Authored By: A Anupama
Symbiosis Law School, Hyderabad
1. Introduction
The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 (POCSO) and its implementation can be understood as India’s legislative response to sexual violence against children. Parliament recognized the need for a law focused solely on sexual offences against children, given that children belong to an age group especially vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation. The aftermath of such an incident can affect the child well into adulthood, and the Act was designed with this reality in mind. It seeks to protect the child’s well-being in every sense — mental, psychological, and social — without burdening the child with the risk of being forced to relive the traumatic experience, all while preserving the child’s role in attaining justice.
To improve investigative practice in child sexual offence cases, the Act sets out a series of precautionary measures. These include the manner in which statements are recorded, medical examination by a qualified professional, support during the investigation, and specific mechanisms to be carried out by designated authorities. When properly followed and kept within a clear chain of custody, these safeguards strengthen the evidentiary value of the case when it reaches court. They support the prosecution by backing the victim’s account with evidence that can be relied upon.
Every legislative scheme has its blind spots, and POCSO’s lies in procedural non-compliance. This has been documented in prior scholarship by Subham Chatterjee, Shailesh Kumar, Davis Panadan Varghese, Sini John, and others.2 Their work collectively addresses issues such as delayed FIRs, statements recorded in an unacceptable manner, delayed medical examinations, and the absence of forensic investigation. Most of this scholarship, however, focuses on weak implementation and treats these as mere irregularities obstructing justice for child victims — with comparatively little attention paid to how such irregularities affect the assessment of evidence itself.
This is a significant gap, because it goes to the heart of how courts evaluate evidence. Courts routinely note a substantial delay in lodging the FIR, a statement that was not properly recorded, or a lack of evidence caused by a delayed medical examination. When evidence is assessed on these terms, the prosecution often fails to establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt, giving the accused the benefit of that doubt.
This article examines how courts extend the benefit of doubt by scrutinizing procedural compliance so closely that it produces insufficient evidence, eroding the victim-centric purpose at the heart of the legislation. It proposes dividing the “benefit of doubt” into two categories: doubt arising from evidence that is genuinely unreliable, and doubt arising from faults in the investigation itself.
The article proceeds in four parts. The first sets out the statutory framework governing POCSO investigations. The second examines judicial decisions showing how procedural lapses have shaped the assessment of evidence. The third offers a critical evaluation from the victim’s perspective. The fourth draws on comparative practice from the United Kingdom and Australia to inform recommendations for India.
2. Legal Framework
The POCSO Act was brought into force to create a body of law addressing sexual abuse of children specifically, distinct from the general criminal justice system. The legislature recognized the difficulties a child victim faces in the aftermath of such an offence, and built a framework that protects child victims procedurally alongside penalizing the accused.
The defining feature of this legislation is the link between procedural compliance and the reliability of evidence. This offence is typically committed without witnesses, making the victim’s testimony central to establishing guilt. This is precisely why the Act’s child-centric mechanisms are designed to protect both the dignity of the victim and the integrity of the victim’s statement.
Sections 24 to 27 illustrate this approach well. Section 24 requires that a statement be recorded in a child-friendly environment by an officer trained to work with children.3 These provisions exist not only to prevent the victim from reliving the trauma, but to elicit testimony the prosecution can rely on in court. Unlike adults, child victims may omit important details because of trauma, so the person conducting the interview must exercise care and attention. A victim who feels understood is more likely to disclose the details of what occurred.
Section 26 strengthens the reliability of evidence by requiring statements to be recorded early, before a Magistrate.4 These statements are often used at trial to compare against evidence presented in court. If a statement is not properly recorded, inconsistency is introduced precisely at the point where the reliability of the evidence is assessed.
Like Section 26, Section 27 provides for a prompt and sympathetic medical examination.5 A POCSO conviction does not depend on medical evidence. However, delay in the medical examination means the loss of forensic evidence that could otherwise support the prosecution’s case — and courts do treat the absence of forensic evidence as a factor in evaluating the prosecution’s case.
The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Rules, 2020 add further requirements around psychosocial support, institutional coordination, and victim assistance.6
The Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized the protective character of the Act. In Eera v. State (NCT of Delhi), (2017) 15 SCC 133, the Court held that POCSO is welfare legislation that must be interpreted in light of its child-protective purpose. In Alakh Alok Srivastava v. Union of India, (2018) 17 SCC 291, the Court emphasized the need for an efficient investigative process and issued directions on the speedy trial and monitoring of POCSO cases.
Section 29 shows just how much rides on procedural compliance. Designed to address the particular difficulties of prosecuting child sexual abuse, the presumption under Section 29 cannot operate if the prosecution is unable to establish the foundational facts of the offence.7 A failure in investigation, in other words, can leave the prosecution unable to meet the threshold needed to invoke the statutory presumption at all.
