PTI, NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court today restrained the electronic media from showing, even in morphed form, images of the alleged victims of rape and sexual assault at a shelter home in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur district, observing they cannot be compelled to “relive the trauma” again and again.
The apex court ban in which the media was also asked not to interview the victims came on a day when a state-wide bandh was called by the Left parties in Bihar to protest against the alleged sex abuse at the shelter home run by a state-funded NGO.
A bench of Justices Madan B Lokur and Deepak Gupta took cognisance of the Bihar incident and said it was a cause for serious concern that alleged victims of sexual violence were interviewed a number of times and were made to repeat the incident.
“Is this the way we are treating our girls?,” the bench said and asked the media not to interview the alleged victims of sexual abuse at the shelter home while restraining them from telecasting or publishing the images of the victims even in morphed form. “Now the probe has been handed over to the CBI. Will these girls be questioned in front of a camera? It is not easy for anybody. They have to relive the trauma. It is horrible,” the bench observed and issued notices to the Centre and Bihar government seeking their responses on the incident.
“How you talk to a child is different from how you talk to an adult. I had yesterday seen a clip. You do not talk to an alleged victim of rape like this. There are different ways of talking,” Justice Lokur said and questioned as to why these alleged victims should ever be interviewed like this.
Advocate Aparna Bhat, who was appointed as amicus curiae in the matter, requested the court to give a direction that there should not be any media interview of the alleged victims.
“What about freedom of speech and expression? Media will then say that the Supreme Court is banning them,” the bench said.
It referred to the recent incident in Thailand where several children, who were part of a football team, along with their coach were trapped inside a cave for several days during a group outing.
“They were not allowed to be interviewed for 15-20 days (after they came out of the cave). They only had a joint interview of all of them,” the bench said.
The top court said it was “extremely disturbed” after going through the letter received from Patna-resident Ranvijay Kumar who has raised the issue of repeated interviews of the alleged victims of the Muzaffarpur incident.
The bench said it has not restrained the police authority from conducting probe and if they want to question the alleged victims, they would have to take assistance of professional counsellors and qualified child psychiatrist in consultation with National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro-Sciences in Bengaluru and Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Mumbai.
