent to the distinctive psychological, emotional, and power asymmetries that render children uniquely vulnerable.

Growing public concern, coupled with India’s international obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), created sustained pressure for reform. The Justice Verma Committee, constituted in the aftermath of the 2012 Delhi gang rape, further highlighted the need for a comprehensive child-protection statute that moved beyond the adult-centric logic of the IPC. Although the Committee primarily addressed sexual violence against women, its emphasis on consent, vulnerability, and power relations lent renewed urgency to child-specific legislation.

POCSO was conceived as a response to these systemic failures. It adopted a child-centric approach, defining a wide range of sexual offences, including penetrative and non-penetrative assault, sexual harassment, and the use of children for pornographic purposes. The statute introduced child-friendly procedures for reporting, investigation, and trial, seeking to minimise secondary victimisation. Special courts, in-camera proceedings, and mandatory reporting obligations were intended to create a protective legal ecosystem around the child.

At the heart of POCSO lies its strict liability framework. The statute criminalises all sexual activity involving persons below eighteen years of age, rendering consent legally irrelevant. This design choice was deliberate. Legislators feared that recognising consent could allow perpetrators to escape liability by manipulating or coercing minors into apparent acquiescence. By removing consent from consideration, the law sought to erect an uncompromising barrier against exploitation.

However, this protective absolutism carried an implicit assumption that all sexual activity involving minors is inherently abusive. While this assumption holds in cases of predation, grooming, or coercion, it becomes deeply problematic when applied to consensual relationships between adolescents close in age. The very rigidity that strengthens POCSO against exploitation simultaneously generates injustice at its margins. The promise of protection, when untampered by nuance, begins to blur into punishment, laying the groundwork for the paradox that now confronts Indian courts.

Strict Liability and the Erasure of Consent

One of the most defining and controversial features of the POCSO Act is its strict liability regime. Under the statute, consent is rendered legally irrelevant: a person below the age of eighteen is deemed incapable of consenting to any form of sexual activity, and neither the accused’s intent nor the consensual nature of the relationship bears upon criminal liability. From a protective standpoint, this framework appears both logical and necessary. It seeks to foreclose the possibility of perpetrators exploiting power asymmetries, emotional dependence, or immaturity to manufacture an appearance of consent.

In cases involving sexual abuse, grooming, coercion, or manipulation, the exclusion of consent from legal consideration is unquestionably justified. Children, particularly younger minors, lack the cognitive and emotional maturity to meaningfully assess risk, resist pressure, or comprehend long-term consequences. Strict liability thus operates as a safeguard, placing the burden of responsibility squarely on adults and insulating minors from blame.

However, when this framework is mechanically applied to consensual adolescent relationships, it begins to unravel. Consider the now-familiar judicial narrative: a seventeen-year-old girl voluntarily elopes with her romantic partner; parental disapproval follows; allegations of kidnapping and sexual assault are lodged. Despite repeated assertions of consent by the girl, the law compels courts to treat her as a victim and her partner as an offender. Similarly, a sixteen-year-old boy engaging in a mutually affectionate relationship is transformed, by operation of law, into a sexual criminal.

Such cases reveal how POCSO collapses all sexual activity involving minors into a singular category of harm. The law refuses to distinguish between exploitation and experimentation, between violence and voluntary intimacy. Context, mutuality, and agency are rendered invisible. The adolescent subject is stripped of voice, reduced to a legal abstraction incapable of choice.

This absolutism produces consequences that are both disproportionate and counterproductive. Adolescence, a phase recognised by psychology as one of identity formation, emotional discovery, and relational learning, is transformed into a zone of criminal risk. Ordinary experiences of affection and intimacy are reframed as potential offences carrying severe penal consequences. Far from protecting young people, the law exposes them to incarceration, stigma, and long-term social exclusion.

