Survivor-Trustee Urges SC to Retain 18 as Age of Consent Under POCSO

In a searing affidavit before the Supreme Court, a survivor of sex trafficking has recounted her years of brutal exploitation inside Delhi’s GB Road brothels, urging the judiciary not to dilute child protection laws by reducing the age of consent from 18 to 16 years.

In her affidavit, annexed to an intervention application filed by NGO Mission Mukti Foundation, she narrates how she was sold into prostitution and forced to endure years of repeated sexual violence, torture with cigarette burns, and relentless beatings. “Only a girl of 15-16 years can understand the pain of being abused inside a brothel,” she states, describing her life at the time as “hell".

The survivor, now 31, was trafficked to Delhi as a teenager after being lured with the promise of a job. According to the application, the survior was rescued in 2011 after befriending a client who helped her escape. A police case followed, and she was placed in a children’s home before being shifted to Tirupati. At 19, she married and rebuilt her life. But the scars of what she witnessed, both in brothels and later inside shelter homes where other minors were also abused, moved her to act. Lateron, she became trustee of Mission Mukti Foundation, which since 2018 claims to have rescued nearly 1,000 victims of trafficking, 90 percent of them children.

The intervention highlights not only the survivor's personal ordeal but also the broader risks of lowering the age of consent. The foundation argues that traffickers often groom adolescents by portraying exploitation as “love” or “independence,” leaving victims hostile even towards rescuers. “Most perpetrators are aged 17-30, while most victims are between 14-18. We have rescued girls as young as 12,” the application states.

In its intervention, the foundation has placed on record ground-level data: in just the first eight months of 2025, it rescued 222 girls, including 37 in August alone. Many, it says, had been coerced into prostitution through deception, sham marriages, or blackmail using intimate photos and videos. Families, however, received their daughters with love after rescues, underscoring the need for confidentiality and identity protection, the trustee notes.

The foundation’s principal submission is that lowering the age of consent would create legal cover for traffickers and groomers who present coerced or manipulated minors as “willing” adolescents. The application draws on national data and international studies to argue its point: it cites a Times of India analysis highlighting the persistence of child marriage, NCRB state-wise figures on human trafficking, and UN-backed CTDC data showing that a large share of children trafficked for sexual exploitation are aged 15–17.

Mission Mukti also states its own field statistics. For example, that 75 per cent of victims were economically disadvantaged before exploitation and that family members feature in a substantial share of recruitment cases.

The NGO relies heavily on the Law Commission’s September 2023 Report No. 283, quoting paras 18.3–18.6 to show that the commission warned against reducing the age of consent or carving out a limited exception for 16–18 year-olds. The Law Commission cautioned that consent can be manufactured, that lowering the threshold would weaken anti-trafficking and anti-child marriage law in practice, and that judicial discretion on sentence should not substitute for statutory protection.

The NGO also cites international conventions binding India to retain 18 as the threshold. The application says India’s obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and related instruments assume 18 as the protective threshold, and that an amendment would therefore risk non-compliance and impair cross-border anti-trafficking cooperation.

The NGO flags medical and developmental evidence about adolescent vulnerability and sets out projected public-health consequences of earlier pregnancies and maternal complications among teenage mothers.

Moreover, the application notes existing challenges in prosecuting child-sex offences, including low conviction rates under POCSO Act, and warns that introducing a consent defence for 16–18-year-olds would complicate investigations and further depress convictions.

It points to the direction issued by the court on May 8, 2025 to the parties in the present matter requiring collection of conviction data for particular age bands. Mission Mukti offers to assist the court by sharing operational data from district police units and its own rescue records.

It further states that Articles 15(3), 21, 23, and 24 of the Constitution mandate state protection for children, forbidding trafficking and exploitation and that 18 years is a constitutionally mandated threshold critical for safeguarding minors. 

Therefore, the NGO prays for permissive intervention to place its empirical evidence before the court and for an order protecting the managing trustee’s identity from public disclosure.

If the court permits intervention, the Foundation says it will make submissions aimed at preserving the protective posture of POCSO and guarding against unintended legal openings that could facilitate trafficking and child marriage.

Case Title: In Re Assessment Of The Criminal Justice System In Response To Sexual Offences tagged with Nipun Saxena vs Union of India