The Delhi High Court has upheld the conviction of a man found guilty of sodomising an 11-year-old homeless boy. The court emphasized that a child living on the streets may not recall specific details, such as the date, time, or clothing involved in the incident, with the same precision as someone from a stable environment. This ruling highlights the challenges faced by vulnerable children in providing testimony in legal proceedings.
The incident was reported on the police helpline by some social workers, who had organised a programme in the area for providing free medical aid to the homeless, after the minor informed them about it. The court stated that the accused’s identity, the place of incident, the nature of the sexual assault and the sequence of events immediately after the incident remained substantially unchanged throughout all versions testified by the minor boy. “The evidence on record reveals that PW1 was a homeless child living on the streets and earning his livelihood by rag-picking. In such circumstances, it would be unrealistic to expect him to possess exact knowledge of his date of birth or to narrate every detail of the incident with mathematical accuracy,” observed the court. “Minor discrepancies, omissions or improvements, which do not go to the root of the prosecution case, are natural consequences of normal errors of observation and memory, particularly when a child witness recounts a traumatic incident after a lapse of time.
In a judgment passed on the accused’s appeal on August 10, Justice Chandrasekharan Sudha upheld the trial court’s August 2025 decision to convict him under Section 377 (unnatural offences) IPC and Section 6 (Punishment for aggravated penetrative sexual assault) of the POCSO Act. The judge, however, modified the trial court’s 20-year jail term to ten years on the grounds that at the time of the offence, the corresponding sentence was a decade. The school record showed his date of birth as October 12, 2005, making him 11 years old at the time of the incident, the court observed.
It must also be borne in mind that PW1 was a homeless child surviving on the streets and engaged in rag-picking and cannot be expected to give precise particulars regarding dates, time or clothing with the same degree of accuracy as a witness living in a settled environment,” the court said.