More troublingly, the erasure of consent under POCSO undermines the legitimacy of criminal law itself. When punishment is imposed in the absence of harm, coercion, or exploitation, the moral authority of the law is weakened. Strict liability, when untethered from proportionality and context, ceases to be a tool of protection and instead becomes an instrument of overreach. It is within this tension, between safeguarding vulnerability and denying agency, that the POCSO paradox is most starkly revealed.

The Ground Reality: When Love Becomes an FIR

Beyond statutory text and judicial doctrine lies the lived reality of POCSO’s enforcement, a reality that reveals a striking disjunction between legislative intent and social consequence. Empirical patterns across trial courts and High Courts in India indicate that a significant proportion of POCSO prosecutions do not stem from instances of sexual abuse, violence, or exploitation. Instead, they arise from consensual romantic relationships between adolescents, particularly those involving elopement or defiance of parental authority.

These cases are seldom initiated by the adolescents themselves. Rather, they are triggered by parents or guardians who disapprove of the relationship, often invoking the criminal law as a means of regaining control. Disapproval is frequently rooted in considerations of caste, religion, class, or perceived threats to family honour. What might otherwise have remained a private familial conflict is transformed into a criminal proceeding, with the language of protection masking the exercise of social power.

Once an FIR is lodged, the machinery of the criminal justice system moves with unforgiving momentum. Police are bound by mandatory reporting provisions; arrests follow as a matter of course; and prosecutions proceed irrespective of the expressed wishes of the adolescent girl. Even when she consistently asserts that the relationship was voluntary, her testimony is discounted as legally irrelevant. The law, having predetermined her incapacity to consent, refuses to hear her voice.

The consequences for the accused, most often adolescent boys or young men, are severe and enduring. They are arrested, sometimes subjected to prolonged pre-trial detention, and branded as sexual offenders. The stigma attached to a POCSO charge is profound, affecting education, employment prospects, and social standing. Simultaneously, the so-called victim is often removed from her home, placed in institutional care, or subjected to counselling regimes designed not to support her autonomy but to correct her choices.

In this manner, POCSO becomes an instrument of social discipline rather than child protection. The criminal justice system is enlisted to enforce normative ideals of obedience, chastity, and conformity. Love, particularly when it transgresses social boundaries, is reframed as deviance. Intimacy becomes evidence; affection becomes allegation.

This ground reality exposes the paradox at the heart of POCSO’s application. A statute designed to protect children from harm is routinely invoked in the absence of harm. The result is not merely over-criminalisation, but a profound erosion of trust in law. When love becomes an FIR, the promise of protection gives way to the politics of control.

Adolescence, Autonomy, and the Myth of Uniform Childhood

At the conceptual core of the POCSO framework lies a powerful yet deeply flawed assumption: that all persons below the age of eighteen constitute a homogenous class uniformly incapable of consent. This legal fiction collapses childhood and adolescence into a single category of vulnerability, erasing crucial distinctions between stages of development. In doing so, it prioritises administrative simplicity over lived reality, and certainty over justice.

Contemporary developmental psychology paints a far more nuanced picture. Adolescence is widely recognised as a transitional phase marked by evolving cognitive, emotional, and moral capacities. As individuals move through early, middle, and late adolescence, their ability to reason, assess risk, understand consequences, and make autonomous choices increases significantly. A thirteen-year-old and a seventeen-year-old do not merely differ in age; they inhabit fundamentally different developmental worlds. Yet under POCSO, this distinction is rendered legally invisible.

The law’s refusal to acknowledge this continuum has profound consequences. By presuming absolute incapacity up to the moment of attaining majority, POCSO denies adolescents any recognition of emerging autonomy. Choice is recharacterised as victimhood; desire is pathologised as harm. Adolescents are not seen as subjects in the process of becoming autonomous individuals, but as passive objects of protection whose experiences must be regulated rather than understood.

This approach also sits uneasily with other areas of Indian law, which implicitly recognise graded capacity. Adolescents may consent to medical procedures, express informed preferences in custody disputes, and be held criminally responsible under the Juvenile Justice framework based on assessments of mental maturity. The insistence on uniform incapacity within POCSO thus appears less a reflection of developmental science and more an expression of moral anxiety surrounding sexuality.

