In sexual abuse incidents, such as being groped during a morning walk, most of the victims hesitate to put up a legal fight. Even those who want to fight, and establish the guilt, end up facing embarrassing moments in courts while the accused go scot free due to lack of evidence, the Madras High Court has lamented.
Justice N. Anand Venkatesh said, “this court is not inclined to permit such mockery to continue in the present case” and quashed a sexual abuse case at the instance of a woman who had lodged a police complaint of having been groped by a motorcycle borne stranger in 2020 but couldn’t get him punished till date.
The judge pointed out that the petitioner had lodged the complaint with the Anna Nagar East police in Chennai on November 20, 2020 stating that the motorcyclist had groped her during a morning walk on a public road at 9.15 a.m. and fled from the place even before she could recover from the shock.
She produced some images of the accused captured on a closed circuit television (CCTV) camera that had been fixed outside a residential house in the locality. Acting on her complaint, the police registered a First Information Report (FIR) under Section 4 of the Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Harassment of Women Act, 2002.
However, the FIR was booked against ‘unknown accused’ since there was no clarity regarding his identity. Even after completion of investigation and filing of a charge sheet, the accused could not be identified properly since the only material against him was an alleged confession given by him after his arrest in some other case.
Even the two eye witnesses in the sexual abuse case were able to speak only about the groping incident and not about the identity of the accused. “It is an unfortunate case where the victim was virtually molested in broad daylight... but the police were not able to properly identify the accused and the motor vehicle,” the judge said.
He pointed out that the victim had approached the court now with a plea to quash the witness summons issued to her by a Metropolitan Magistrate because she had gone to the Magistrate’s court on August 11, 2023 when nothing fruitful transpired but for making her wait in the court for the entire day recollecting the bad memories.
“If the petitioner undergoes trial, all types of embarrassing questions will be asked and she has to undergo further mental agony in the court... At the best, what will come out of this case will be the sexual abuse suffered by the petitioner and nothing else,” the judge wrote.
He went on to state: “It is not necessary for a criminal trial to go on just to dabble with an incident involving sexual abuse even without identifying the accused. If this is allowed, it is the victim who will actually be embarrassed and vilified and the accused person will go scot free.”
Though the petitioner had sought to quash only the witness summons issued to her by the Magistrate, the judge quashed the entire criminal case, by exercising the extraordinary writ jurisdiction of the High Court under Article 226 of the Constitution, in order to safeguard the petitioner’s dignity.
“The instant case brings to light the stark reality that is involved in sexual abuse cases. Not many are willing to come to court and fight for the abuse that they underwent. Even for those who want to fight and establish their right, the system does not seem to be friendly,” the judge wrote in the postlude to his verdict.