Procedural compliance therefore does double duty: it shields children from secondary victimization, and it preserves the evidentiary basis needed to prosecute the accused successfully. Judicial findings on proof in these cases are shaped directly by whether that procedure was followed.
3. Case Law Analysis
The judicial approach to procedural irregularities under POCSO shows a consistent pattern: outright acquittal on account of a flawed investigation alone is uncommon. Procedural defects matter legally to the extent that they affect the credibility of the evidence collected and give rise to reasonable doubt.
In Eera, the Supreme Court stressed that POCSO must be read in its protective spirit. The case did not itself involve an investigative irregularity, but the doctrine it established matters here: procedural provisions are an integral part of the child protection scheme, not a mere technicality.
Alakh Alok Srivastava makes the significance of procedural requirements explicit. Concerned about delay in the investigation and adjudication of POCSO cases, the Supreme Court issued directions to improve implementation of the Act, observing that ineffective investigations deprive victims of their rights and undermine the statutory scheme — and specifically noting that procedural delay reduces the evidentiary base available at trial.
The clearest illustration of how procedural weakness produces evidentiary uncertainty is Debraj Dutta v. State of West Bengal & Anr., SLP (Crl.) No. 16838 of 2025 (Supreme Court, April 7, 2026).8 There, the Supreme Court held that the presumption under Section 29 becomes operative only once the prosecution has proved certain basic facts through valid evidence. Because evidentiary weaknesses prevented the prosecution from establishing those basic facts, the statutory presumption could not be invoked.
Debraj Dutta matters precisely because of how indirectly procedural weakness operates: non-uniform witness statements, delay in medical examination, and inadequate preservation of evidence can, cumulatively, leave the prosecution unable to establish the basic facts Section 29 requires — meaning a provision specifically designed to address the evidentiary difficulties of child sexual abuse cases ends up unavailable.
A related principle appears in Phool Singh v. State of Madhya Pradesh (Supreme Court, 2021).9 While that case involved an adult complainant rather than a child victim, the Court’s reasoning is instructive by analogy: minor discrepancies do not necessarily undermine a witness’s credibility, though material discrepancies going to the central narrative of the case must be weighed carefully. In many POCSO cases, such discrepancies trace back to procedural flaws in the investigation itself, rather than to any falsehood in the victim’s account.
Read together, these decisions point to a genuine doctrinal tension. Courts are rightly committed to guarding against wrongful conviction, but the ordinary rules of evidence, applied without more, leave room for investigative shortcomings to hand the defense a basis for reasonable doubt that has nothing to do with whether the abuse occurred.
4. Critical Evaluation
The issue this article raises is not reasonable doubt itself, nor whether such doubt is justified in a given case — it is the source of that doubt. Children have no control over how their own cases are investigated. They cannot ensure that an FIR is filed promptly, that a medical examination happens on time, that forensic samples are properly collected, or that the Act’s statutory protections are actually followed. These are functions performed entirely by State agencies.
Yet when investigating agencies fail to meet those obligations, the resulting evidentiary gaps work against the survivor. There is a structural imbalance built into this process: the child bears the practical consequences of mistakes made by the very agencies responsible for enforcing the law on the child’s behalf.
This is especially true of the Section 29 presumption. Parliament created it precisely to address the evidentiary difficulties inherent in child sexual abuse cases. But wherever the investigation itself fails to establish the basic facts, the presumption simply cannot do the work it was designed to do.
A victim-centered approach requires separating two distinct kinds of doubt. The first arises from evidence that is genuinely untrustworthy — false or internally contradictory — and this doubt should rightly favor the accused. The second arises from State failure: delay in investigation, poor evidence-gathering, or procedural non-compliance. These failings inevitably affect the quality of the evidence available, but they say nothing about whether the underlying allegation is true.
Current judicial reasoning tends to treat both kinds of doubt the same way. Investigative failings become evidentiary failings, which in turn become reasonable doubt — meaning the cost of State failure is effectively transferred onto the victim of the abuse.
This concern is reinforced by research on how trauma affects memory and disclosure. Child victims of abuse frequently disclose what happened incrementally, and their accounts are often inconsistent for reasons unrelated to truthfulness. When the procedural protections designed to support a child’s testimony are not followed, these inconsistencies only become more pronounced.
The price of investigative failure, then, is not merely doctrinal. It erodes trust in the legal system and risks converting legislation that is meant to be victim-centric into a system where institutional failure ends up indirectly benefiting the accused.
5. Comparative Perspectives
The experience of the United Kingdom and Australia shows that protecting child victims and preserving a fair trial are not competing goals — they can be pursued together.
In the UK, the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 introduced a wide range of reforms.10 Interviews with child witnesses are typically conducted through video-recorded interviews shortly after disclosure. Recording evidence promptly reduces the risk of inconsistency caused by repeated questioning over the course of an investigation, and intermediaries and other special measures are widely used in court to support child witnesses.
