New Delhi. The Supreme Court on Thursday said that even after reaching a settlement between the opposing parties, a case of sexual harassment cannot be closed as such crimes have a serious impact on the society. The comment was made while rejecting the Rajasthan High Court order which had quashed the FIR against a teacher accused of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl at a school in Rajasthan’s Sawai Madhopur district. A bench of Justices C T Ravikumar and Sanjay Kumar said that the High Court has wrongly read and applied the laid down law to quash the relevant FIR and all further proceedings.
The bench said, “Such crimes against children should be considered heinous and serious.” Needless to say, such crimes cannot be taken lightly as crimes of personal nature and in fact, such crimes should be taken as crimes against the society.” He said, “We are unable to understand how the High Court came to the conclusion that there is a dispute between the parties in this matter which has to be resolved and moreover in order to maintain good faith the FIR and all further proceedings in relation to it should be quashed without regard to the allegations made against the third respondent in the relevant FIR.”
The top court also rejected the arguments of the teacher and the victim’s father who challenged the jurisdiction of the person filing the PIL in the case. The top court said that when an incident of this nature and gravity allegedly took place in a higher secondary school, that too by a teacher, then it cannot be termed as a crime of purely personal nature which has no impact on the society. will be.