Chennai, Sept 7 (BPNS)

The Madurai bench of the Madras High directed the Tamil Nadu government to give proper counseling to teenage sexual offenders. The court called upon the state government to bring up a mechanism wherein counseling is given to teenagers who are involved in sexual offenses.

The division bench of the Madurai bench of the Madras High Court comprising of Justices J. Nisha Banu and N. Anand Venkatesh observed that the government must ensure that such efforts are undertaken or else the teenage first-time offenders have a chance of turning themselves into hardened criminals.  The court said that the children would then lose their entire lives and said that the government must not allow such a scenario to happen.

The court was hearing a habeas corpus petition filed by a person who sought the quashing of the detention order passed by the Virudhunagar district collector against his 18 year old son in 2021.

The collector had passed the detention orders against the teenager holding that he was a sexual offender and the petitioner sought a direction from the court to set his son free and at his liberty.

The court set aside the detention order and said that technology was posing a great challenge and was impacting the minds of teenagers. The court observed that the case at hand was a case wherein the teenager who is the detenu is an 18 year old and his co-accused,a minor girl.

The division bench of the Madras high court said that teenagers are easily falling prey to pornographic content through mobile phones and their minds are polluted and confused. The court observed that they do things without understanding their consequences, and once these teenagers are arrested and put in prison the government must develop mechanisms and efforts must be taken to attend to their mental perversions.

The division bench of the Madras High Court also observed that the purpose of confining a teenager to prison is not to abandon him and throw him out of mainstream society.