Three years ago, Akshay, a 14-year-old from a posh Delhi school, rolled his eyes at me when I asked him if he was a virgin. “These ideas are outdated man, what’s the big deal about sex? It made sense to me to do it, so I did it,” he had smirked. This week, it did become a big deal. Akshay, like several of the children I’d interviewed for INN cover story on the highly sexualised lives of urban schoolchildren, could go to jail for engaging in sexual activity below the newly appointed age of consent (AoC), 18.
In 2010, INN found that age was more than just a number to several young people — it was a ticking stopwatch in the race to outdo each other in the bedroom (and school toilets, parent-free homes, parked cars and occasionally hotel rooms). Through interviews across Delhi, Jaipur, Chandigarh and Mumbai, we met terrifyingly sexual creatures of all shapes and sizes — nine-year-olds who distributed porn in class (spiral-bound and printed in booklets), 12-year-olds already visiting shrinks for relationships that had turned sour (because their parents discovered them having oral sex), 14-year-olds who had photographed themselves in the nude, made videos of their accomplishments and passed them around for classmates to cackle over and 16-year-olds who had impregnated 19-year-olds (and knew exactly “how to take care of it”).
If these stories make you balk, you should be even more worried because, as of 2013, you may never hear them again. That the forbidden held an irresistible lure for children trying hard to be adults (as well as for childish adults) was no surprise even then. But the anti-rape Bill passed in Parliament this week, which sets the official AoC at 18 years of age, will not, as the government hopes, prevent statutory rape. Nor will it, as several parents are praying, stop children from having sex. Instead, it will teach children to be more ‘adult’ than before by teaching them how to hide their crimes better.
While the question of what the correct age of consent should be has perplexed countries more liberal than ours for years, it has rarely affected individual decisions to engage in sexual activity. Deciding on an age of consent purports to protect the young from sexual predators by decreeing that a person below a certain age is too vulnerable to provide consent, therefore any kind of sexual act performed on them is done, most likely, through physical force, intimidation or emotional manipulation. Though the frightening picture of Humbert Humbert coaxing Lolita into sleep with his “purple pills” might rouse the mind to rightful indignation, it is harder to define how (and if at all) the law should step in when the picture involves two hormone-crazed young people furtively discovering each other’s bodies in the dark cool of a movie theatre.
In 2012, a survey revealed that 40 percent of our population was below the age of 18. As a result of this alarming statistic, combined with the epidemic of child abuse in India, a panicked judiciary set about drafting the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO), revising its definition of a child to an individual below 18 years of age from 16, which had been the AoC according to the Indian Penal Code (IPC) since 1983. Soon after, the AoC was revised to 16 once again until, following the outcry after 16 December 2012, a blustering ordinance set about remedying anti-rape laws by raising the AoC back to 18.
Things were further garbled by what lawyer Rebecca John calls a “shrill electronic media”, which turned the AoC debate into a campaign that encouraged pre-marital sex. “Suddenly, the issue became whether or not we should let our young daughters have sex. Women’s groups were depicted as encouraging rampant juvenile sex. What we really needed to address was — if our children do have sex, should they be thrown into jail for it?” says Kirti Singh, a human rights advocate. Singh, whose primary area of study has been tracking how developing nations arrived at their official Ages of Consent, and how these have been indicative of their changing social attitudes, believes that raising the AoC to 18 is “a deeply conservative political move”, since most countries in the world have agreed on an AoC between 14 and 16 years of age.
Others, like Canada and the UK, are currently debating whether the AoC should be lowered further, keeping in mind the fact that children now attain puberty faster than they did 10 years ago, and therefore, start becoming sexually curious much before they are able to rightfully consent. While David Cameron has famously rejected the suggestion as being “outrageous”, given the increasing number of teenage pregnancies in the UK, healthcare practitioners have begun to feel that, alternately, lowering the AoC might give children much needed access to contraception and sex education from an earlier age.
