The two issues involved in the debate are related but also discrete. One is the case for a lower age bar for criminals to be treated as adults for serious and heinous crimes in general. The other is dealing with the crime of rape, in particular, committed by males who come within the cut-off age of the juvenile justice law. The government may have over-reached itself in trying to address the second specific issue by lowering the age bar for juvenile criminals for a universal set of serious and heinous crimes. It would have been more constructive to have lowered the age bar only for rape offenders. Although several developed countries do have a lower age bar - 13 years in the US, 14 years in Canada and Germany and 16 years in South Africa and France - for its citizens to enter the adult criminal justice system, it can be argued that Indian society with its grinding poverty and the brutalisation that goes with it demands a less draconian approach for murder, burglary and so on by juveniles, the bulk of whom come from deprived backgrounds. Rape, however, can be argued to be distinct from other heinous crimes; it is a uniquely adult crime by its very nature, inasmuch as it can only be committed by sexually developed men - who could be under 18 years - and it cuts across the socio-economic spectrum. Dealing with it within the adult justice system would certainly send a strong signal of intolerance against a crime that is rampant in Indian society. However, there will still be doubts over whether the new provision of trying a juvenile as an adult contravenes the provisions of the Constitution or the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which India is a signatory.
The tragic case of the paramedic student unintentionally distorted the debate by suggesting that it is professional "modern" women who are at risk of sexual violence. That is valid, but it is an extension of the fact that girls and women are at constant risk of sexual assault from males, including young adults, within the broad family set-up. Statistics also show that the incidence of rape by juveniles has grown four-fold between 2003 and 2013 compared with an 88 per cent jump in burglary and an increase of one and half times for murder. True, the juvenile justice law has provided an "escape clause" in allowing for the Justice Board to consider whether the juvenile was in an "adult frame of mind". But given the parlous state of the justice system, there is little confidence of this discretionary system functioning in the way lawmakers have envisaged.