Gen Z teens must be counselled out of porn addictions rather than being punished: Madras High Court

Generation Z (Gen Z) teenagers are getting addicted to porn just like the millennials used to get addicted to cigarettes and liquor. Instead of damning and punishing such youngsters with criminal charges, society must be mature enough to counsel them out of these addiction, the Madras High Court has said.

Generation Z (Gen Z) teenagers are getting addicted to porn just like the millennials used to get addicted to cigarettes and liquor. Instead of damning and punishing such youngsters with criminal charges, society must be mature enough to counsel them out of these addiction, the Madras High Court has said.

Justice N. Anand Venkatesh made these observations while quashing a case booked against a youngster by the Ambattur police in Chennai for having downloaded two child porn videos from the Internet and watching it on his mobile phone. The police had seized the mobile phone and found the two videos in it.

However, the judge said, watching porn videos in private, per se, would not attract either Section 14 (1) of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 or Section 67B of the Information Technology Act, 2000 which had been pressed against the youngster following an anonymous complaint.

The judge pointed out that Section 14(1) of the POCSO could be pressed only if the accused had used children for sexual acts which was not the charge in the present case. Similarly, Section 67B of the I-T Act could be invoked only if the accused had shared the child porn video with others and not otherwise.

Stating that the two videos of a couple of teens having sex with an adult woman, downloaded from the Internet, had remained only within the private domain of the youngster, the judge said: “At the best, it can only be construed as a moral decay on the part of the accused person.”

After summoning the youngster to court and interacting with him, the judge wrote that the youngster had fairly conceded to have been addicted to watching porn on the Internet. He had also honestly said that he was now attempting to get rid of the habit and was willing to undergo counselling too.