Short Paragraph on Sexual Offences !
Cesare Beccaria was perhaps the first criminologist who comprehended crime as a symptom of social disease. This concept of crime led penologists to believe that struggle against crimes was above all a struggle against poverty, sickness, alcoholism and prostitution. This, in other words, means that if these social evils could be eliminated, the problem of crime prevention would be considerably eased.
There are, however, certain peculiar categories of crime which do not respond to this hypothesis favourably because of the pervasive tendency of human nature. Sex crime is obviously one among such crimes which prevails in almost all societies from ages.
With the advance of science, civilization and culture, the complexities of life have enormously multiplied. Modern mechanisation and urbanisation has brought about total disintegration of the ‘family’ institution which has created serious problems in human life. The control of parents over their wards has weakened considerably.
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In fact it is this parental negligence which is mainly responsible for growing indiscipline, rowdyism and vagrancy among youngsters. Uncontrollable hooliganism among youths has become a serious problem for law enforcement agencies throughout the world.
It has rather become a social disease. As a result of this unhappy development, the incidence of sex delinquency in the form of unmarried motherhood, abortion, rape, kidnapping, enticement, abduction, adultery, incest, indecent assault etc. has become too common.
A study of sexual offences in one of the American States reveals that almost 88 per cent of the school-going girls between the age of fourteen and eighteen had sex-experience before attaining puberty. Another survey in U.S.A. concluded that in one out of every five or ten marriages today the bride is already pregnant. Depicting the picture of modern sexy-civilization in United States, the Life International of October 23, 1961 rightly observed that “a couple goes for a date and wake up to find they have been married although they cannot remember why and where……..
Looking to the psychological aspect of sex indulgences, Dr. Albert Ellis has expressed a view that he is against putting any ban on any type of sexual behaviour, not even open prostitution by males or females. He observes that discouragement of sex pleasures and dispensation of cohabitation as disgusting and revolting may lead to neurotic loss of feeling and enjoyment in normal sex which may result into fatal consequences. However, it would not be correct to subscribe to this view of Dr. Ellis in the Indian setting.
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Like any other western country, sex delinquency in India has also recorded an upward trend in recent decades. Despite repressive socio-legal measures to control sex crime, the ‘permissive’ trend of the modem Indian society is causing obstruction for prosecution and punishment of sexual-offenders. These offences therefore, have thrown a great challenge before the criminal justice administration.