By ignoring adolescent autonomy, the law risks infantilisation rather than empowerment. It deprives young people of the opportunity to develop healthy understandings of consent, boundaries, and responsibility. Moreover, it places them at odds with the legal system, fostering distrust and fear rather than protection.

The myth of uniform childhood, when translated into criminal law, produces outcomes that are both unjust and counterproductive. A legal regime that refuses to see adolescents as evolving moral agents cannot adequately serve their best interests. Recognising the continuum of adolescence does not weaken child protection; rather, it strengthens it by aligning law with reality. Without such recognition, POCSO remains ill-equipped to distinguish vulnerability from volition and protection from punishment.

Gendered Enforcement and the Denial of Female Agency

Although the POCSO Act is drafted in gender-neutral terms, its enforcement reveals a starkly gendered reality. In practice, the accused are overwhelmingly male, while the complainants are almost invariably female. This pattern is not incidental; it reflects deeply entrenched patriarchal assumptions about sexuality, desire, and agency. Men are imagined as aggressors by default, while women, particularly adolescent girls, are cast as passive subjects in need of rescue, regardless of their expressed choices.

In consensual adolescent relationships, this gendered lens produces especially troubling outcomes. When girls assert that their relationships were voluntary, affectionate, and desired, their testimony is routinely discounted. Courts, police, and families alike invoke the statutory presumption of incapacity to override their voices. Consent, even when articulated with clarity and consistency, is reinterpreted as confusion, coercion, or manipulation. Protection thus becomes a pretext for silencing.

This denial of female agency is often justified in paternalistic terms. The law positions itself as knowing what is best for the adolescent girl, even when she vehemently disagrees. Such an approach mirrors older moral frameworks that equate female sexuality with vulnerability and risk, requiring constant supervision and control. In this sense, POCSO enforcement does not merely reflect patriarchy; it reproduces it.

The consequences are far-reaching. Adolescent girls are frequently removed from their homes and placed in institutional care, ostensibly for their own safety. Counselling regimes are imposed not to support informed choice, but to correct perceived deviance. The girl’s autonomy is subordinated to familial honour and social respectability, with the criminal justice system acting as an enforcer of normative femininity.

From a constitutional perspective, this gendered enforcement raises serious equality concerns. Article 14’s guarantee of equal protection is undermined when the law operates on stereotypical assumptions about male aggression and female passivity. Moreover, the denial of agency implicates the right to dignity under Article 21. Dignity is not merely about protection from harm; it is about recognition as a thinking, choosing individual.

Ironically, a statute enacted to empower children often strips adolescent girls of the very autonomy it purports to safeguard. By refusing to acknowledge their capacity for desire and decision-making, the law reduces them to objects of concern rather than subjects of rights. True protection cannot be achieved through silencing. Until enforcement practices reckon with female agency, POCSO’s promise of child-centred justice will remain deeply compromised.

Caste, Community, and the Criminalisation of Choice

A striking and deeply troubling dimension of POCSO’s contemporary application is its frequent entanglement with questions of caste, community, and social hierarchy. A significant number of prosecutions arise from relationships that transgress entrenched social boundaries, inter-caste, inter-faith, or inter-class unions that challenge familial authority and communal norms. In such contexts, the statute is not merely invoked to protect minors; it is deployed to police choice.

Historically, Indian society has regulated intimacy as a means of preserving social order. Marriage and sexuality have long been instruments through which caste purity, religious continuity, and patriarchal control are maintained. When adolescents form relationships that defy these structures, legal mechanisms are often mobilised to restore equilibrium. POCSO, with its strict liability framework and mandatory procedures, offers a particularly potent tool for this purpose.

The transformation of social disapproval into criminal allegation follows a predictable pattern. Familial opposition frequently couched in concerns of safety or propriety is reframed as victimhood under the law. Allegations of kidnapping and sexual assault are lodged not in response to harm, but as expressions of outrage at disobedience. The criminal process thus becomes a continuation of social discipline by other means.

