Aakanksha Sharma is a PhD Scholar at Amity Law School, Amity University, Noida. Her research lies at the intersection of forensic mental health, child protection, and criminal justice, with a particular focus on prevention-oriented approaches to child sexual abuse. She has presented her work at national and international conferences and has published in the areas of criminology, victimology, and forensic mental health. She was recently featured in the Early Career Corner of the International Association for Forensic Mental Health Services (IAFMHS) Newsletter. She also serves as Director of Anmol Angna Foundation, a child-focused social initiative.
In India, once a child sexual assault case is reported, the conversation follows a certain pattern. There’s outrage. More severe punishment is being demanded. There are debates over fast-track courts and the death penalty. And then the news cycle moves on to the next instance. What’s rarely raised in the discussion is this: by the time a case gets public attention, the child has already been hurt. The law, with all its apparatus, had arrived too late.
In 2012, India passed the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, a landmark legislation that established special courts for children, provided child-friendly procedures throughout the investigation and trial and strengthened procedural safeguards under the Act. Fourteen years later, it is our primary legal shield against child sexual abuse. In many ways, it is a strong one. But POCSO has a fundamental blind spot. It is built entirely around what happens after abuse occurs. And that is a problem we have almost entirely failed to address.
What POCSO Gets Right
Before criticising the Act, it is worth noting what it got right. POCSO solved a major legislative gap. Before 2012, there was no separate statute in India for the criminalisation of sexual offences against children.
The Indian Penal Code was not sufficient and was fully inadequate in scope. POCSO did that. It covered a range of offences from penetrative sexual assault to sexual harassment and exposure to pornography. Child-friendly procedures were required with respect to the trial. It required cases to be disposed of within one year. It made reporting mandatory for professionals who work with children. These are genuine achievements.
The Reactive Trap
But every single provision of POCSO is triggered by one thing: a reported offence. The Act has no mechanism for identifying risk before harm occurs. It provides no framework for early psychological assessment. It does not offer structured intervention to individuals who exhibit concerning behaviour patterns but have not yet committed an offence. That’s not a criticism specific to India. Most criminal justice systems are reactive. The assumption in the penal law is that we act after a crime has been reported, after a victim has come forward, after harm has been done. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, the number of reported cases under POCSO was more than 50,000 in 2022 alone[1]. Yet these figures reflect only reported cases. The actual incidence of child sexual abuse is likely far more than official statistics suggest. Under-reporting remains one of the greatest challenges in understanding the scale of the problem, driven by shame, fear, family pressure, stigma, and limited access to justice.
The hard truth is that for every child who goes to a Special Court under POCSO, there are many more whose abuse was never reported. And for every abuse that was reported, there was a period, sometimes a long one, in which warning signs existed and went unaddressed.
The Missing Piece: Forensic Mental Health
Forensic mental health is the interdisciplinary field that brings psychological and psychiatric expertise to legal and public safety questions. In child protection contexts, it encompasses the assessment of risk factors, the identification of behavioural indicators, the evaluation of psychological functioning, and the delivery of evidence-based interventions.
Research suggests that child sexual offending is rooted in identifiable risk factors– cognitive distortions of children and sexuality, emotional dysregulation, social isolation, adverse childhood experiences and maladaptive coping mechanisms. It is also helped by protective factors: stable social support, meaningful employment, psychological treatment, and the ability to self-regulate.
I have surveyed seven clinical and forensic psychologists who have experience in this field in my dissertation. Six out of seven reported that they are never routinely asked to assess the risk of reoffending in child sexual offence cases. None agreed that India currently has adequate infrastructure for forensic mental health assessment and treatment in this domain. These are professionals who have devoted their careers to this area, and are being used as afterthoughts, if at all.
One of them put it in a way that has stayed with me: “Rehabilitation is a form of prevention.” That sentence encapsulates everything that is missing from our current approach to child protection.
What the World Has Figured Out
Other countries have moved beyond the reactive model. Germany’s Prevention Project Dunkelfeld, which has been running since 2005, provides confidential assessment and psychological treatment to people with sexual interests in children who have not yet committed an offence.[2] The point is that if we wait for a crime to occur, we have already failed a child. Research on the programme has shown that voluntary early therapeutic intervention can meaningfully reduce risk.[3]
The United Kingdom’s safeguarding framework, Working Together to Safeguard Children (2026),[4] requires detailed information sharing and coordinated decision-making among mental health professionals, social services, schools and law enforcement. Risk is assessed collectively, and intervention is proportionate and early. No single institution handles child protection alone.
The United States has developed validated, evidence-based risk assessment tools (like the Static-99R)[5] that enable professionals to assess the likelihood of reoffending and tailor interventions accordingly. India has none of this infrastructure in any systematic form.
What India Needs
The answer isn’t to break down POCSO. It’s to build on it— to build the forensic mental health architecture that POCSO implicitly requires but does not provide. In other words, this means three things.
First, Forensic psychological examination has to be a routine feature of POCSO rather than an exception. Pre-sentencing psychological evaluation, currently popular in numerous jurisdictions, would help the courts make better decisions about sentencing, treatment, and supervision.
Second, India needs specialised early intervention pathways, accessible psychological services to enable those having worrying thoughts or impulses to seek treatment anonymously, before causing harm. This is not about justifying behaviour. “It’s about stopping it.”
Third, existing institutional infrastructure (Child Welfare Committees, District Child Protection Units, Special Courts) has to be legally linked with forensic mental health professionals. These bodies are now on silos. It would radically redefine what those bodies are able to achieve by bringing forensic knowledge into the multidisciplinary child protection discourse.
The Stakes Are Too High for Inaction
India’s child protection law is lacking a dimension. We have had a very good legal reaction to child sexual abuse and that matters. But a legal system that can only respond after a child is hurt is, by definition, an incomplete system.
Forensic mental health offers the chance to identify risk earlier, to intervene before harm happens and to prevent reoffending risk. Research is rigorous. Foreign experience is instructive. The agreement of experts in India – the very people who would offer this expertise – confirms the disparity. What is lacking is the institutional resolve to do anything about it. POCSO was a start. It’s time to build the next thing.
[1] National Crime Records Bureau, Crime in India 2022 (Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India 2022)
[2] KM Beier and others, ‘The German Dunkelfeld Project: A Pilot Study to Prevent Child Sexual Abuse and the Use of Child Abusive Images’ (2015) 12(2) The Journal of Sexual Medicine 529. [1, 2]
[3] ibid
[4] Department for Education, Working Together to Safeguard Children 2026: A Guide to Multi-Agency Working to Help, Protect and Promote the Welfare of Children (UK Government 2026). [1, 2, 3]
[5] RK Hanson and D Thornton, ‘Improving Risk Assessments for Sex Offenders: A Comparison of Three Actuarial Scales’ (2000) 24(1) Law and Human Behavior 119.
