From Protection to Prosecution: A Critical Analysis of the POCSO Act’s Implementation Gaps and Their Impact on Child-Centric Justice in India
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31305/rrijm2025.v05.n04.004Keywords:
Child sexual abuse, child-rights, protection-oriented, child-centric, adolescenceAbstract
Child sexual abuse (CSA) has been an extensive but grossly underreported vice in India, influenced by the social stigma, family pressure, retaliation fear, and the lack of trust in institutions. Although the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO) is a wholesome legal procedure established by the state to ensure that legislation protects children, loopholes between the separation of the law and reality still prevail to frustrate the process of offering effective child-centric justice. In this paper, the author will critically analyze how the POCSO regime has shifted to be more of a protection-oriented policy rather than a prosecution-oriented one. The main aim of the research is to find and examine structural, procedural and institutional failures in the overall implementation of the POCSO Act and evaluate the effect of such failures on the rights, dignity and well-being of child victims. The article is written in the mixed methodological framework, which consists of doctrinal legal review of laws, judicial case laws, and governmental policies and regulations, as well as the empirical information, as represented by the official crime data, government reports, and academic research. This paper concludes that the POCSO Act is a positive move in the field of child protection jurisprudence, which is undermined by the systemic inabilities to implement the law to facilitate justice in a child-centric way. To restore the law to its original child-rights mandate, institutional capacity is needed, as well as trauma-informed practices and rebalancing the prosecution and protection.
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