Week 4: Drafting POCSO Plus and Waiting for the Rain
Tessa and I had one main goal this week: finish the draft of our revisions to the POCSO Act, dubbed “POCSO Plus”, and write up a second document for the CTA to read that summarized the problems we identified in the POCSO Act and our proposed solutions. While we expected drafting to take some time, we had made such an extensive spreadsheet detailing our research that it took us working right up until lunch on Friday to finish drafting both documents. As much as I would like to write a more interesting blog for this week sharing stories of our interviews and research, drafting is really all we did! We ended up taking the POCSO Act from 16 pages to 36 pages (still so much shorter than any major piece of legislation at home!) and finally feel like we have something to show for all our work here so far. Some of our additions include: adding the crime of child stalking, internet crimes, a victim compensation scheme (providing shelter/financial aid/vocational training to victims and their families throughout the trial of the case), and creating a CTA database of POCSO offenses (there is currently no database and no collaboration between schools/TWH/WED, so at every interview we had to ask how many cases that particular school/organization had handled, as anything ongoing is not online yet and sometimes past cases are not available online either).
Something I noticed as I scoured the U.S. Code for ideas on what to add to the POCSO Act is that the U.S. Code includes putting a victim in reasonable fear of the death or serious bodily injury to their horse as an offense under the crime of stalking...I cannot find any information yet about why horses are included separately from pets or livestock, so if anyone knows, I would love to learn why. (see 18 U.S.C.A. § 2261A)
In other news, there is a heat wave in Dharamshala again, keeping our temperatures in the 90s which—while far better than Delhi, which looks to be staying around 110-115—is still hot with no A/C like we are used to at home. I think it’s safe to say Tessa and I are both excited for monsoon season to start just to cool things off. The locals keep telling us we should be looking forward to the rains, and that they should come any day now...