Headmasters duty bound to report sexual offences to authorities concerned, says Madras High Court

Madras High Court rules school headmasters must report sexual offences against children or face prosecution under POCSO Act.

School headmasters/headmistresses cannot wriggle out of prosecution initiated under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act of 2012 if they had failed to inform commission of any such offence to the authorities concerned, the Madras High Court has ruled.

Justice P. Velmurugan wrote: “The headmaster is the guardian of the entire school. If any incident covered under the POCSO Act had taken place in the school, the same has to be immediately intimated either to the District Child Protection Officer or to the police concerned.”

The observations were made while refusing to quash a chargesheet filed by the Coimbatore district police against a school headmaster under Section 21(2) of POCSO Act which mandates the person in-charge of every institution to report the commission of sexual offences against children.

In his quash petition, the headmaster had claimed that he had not received any oral or written complaint from the victim girl when she was studying in class VIII in 2018 but suddenly she had chosen to lodge a police complaint regarding the alleged sexual offence in 2022. Though the petitioner’s name was not included in the First Information Report, the police had chosen to prosecute him as the third accused in the case under Section 21(2) of POCSO Act, while filing the charge sheet, and hence he had rushed to the court with a plea to quash the final report.

On the other hand, Additional Public Prosecutor S. Sugendran told the court that the police had collected enough materials against the petitioner during the course of investigation and therefore, the chargesheet was laid against him too apart from the accused mentioned in the FIR.

After hearing both sides, the judge wrote: ‘In this case, the petitioner who was the headmaster of the school at the time of occurrence, neither informed about the sexual assault committed by the other accused to the authorities concerned nor taken any action against them. Since there is a prima facie allegation against the petitioner, this court is not inclined to quash the chargesheet filed against the petitioner.“