Justice Ganediwala this month acquitting a 39-year-old man for groping a minor girl, noting that there was no "skin-to-skin contact with sexual intent" has faced severe flak.
The police said the ordeal began for the student in December 2022, when she was putting up at a city hostel. Assistant Commissioner of Police (Kalyanpur) Abhishek Pandey said the case was registered on Friday after she approached the Kalyanpur police station.
Two persons were arrested for alleged voyeurism after some female students at a private engineering college in Medchal, near Hyderabad, accused the cooking staff of recording them in the hostel washrooms, police said on Sunday.
In a judgment passed on January 19, the Bombay high court has said groping a minor's breast without 'skin-to-skin contact' cannot be termed sexual assault as defined under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.
Justice Pushpa Ganediwala recently acquitted a man accused of groping a 12-year-old girl's breast because he did not make skin-to-skin contact and days earlier, ruled that holding the hands of a five-year-old girl and unzipping the trousers do not amount to "sexual assault" under the POCSO Act.
A bench of Justices B R Gavai and Augustine George Masih observed it was pained to say that some of the observations made in the high court order depicted total insensitiveness and an inhuman approach.
Senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader B S Yediyurappa, facing a Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act charge, returned to Bengaluru on Saturday and said he will appear before the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) on June 17 for questioning.
As per a complaint lodged by parents, the teacher allegedly took five girl students to the washroom and strip-searched them after a mobile phone rang during class at a government girls' higher secondary school on August 2, an official said.
According to Tirupati district superintendent of police L Subbarayudu, Nagaraju (24), who is the victim's maternal uncle, lured the girl to a secluded place in AM Puram village by offering her snacks on Friday evening and committed the crime.
Union Minister Raksha Khadse on Sunday lodged a police complaint regarding the harassment of her daughter and some of her friends by a group of boys at an event in Maharashtra's Jalgaon district.
Banerjee had on Wednesday said an amendment to existing laws will be passed in the state assembly next week to ensure capital punishment to convicted rapists.
'If it is not reversed, it will set a dangerous precedent.'
The Madras High Court has asserted that press freedom and privacy are intertwined and that surveillance constitutes an attack on the press, which is considered the fourth pillar of democracy. The court made this observation while addressing petitions filed by the Chennai Press Club and three reporters seeking protection from harassment by a police Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing the leak of an FIR concerning a sexual assault case at Anna University. The court highlighted the importance of protecting journalists' sources and criticized the SIT for seizing reporters' mobile phones without justification and for failing to adequately investigate the source of the leaked FIR.
The alleged crime in the ambulance being operated under '108' emergency service took place on November 22 and two of the four accused in the case, including the driver, have been arrested, they said.
Govt said these amendments are aimed at discouraging the trend of child sexual abuse by acting as a deterrent.
A sessions court in Indore has acquitted a bangle seller from a minority community, accused of molesting a minor girl, noting that the prosecution failed to establish its case even by 'leshmatra' (an iota).
A 54-year-old woman who accused senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader B S Yediyurappa of allegedly sexually abusing her 17-year-old daughter died at a private hospital in Bengaluru due to lung cancer, police said on Monday.
Chief pontiff of Murugha Math Shivamurthy Murugha Sharanaru, who has been arrested for alleged sexual abuse of two minor girls, was on Friday remanded to police custody till September 5.
Nearly 3,000 polling booths have been identified as sensitive, and special security arrangements, including drone surveillance, have been ensured at some of these locations.
The government also took note of pending cases in various high courts and said that 1.66 lakh cases relating to sexual assaults were pending across the country at several stages.
The victim alleged that he was being sexually assaulted for nearly two years, they said.
The police arrested the accused on Thursday and booked him under relevant sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, an official said.
Zubair refuted the allegation as 'an absolutely frivolous complaint', and AltNews backed him, saying his work 'hurts those who have weaponised misinformation to subvert the Indian democracy'.
An FIR has been lodged in this case against the junior doctor of the pediatric department of the SN Medical College and Hospital, they said.
Justice Jasmeet Singh noted that arguments in court proceedings include assertions doubting the victim's integrity and character while she is forced to be present in the same space as the person who has allegedly violated her.
"The act of pressing of the breast of the child aged 12 years, in the absence of any specific detail as to whether the top was removed or whether he inserted his hand inside top and pressed her breast, would not fall in the definition of 'sexual assault'. It would certainly fall within the definition of the offence under Section 354 of the Indian Penal Code," it said.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has brought back Salman Rehman Khan, an alleged member of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, from Rwanda. Khan was wanted by the NIA for terror-related offences in Bengaluru. He was traced to Rwanda and returned to India on November 28, 2024. The return of Khan comes after similar operations in coordination with Interpol, where two other accused were brought back from Saudi Arabia.
A purported video showing the boy dancing to a song with four to five men sitting around surfaced online. In the video, the men were compelling the boy to dance with a smile.
A Bengaluru court on Thursday issued a non-bailable arrest warrant against Yediyurappa in the case registered against him under the POCSO Act on March 14 this year.
A special court in Tamil Nadu's Thanjavur on Tuesday sentenced a PhD scholar to five life imprisonments, to be served concurrently, for sexually assaulting minors and posting videos of the acts on the Internet to make money, officials said.
The National Medical Commission on Thursday withdrew and cancelled guidelines under Competency Based Medical Education Curriculum in which it had reintroduced sodomy and lesbianism as unnatural sexual offences in the forensic medicine and toxicology curriculum for undergraduate medical students.
Section 375 (rape) of IPC has an exception clause which says "sexual intercourse or sexual acts by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under fifteen years of age, is not rape."
The Supreme Court on Tuesday set aside an order of the Calcutta high court in which it acquitted an accused in a sexual assault case and made 'objectionable' observations advising adolescent girls to 'control sexual urges'.
The observations came from a bench of Chief Justice DY Chandrachud and Justice J B Pardiwala while reserving the verdict on an appeal filed by NGOs -- Just Rights for Children Alliance of Faridabad and New Delhi-based Bachpan Bachao Andolan -- challenging a Madras high court verdict.
The Badlapur school, where two young girls were allegedly sexually abused, preferred to cover up the crime instead of helping their parents file a police complaint, said Susieben Shah, chairperson of Maharashtra State Commission for Protection of Child Rights, on Wednesday.
A court in Maharashtra's Thane district has sentenced a man to 20 years rigorous imprisonment (RI) for raping a minor girl in 2021, relying on the deposition of the six-year-old victim and other prosecution witnesses.
The National Medical Commission has reintroduced 'sodomy and lesbianism' as unnatural sexual offences in the forensic medicine and toxicology curriculum for undergraduate medical students.
The observation came while setting aside an order of the Rajasthan high court which had quashed the FIR against a teacher who was accused of sexually molesting a 16-year-old girl at school in Rajasthan's Sawai Madhopur district.
A Delhi court on Friday ordered framing of charges against former Wrestling Federation of India chief and BJP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh in a sexual harassment case lodged by six female wrestlers.
The newly enacted Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which replaces the British-era Indian Penal Code, has made sexual offences "gender neutral" for the victim and the perpetrator, according to official documents.