This phenomenon implicates the State in the reproduction of hierarchy. By proceeding with prosecutions despite clear indications of consent, the criminal justice system lends its authority to caste and community prejudices. Police action, prosecutorial discretion, and judicial formalism collectively operate to legitimise social anxieties as legal grievances. Neutrality, in such cases, becomes illusory.

The constitutional implications are profound. The right to choose one’s partner has been recognised by the Supreme Court as an intrinsic facet of personal liberty and dignity. When POCSO is used to penalise relationships that merely offend social sensibilities, it collides directly with this constitutional guarantee. Autonomy is sacrificed at the altar of conformity; liberty is curtailed to preserve hierarchy.

Moreover, the selective invocation of POCSO in cases involving marginalised communities reveals patterns of unequal enforcement. Adolescents from lower castes or minority backgrounds are disproportionately targeted, reinforcing existing power asymmetries. The law, rather than acting as a shield for the vulnerable, becomes an instrument through which vulnerability is produced.

In criminalising choice, POCSO’s application extends beyond the regulation of sexuality to the governance of social order. The statute’s protective rhetoric masks its role in sustaining caste and communal boundaries. Until this intersection between law and hierarchy is acknowledged, reform efforts will remain incomplete. Child protection cannot be disentangled from social justice, and any meaningful recalibration of POCSO must confront the uncomfortable truth that, in practice, the law often punishes transgression more readily than it prevents harm.

 Judicial Discomfort and Fragmented Responses

Indian courts, particularly High Courts, have increasingly found themselves uneasy at the rigid application of the POCSO Act to consensual adolescent relationships. While bound by the statute’s strict language, judges have repeatedly acknowledged the moral and practical dissonance between the law’s intent and its outcomes. This judicial discomfort has produced a fragmented jurisprudence marked by creative reasoning, cautious restraint, and, at times, open calls for legislative reform.

Several High Courts have exercised inherent powers under Section 482 of the Code of Criminal Procedure to quash POCSO proceedings where the facts reveal a consensual relationship between adolescents close in age. Courts have emphasised that criminal law should not be used as a weapon of parental vengeance or social discipline. In these cases, judges have spoken of “romantic relationships,” “teenage infatuation,” and “mutual affection,” language that stands in stark contrast to the statute’s vocabulary of assault and exploitation.

At the same time, other courts have refused to grant relief, citing the mandatory nature of POCSO and the absence of any statutory exception for consent. This has resulted in doctrinal inconsistency: similarly situated adolescents receive vastly different legal outcomes depending on the jurisdiction or judicial philosophy involved. The rule of law, ideally predictable and uniform, fractures under the weight of moral complexity.

The Supreme Court, while yet to authoritatively settle the issue, has begun to acknowledge the problem. In recent observations, it has urged the Union Government to consider introducing a close-in-age or Romeo–Juliet clause. The Court has recognised that the blanket criminalisation of adolescent intimacy may cause more harm than good, irreversibly damaging young lives without advancing child protection.

Yet, judicial creativity has limits. Courts cannot rewrite statutes; they can only interpret or soften their application at the margins. The resulting jurisprudence resembles a patchwork, compassionate in some cases, unforgiving in others. This unevenness underscores a deeper truth: the resolution of this paradox cannot come from the judiciary alone.

Judicial discomfort, therefore, serves as a constitutional signal, a warning that the law, as it stands, is misaligned with lived reality. When courts repeatedly strain against statutory rigidity, it is often a sign that legislative recalibration is not merely desirable but necessary.

The Romeo–Juliet Clause: Conceptual Foundations and Comparative Perspectives

The idea of a Romeo–Juliet clause derives its name from Shakespeare’s tragic lovers, young, consenting, and destroyed not by malice but by rigid social and legal constraints. In legal terms, such a clause creates a close-in-age exemption that decriminalises consensual sexual activity between adolescents, or between a minor and a young adult, provided the age difference is minimal, and the relationship is demonstrably non-exploitative. The conceptual foundation of this exemption lies in a refusal to conflate adolescent intimacy with sexual predation.

