Sexual assault probe: HC flays police insensitivity

Time of India

2 days ago

Chennai: In yet another incident of police insensitivity while handling cases of sexual harassment, a woman victim was made to view her leaked non-consensual intimate images (NCII) in the presence of seven male police officers.
The videos, shared online by her boyfriend, were shown to her during the investigation process to "identify" the accused.
"It was not only the accused who violated her dignity guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution, but also each of the seven police officers present during the inquiry," Justice Anand Venkatesh said.
"It was like adding insult to injury. Don't the officers have a little bit of sense? Society will not question the boy who committed the crime; it will question only the girl who the victim is," the judge said.
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In the name of investigation, more harassment was meted out to the victim. The police are dealing with the case as if they were dealing with thugs, he added.
This is not an ordinary case, in which the police are dealing with morons. The accused in such cases are the most intelligent, deadliest persons sitting in a room that we don't know where, Justice Anand Venkatesh said.
The court then censured the police for revealing the name of the victim in the FIR and directed that it must be redacted from the FIR and from all those documents where it was incorporated during the investigation.
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In no place must the name of the victim girl be shown, the judge said.
As to the removal of the NCII of the woman lawyer from the internet, the Union govt informed the court that immediate steps were taken to block all the websites from where the contents could not be removed.
However, Senior advocate Abudu Kumar Rajaratnam for the petitioner submitted that the videos/intimate images once again resurfaced on 39 sites. He produced the particulars of those 39 sites to the court.
Recording the submission, the court directed the Union govt to file an affidavit explaining the various steps that were initiated and give a prototype as to what a victim girl must do when she is faced with a situation like this.
In the meantime, the Union govt shall ensure that the NCII does not resurface and the technology discussed in the order passed by the Delhi and Karnataka high courts shall be adopted, he said.
If ultimately, the Union can completely block the NCII and prevent it from resurfacing, it will be a test case that can be applied in the future to handle the situation more effectively, he added.