In India, there are other, more fatal considerations that must be borne in mind before allowing young people to make a choice. All India Progressive Women’s Association secretary Kavita Krishnan confessed last week that she was worried about the ramifications the AoC would have on India’s high incidence of honour killings. “Every second day, I read about a father or a brother who has cut off a young girl’s head, brandishing it before the police with pride in the belief that he has defended his family’s honour. Raising the AoC gives them yet another reason, apart from caste and honour, to punish girls for choosing their partners,”
Krishnan said in a video editorial. John, a senior advocate, activist and mother to a 16-year-old, says that she has lost count of the number of habeas corpus petitions lodged with courts daily by parents seeking to criminalise sexual activity between their teenaged children. Unsurprisingly, these parents are usually fathers trying to protect the virginity of their female child. “This is an age group where activities of this sort are almost always consensual. Raising the AoC to 18 is not, as most people seem to think, an ethical or moral decision, but a legal one. Do we want to treat all consensual sex between teenagers as statutory rape?” she asks.
INN cover story had found that while young people were highly cued into the sexual lessons that pop culture was feeding them — through Bollywood films, American serials or even Bhojpuri songs — they failed to pick up crucial lessons on safe sex practices and how to distinguish a ‘bad touch’ from a ‘good’ one. Child psychologists in the UK have argued that with an AoC as late as 16 or 18 children who have attained puberty at 13 or 14 and are experiencing sexual curiosity would be more vulnerable to abuse. Child psychiatrist Shelja Sen agrees that raising the AoC could make “already secretive teenagers” even more wary of seeking out medical advice or counselling, even if they are being abused, because “where they once feared merely their parents finding out, they will now fear being sent to jail for something they naturally assume is ‘their fault’.”
Unlike the tired trope that politicians peddle, that all sexual licentiousness is learnt from the West, what one could learn from countries like Australia or Canada is to protect children’s natural curiosity, expressed through teenage love and often sexual experimentation, while protecting them from abuse. It would help to realise that much like children have found ways to drink, smoke or drive their parents’ cars in spite of being told not to, they will find means to sexual pleasure. In which case, it might be better to help them assimilate the fragmented and distorted ideas of sex they receive daily through badnaam munnis, ads for vaginal tightening gels and newspaper reports on rape.
One way that western countries have found around criminalising the natural sexual curiosity of the young, which women’s groups in India are fighting for, is the ‘Romeo and Juliet’ defence, whereby sexual relations between two minors are only considered to be statutory rape if one partner is significantly (three-to-five years, depending on the country) older than the other. Yet, ironically, a recent example of how a culture hyper-vigilant about abuse and protecting the rights of the young could still go awry is the instance of the Steubenville boys. The all-star football players, with “bright and promising futures” had undoubtedly received enough information on what separates the ‘good touch’ from the ‘bad’.
Yet, it did not prevent them from dragging an unconscious 16-year-old from party to party, raping her repeatedly while posting photographs of her, naked and helpless, on social media. Contrast these high-achieving delinquents with Accused number 6, reportedly the most brutal of that gang of six in New Delhi, who was also below the age of consent when he raped a 23-year-old girl. As the most notorious juvenile in the country, we know more and more about him than we care to — his father was mentally challenged, he had to care for five siblings all of whom were younger than him, he had run away from home a long time ago and was broke on 16 December, when he met the prime accused Ram Singh and set out on a joyride with his friends.
While none of these facts — the bright futures of the Steubenville boys, or the bleak one in store for Accused number 6 — alter their total disregard for the consequences of their actions, what is clear is the deep sense of alienation, entitlement and misogyny the young can imbibe if they do not receive sex-positive messages from adults around them. Niveda Deepak, a school teacher at New Delhi’s Amity International and the mother of two young daughters feels that the system puts too much pressure on whether or not the young are sexually active, when it should worry about whether the child has received enough atte ntion and support at home to be able to work through his urges. “What purpose could banishing a sexually active teenaged boy to jail serve, apart from turning sex into more of a taboo for him, and convincing him that it is something that must be snatched? How could it teach him to respect women when he will only live to hate the moment he had sex, maybe even the moment he was in love, as the moment that turned him into a sex offender for life?” she asks.
Playwright JB Priestley once wrote, “Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.” It is apparent that our politicians have no sense of the culture of abuse and sexual violence that we are living in. But the boys from Steubenville and Accused number 6 do. They grew up steeped in it. The question we must ask ourselves then, is not whether our teenagers are ready or not, but are we ready for them?
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