Comparative legal systems have long recognised the dangers of blanket criminalisation. In the United States, many states provide statutory age-gap exemptions, often ranging between two and four years, shielding adolescents from felony prosecution. Canada’s Criminal Code permits consensual sexual activity for minors aged fourteen and above with partners close in age, while maintaining strict prohibitions against relationships involving authority, trust, or dependency. European jurisdictions such as Germany and the Netherlands go further, explicitly requiring proof of exploitation or abuse of immaturity before criminal liability is imposed.

What unites these models is not permissiveness, but proportionality. Protection is calibrated to harm, not merely age. These frameworks recognise adolescence as a transitional stage, neither absolute vulnerability nor full autonomy, but a space where consent may exist under carefully defined conditions.

India’s refusal to adopt such nuance places it increasingly at odds with global child-protection jurisprudence. While international conventions mandate protection from sexual exploitation, they do not require the criminalisation of all adolescent intimacy. Indeed, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has cautioned against punitive approaches that undermine adolescent dignity and development.

A Romeo–Juliet clause does not dilute child protection; it sharpens it. By distinguishing abuse from affection, coercion from choice, and harm from human experience, such a clause restores moral credibility to the law. Without this distinction, POCSO risks overreach, punishing what it was never meant to regulate.

The Resistance to Reform: Moral Panic and Misplaced Fears

Opposition to a Romeo–Juliet clause is often framed in the language of child safety. Critics warn that any exemption may be exploited by predators, weaken deterrence, or erode societal morality. These arguments, while emotionally potent, rest on conceptual conflations and empirical anxieties rather than legal reasoning.

First, the fear of misuse ignores the possibility of careful drafting. A narrowly tailored clause can exclude relationships involving coercion, deception, authority, or significant age disparities. Judicial oversight can ensure that claims of consent are scrutinised, not presumed. The existence of misuse in law enforcement is not unique to exemptions; it is endemic to all criminal law and cannot justify blanket punishment.

Second, concerns about moral decline reveal an unease with adolescent sexuality itself. The law, however, is not an instrument for enforcing chastity. Criminal jurisprudence must respond to harm, not discomfort. To punish consensual intimacy because it offends social sensibilities is to collapse the distinction between sin and crime, a move incompatible with constitutional governance.

Third, deterrence arguments collapse under scrutiny. There is little evidence to suggest that criminalising teenage relationships prevents abuse. On the contrary, over-criminalisation diverts resources away from genuine cases of exploitation, overwhelms courts, and erodes trust in protective institutions.

Ultimately, resistance to reform reflects a deeper anxiety: the fear of relinquishing control over adolescent choice, particularly female choice. The refusal to recognise consent is not merely protective; it is paternalistic. In seeking to save children from risk, the law ends up denying them voice, agency, and dignity.

Reform, therefore, is not a concession to permissiveness. It is an assertion of constitutional maturity, an acknowledgement that protection without proportionality is not justice, but excess.

Constitutional Morality, Proportionality, and Articles 14 & 21

The criminalisation of consensual adolescent relationships under POCSO raises profound constitutional concerns, particularly under Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution of India. Article 21 guarantees the right to life and personal liberty, a provision expansively interpreted by the Supreme Court to include dignity, autonomy, bodily integrity, and decisional privacy. When adolescents engaging in consensual relationships are subjected to arrest, prosecution, and social stigma, the State intrudes deeply into this protected sphere of personal liberty.

The doctrine of proportionality, now firmly embedded in Indian constitutional jurisprudence, requires that any restriction on fundamental rights must pursue a legitimate aim, be suitable to achieve that aim, be the least restrictive means available, and maintain a balance between the harm caused and the benefit sought. While child protection is undeniably a legitimate aim, the blanket criminalisation of all sexual activity involving minors, irrespective of age proximity or consent, fails this test. Punishing consensual adolescent intimacy with the same severity as violent sexual abuse is neither proportionate nor rational.

