18,733 cases, one waiting child: Tamil Nadu's POCSO queue is itself a second injury

The number is large enough to hide the person inside it. Across Tamil Nadu's 38 districts, 18,733 cases under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act are pending in court, according to reporting this week. Behind each file is a child who has already told the story once to family, once to police, once to a magistrate, and who must now wait to tell it again to a judge who may not yet have been appointed.

The Madras High Court has been told a similar story in numbers. A report placed before the court put pending POCSO trials at more than 18,500, with over 10,200 cases having already crossed the one year that Section 35(2) of the Act contemplates for completion. The same record listed the familiar causes: forensic reports that arrive late, dates for recording statements that are hard to obtain, twenty districts without a sanctioned special court, and presiding officers' posts left vacant. None of these is an act of God. Each is an administrative choice, repeated.

The law promised speed because delay is not neutral for a child. School changes, neighbourhoods learn, families fracture under pressure, and a witness who was eight can be eleven by the time the cross-examination begins. Patchy support services make the wait harder still. Where a support person, a counsellor and a safe room exist, a child can endure the process. Where they do not, the process itself becomes the punishment, and some families quietly stop coming.

The State has told the court that DNA laboratories are being set up in districts and that review mechanisms will be tightened. Those are steps, not a calendar. The incumbent TVK government, which came to office promising order and delivery, now owns this queue. It can publish, district by district, how many special courts are sanctioned, how many are sitting, how many forensic reports are pending beyond ninety days, and by what date the backlog older than one year will be cleared.

A child cannot file a grievance about the grievance system. Adults must do it for them, in public and on the record. Until the government treats a pending POCSO case as an emergency and not as a statistic for the next hearing, Tamil Nadu will keep asking its most injured citizens to prove, year after year, that they deserve the protection the law already gave them.