Multiple experts/interviewees (including Vrinda Grover, Vidya Reddy, Fiba/Feeba Nisha, Surabhi Shripuri, Surohisha Puri) — mapped as 'Various experts/interviewees (Unknown specific)'
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75 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 19 Jul
Multiple experts/interviewees (including Vrinda Grover, Vidya Reddy, Fiba/Feeba Nisha, Surabhi Shripuri, Surohisha Puri) — mapped as 'Various experts/interviewees (Unknown specific)'’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
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We did see that there was a need for this act to come up because of the incidence of child abuse all around in the country.
So a more stringent act came up at that time.
It had a very large support all across political circles and even from civil society.
So there were lawyers, there were academics, there were activists, there were psychologists, and each one of us brought to the table our expertise and experience.
Prior to POXO, we did not have a law that was specific to sexual offences against children.
So the whole idea was to both provide protection as well as to make the procedure much more sensitive for the child going through it.
The age of consent was 16 years.
It was when POXO was passed in 2012 that it was raised to 18 for all children.
Thereafter, there was an amendment in the penal code itself following the gang rape and murder of Nirbhaya in Delhi in 2012, which led to a series of
reforms in sexual offences law, including for adult women, and there also the age of consent was raised to 80.
This was not a recommendation made at all by the drafting committee because the experience of all of us showed us very clearly it was very commonplace to find adolescent young people engaging in
voluntary consensual sexual relations.
There is absolutely no disagreement that a child should be considered as being under 18 years of age.
But what the government completely misunderstood was that the guiding doctrine of the UN Child Rights Convention is what is in the best interest of the child.
It is not in the best interest of the child to criminalize voluntary, consensual sexual relationships.
And the apprehension that was voiced by the drafting committee way back in 2012
has found an echo in judgments of high courts across the country and as recent as January 2026 by the Supreme Court of India, urging the government of India to review the matter because what is coming before the court is a slew of cases where there is voluntary sexual relationships.
We recommended both that keep it 16 and consider having what is conventionally called the Romeo-Juliet clause and to have a clause in age exception.
Because what we are seeing today is that if the girl is 17 years and the boy is also a minor, but is then being sent to a juvenile home,
Or if the girl is, say, 17 and the boy is an adult, then we see the boys being sent to prison.
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