Article 14, which guarantees equality before the law, is also implicated. Adolescents similarly situated in terms of age, maturity, and voluntariness are treated as perpetrators and victims based on rigid statutory presumptions and gendered enforcement patterns. Such arbitrariness undermines the constitutional promise of equal protection. Constitutional morality demands that the law transcend social prejudice and moral panic, grounding itself instead in reason, dignity, and justice.

What a Balanced Romeo–Juliet Clause Could Look Like

A well-crafted Romeo–Juliet clause would not dilute the protective strength of POCSO but would refine it. The objective must be to carve out a narrow, carefully regulated exception that distinguishes consensual adolescent relationships from exploitative conduct. Comparative models offer valuable guidance, but the Indian context requires a uniquely calibrated solution.

First, the clause could incorporate a limited age-gap exemption, typically three to five years, ensuring that both parties are adolescents or young persons close in age. Second, relationships involving authority, trust, or dependency, such as teachers, guardians, or employers, must be explicitly excluded. Third, the provision should mandate judicial scrutiny at the threshold stage, enabling courts to assess voluntariness, absence of coercion, and contextual factors before allowing prosecution to proceed.

Crucially, such a clause must not operate as a blanket immunity. Any indication of force, deception, manipulation, or abuse must immediately attract the full rigour of POCSO. Properly framed, the clause would act as a filter, protecting genuine victims while preventing the needless destruction of young lives.

Beyond Law: The Imperative of Social Reform

Legal reform alone cannot resolve the deeper anxieties surrounding adolescent sexuality. The criminalisation of teenage relationships is symptomatic of broader social discomfort with youth autonomy, particularly female autonomy. Any meaningful reform must therefore be accompanied by parallel social interventions. Comprehensive, age-appropriate sex education is essential to equip adolescents with knowledge about consent, boundaries, and safety. Parents and communities must be sensitised to distinguish between abuse and consensual relationships, replacing fear-driven responses with dialogue and trust. Accessible counselling services can provide safe spaces for adolescents to navigate emotional and relational challenges without coercion or punishment. Without addressing these social dimensions, legal reform risks being superficial. Law can set boundaries, but society must learn to listen.

Saving the Law Without Sacrificing Love

The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act remains a cornerstone of child protection in India. Its necessity is unquestionable, and its achievements in addressing sexual abuse are significant. Yet, when applied without nuance, the law risks undermining the very values it seeks to uphold. The prosecution of consensual adolescent relationships transforms care into control and protection into punishment. A narrowly tailored Romeo–Juliet clause offers a principled middle path, one that preserves the Act’s protective mandate while respecting adolescent autonomy, dignity, and constitutional rights. Until such reform is realised, Indian courts will continue to witness Romeo and Juliet not as tragic lovers of fiction, but as young citizens standing trial, not for harm inflicted, but for love chosen.

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Bibliography:

• Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, Act No. 32 of 2012, Government of India.
• Constitution of India, Articles 14 and 21.
• United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989.
• Justice J.S. Verma Committee Report on Amendments to Criminal Law (2013).
• Independent Thought v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 800.
• Supreme Court of India, observations on consensual adolescent relationships under the POCSO Act (various orders and judgments).
• High Court judgments on misuse of POCSO in consensual adolescent cases, including decisions from the Madras High Court, Delhi High Court, and Kerala High Court.
• Law Commission of India, Reports relating to sexual offences and child protection laws.
• Steinberg, L., Adolescence, McGraw-Hill Education – developmental psychology perspectives on adolescent consent and autonomy.
• Agnes, F., Feminist critiques of carceral approaches to sexual violence and child protection laws, Economic and Political Weekly.
• Comparative legal studies on close-in-age exemptions (Romeo–Juliet laws) in the United States, Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands.
• Sociological literature on caste, honour, and the criminalisation of intimate choice in India.