The Delhi High Court has refused to interfere with the conviction of a man accused of sodomising an 11-year-old homeless boy, asserting that a child surviving on the streets cannot be expected to share details of date, time or clothing with the same accuracy as a witness living in a settled environment.
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 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.
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.
Rejecting the defence, the court said the boy’s inability to state his exact age or date of birth or other specific details would not benefit the accused. It said although in his testimony, the survivor claimed that he was about 15 years of age, given his social background, it was “unrealistic” to expect him to know his exact age.
