Court pulls up media for publishing victim’s name

The directive of the court came in response to a letter written by the alleged sex scandal victim of Balasore to the Chief Justice, who admitted it as a writ petition.

The issue had rocked the state last week after the chairperson of the State Womens Commission sent a report to that effect to the state government.The petitioner alleged that the report published in newspapers about the sex scandal was false,baseless, concocted, malicious and blatant lies and urged the court to take action against the chairperson of the Commission.

While issuing notice to the state government and State Women’s Commission, the Bench observed that the allegation if true, were very serious, particularly when the credibility of a statutory body was questioned.The court further observed that the dignity of a woman was sacrosanct and any attempt to defile it amounted to violation of the protection of the right to live with dignity as provided by the constitution.

In the conservative Indian society nothing could be more unfortunate for a girl than the stigma of having been sexually assaulted or harassed, the Bench observed.

The Bench fixed august 13 next for further hearing.

The Commission in his report to the government last Monday had said that the girl student from Balasore had been lured by a teacher of her own college to Bhubaneswar on July 9 last on the promise of getting her a job. After reaching an apartment in theNayapalli area of the city she realised that she had been brought there with an ulterior motive. However, she managed to escape from there, the report said.

Earlier the girl had said in an affidavit that she had no knowledge of the incident.

On the basis of the Womens Commission’s report, the Orissa government had ordered a Crime Branch enquiry into the alleged incident.