Consent Below 18: The State Must Remain the Adult in the Room

It is her position that too many consensual teenage relationships end up in prosecutions & young boys are put behind bars by girls’ families as “vengeance”.

The proposal to dilute POCSO’s age threshold misunderstands the logic of the law which was passed with the objective of protecting children from sexual abuse. The line at eighteen is not arbitrary as is widely claimed by Jaising.

It is the outcome of deliberate legislative reasoning and a protective choice that Parliament made, after rejecting an earlier proposal to recognise consent between sixteen and eighteen.

When Parliament debated the Bill in 2011, the draft version actually contained a proviso permitting courts to examine whether “consent” existed for children aged sixteen to eighteen. The Department-related Standing Committee on Human Resource Development, in its 240th Report tabled in December 2011, rejected this clause outright. It concluded that once Indian law defined a child as anyone under eighteen, recognising consent below that age would contradict the Juvenile Justice Act, the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act and India’s commitments under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Committee said such a clause would “negate the very object of the legislation” and shift trials away from the “conduct of the accused” to the “behaviour of the child”. Parliament accepted that advice and deleted the proviso.

This legal deliberation matters. It demonstrates that POCSO’s bright-line rule was designed to serve a protective and normative function. The law intentionally removed consent as a defence for those under eighteen because it recognised the deep power asymmetries that often shape relationships in India.

Therefore, to offer a convoluted position that shifts the lens on possible prosecutions in inter-faith or inter-religious teenage romance, from power imbalances where gender, caste, class and economic dependence continue to distort equality is deeply presumptive. Assuming full autonomy at sixteen invites exploitation which is disguised as choice.

The age of consent functions as a social signal as much as a legal rule. It tells parents, educators and peers where the line of protection stands. The moment that line shifts, ambiguity follows. At what point does a relationship stop being a romantic experiment and start being exploitative? Who decides whether a minor’s consent was truly free or simply the product of persuasion, threat or trust? The certainty of POCSO’s eighteen threshold prevents those grey zones from being manipulated in courtrooms already burdened with gender bias and evidentiary weakness.

Critics argue that the law has criminalised consensual adolescent intimacy. However, this is an enforcement problem, not a legislative defect. The Supreme Court’s decision in Independent Thought v. Union of India (2017) reaffirmed that the purpose of POCSO is protection, not moral policing. The correct reform path lies in improving prosecutorial discretion and judicial sensitivity, not in rewriting the statute, as the Law Commission has pointedly stated.

The coherence of India’s child protection framework

The 2013 Criminal Law Amendment, enacted after the Nirbhaya case, raised the age of consent in the Indian Penal Code to eighteen precisely to bring it in line with POCSO. Later, the Law Commission’s 283rd Report (2023) reviewed the same question and advised strongly against lowering the age. It emphasised the danger of grooming and the need to preserve harmony across all child-focused statutes.

The Commission’s reasoning echoed the Standing Committee’s findings from a decade earlier which specified that the law must protect minors until adulthood, not prematurely classify them as sexual actors.

The Commission did, however, recommend that courts be given guided judicial discretion in cases involving consensual relationships between sixteen and eighteen, so that such situations are not punished with the same severity as exploitative offences. This nuanced approach preserves the age of consent at eighteen while addressing concerns about over-criminalisation.

The case for restraint

Many argue that the impulse to reform POCSO arises from compassion. Many teenagers today do form relationships of affection, and the criminal process can indeed scar their lives. However, lowering the age of consent could create a greater and irreversible harm, making it harder to prosecute real abusers who exploit emotional or financial vulnerability.

This also allows defence lawyers to convert trials into inquiries about a child’s supposed willingness, overturning precisely the dynamics that the legislature originally sought to eliminate.

Instead, India needs clear prosecutorial guidelines and judicial training that distinguish genuine adolescent experimentation from predatory conduct. The National and State Commissions for the Protection of Child Rights can be empowered to issue case-screening frameworks so that consensual teenage relationships are diverted to counselling or family mediation rather than to criminal courts. Reform must be directed at implementation, not at the foundation of the law.

Protecting choice through protection itself

True autonomy cannot exist without safety, especially when it comes to minors. Lowering the age of consent assumes that sixteen-year-olds possess the same agency as adults, when social evidence shows otherwise. Studies across South Asia link early sexual exposure to higher rates of coercion, school dropout and psychological distress. Protecting adolescents until eighteen is therefore not infantilising; it is an act of enabling freedom for a holistic development of children’s future.

POCSO’s bright-line rule stands as a constitutional commitment that children are entitled to unambiguous safety from sexual predators until they reach adulthood. Parliament debated it, refined it and consciously rejected a consent window. The law’s clarity is its greatest strength, and shifting the debate to consent in child safety against sexual abuse blurs every logic for which it stands. The law currently shields minors from being blamed, coerced or cross-examined for choices they are not yet equipped to make.

The age of eighteen, therefore, must stand. It is a legal promise that the State will remain the adult in the room until every child can safely become one.