Australia follows a similarly trauma-informed approach. Its courts and investigators proceed on the understanding that delayed disclosure and fragmented recall are typical features of child sexual abuse, not indications that the abuse did not occur.
These examples show that procedure serves an evidentiary function as much as a protective one. The lesson for India is that improvements to investigative technique — earlier, better-recorded testimony, trauma-informed interviewing, and the use of intermediaries — can make evidence more reliable without compromising the rights of the accused. Building these mechanisms more consistently into POCSO practice is a natural next step in closing the gap this article identifies.
6. Conclusion
The POCSO Act remains one of the most significant pieces of Indian legislation addressing child sexual abuse. But how well the statute functions cannot be measured by its text alone — it depends equally on the quality of investigation and procedural compliance in practice.
The cases examined in this article show that procedural failures create evidentiary gaps that shape how courts assess the sufficiency of proof. Courts are right to require proof beyond reasonable doubt. But that doubt frequently arises not from any weakness in the victim’s account, but from deficiencies in how the case was investigated.
The real problem, then, is not that the accused receives the benefit of the doubt — it is that the cost of institutional failure is shifted onto children. A genuinely survivor-oriented approach to POCSO requires courts to draw a clear line between doubt that stems from evidentiary weakness and doubt that stems from failures in the investigative process. Only by keeping these two categories distinct can the presumption Parliament built into Section 29, and the protective purpose of the Act as a whole, function as intended.
Endnote(S):
1. 3rd Year (6th Semester), BBA LLB, Symbiosis Law School, Hyderabad.
2. Subham Chatterjee, A Critical Analysis of Implementation Gaps in POCSO Investigations, Indian Journal of Criminal Law Studies; Subham Chatterjee, An Analysis of Evidence from Forensic Practices, Procedural Compliance, and Survivor Narratives in POCSO Trials, Journal of Victimology and Criminal Justice; Shailesh Kumar, Access to Justice and Sexual Violence Against Children in India: An Empirical Study of the Reforms under the POCSO Act 2012, Socio-Legal Review; Davis Panadan Varghese & Sini John, The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012: Strong Provisions, Weak Implementation?
3. Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, No. 32 of 2012, India Code, § 24.
4. Id. § 26.
5. Id. § 27.
6. Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Rules, 2020, G.S.R. 644(E), Gazette of India (Nov. 9, 2020).
7. Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, No. 32 of 2012, India Code, § 29.
8. Debraj Dutta v. State of West Bengal & Anr., SLP (Crl.) No. 16838 of 2025 (Sup. Ct. Apr. 7, 2026) (India).
9. Phool Singh v. State of Madhya Pradesh, Crl. Appeal No. 1520 of 2021 (Sup. Ct.) (India) — please verify the reported SCC citation before publication; see Analysis Report.
10. Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999, c. 23 (U.K.).
Reference(S):
Cases
Alakh Alok Srivastava v. Union of India, (2018) 17 SCC 291 (India).
Debraj Dutta v. State of West Bengal & Anr., SLP (Crl.) No. 16838 of 2025 (Sup. Ct. Apr. 7, 2026) (India).
Eera v. State (NCT of Delhi), (2017) 15 SCC 133 (India).
Phool Singh v. State of Madhya Pradesh, Crl. Appeal No. 1520 of 2021 (Sup. Ct.) (India).
Statutes
Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, No. 32 of 2012, India Code (2012).
Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Rules, 2020, G.S.R. 644(E), Gazette of India (Nov. 9, 2020).
Bibliography
Arohi Sanyal, Child Sexual Abuse in India: Constitutional Obligations, POCSO Enforcement, and Institutional Failures.
Davis Panadan Varghese & Sini John, The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012: Strong Provisions, Weak Implementation?
Insha Khan & Sahil, Beyond Statutory Protection: Evaluating the Effectiveness of the POCSO Act in Balancing Child Safety, Due Process and Victim-Centric Justice in India, 10 Research Review International Journal of Multidisciplinary 273 (2025).
Nita Rijiju & Pranita Choudhury, Challenges in Implementing the POCSO Act: Bridging the Gap Between Law and Reality: A Comparative Analysis with Global Child Protection Standards, International Journal of Law, Justice and Jurisprudence (2024).
Rajasi Kane Sengupta, Structural Gaps in the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act: Insights from Recent Court Decisions, Indian Journal of Legal Studies (2024).
Shailesh Kumar, Access to Justice and Sexual Violence Against Children in India: An Empirical Study of the Reforms under the POCSO Act 2012, Socio-Legal Review.
Subham Chatterjee, A Critical Analysis of Implementation Gaps in POCSO Investigations, Indian Journal of Criminal Law Studies.
Subham Chatterjee, An Analysis of Evidence from Forensic Practices, Procedural Compliance, and Survivor Narratives in POCSO Trials, Journal of Victimology and Criminal Justice.
