Sexual harassment case will not stand if women were wearing provocative dress: Kerala Court
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Kozhikode: A sexual harassment case will not stand against a man if the dress of a woman is provocative and revealing, a sessions court in Kerala's Kozhikode observed while granting anticipatory bail to writer and social activist Civic Chandran.
The writer, who has been accused of sexually harassing a woman, presented photographs of the woman complainant before the court to get anticipatory bail. After going through the photographs, Justice S Krishna Kumar observed that prime facie, Section 354A of the Indian Penal Code could not be applied against the accused as the complainant was wearing sexually provocative dress.
The sessions court did its verbal observation while reading Section 354A of IPC, which says "In order to attract this Section, there must be physical contact and advances involving unwelcome and explicit sexual overtures. There must be a demand or request for sexual favours. There must be sexually coloured remarks."
The court also found the missing intention of outraging the modesty of a woman on the part of the accused, reading the same Section.
The accused writer in his defence claimed that the said incident happened when there were other people, including the boyfriend of the complainant and nobody had raised such complaints against him.