The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) is not happy about changes in the age of consent as mandated by the Protection of Children From Sexual Offences Bill,which was passed in the Budget session of Parliament and now awaits Presidential assent. Our position is that the existing age of consent provision should have been retained. Our chairperson feels very strongly about it. We had alternatively recommended an age gap provision of two years,but that was not accepted, said NCPCR member secretary Lov Verma. An age gap provision means that a pre-determined age is treated as age of consent,provided the gap in age with the sexual partner is within a prescribed limit. The Ministry of Women and Child development had followed the recommendations of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on HRD in overturning the age of consent clause as given in the IPC,which says that consensual sex with a girl aged 16-18 is not rape. The child sexual offences Bill treats sex with any girl below the age of 18 as amounting to rape. It has unleashed a wave of protests from human rights activists,who call it violative of the basic rights of a person. They also fear complicated legal tangles given the high incidence of child marriages in the country. The average age of marriage for women in India is believed to be 21. Though the recently released Unicefs State of the Worlds Children Report 2012 says 18 per cent of Indian children aged below 15 are married,as are 47 per cent of those aged below 18. Officials in the WCD Ministry say that an age gap provision may not have been included but it is unfair to charge the proposed law with criminalisation of sex between consenting adolescents,because that was never its intention. While theoretically the proposed law makes no distinction between,say,a 35-year-old who has sex with a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old who does the same,a senior official said: That does not mean we will slap criminal charges. The 17-year-old will be tried under the Juvenile Justice Act and neither does the law mandate that a pregnant 16-year-old be harassed because she is under the legally permissible age for sex. For the law she is a victim and she will be treated thus.
