New Delhi: A court has convicted a man of attempting to rape a differently abled woman, relying on the testimony of her mother and a psychiatric assessment that said the survivor had a social age of “one year and two months” and suffered from “profound social intellectual impairment”.Social age is a measure of a person’s capacity to have interpersonal relations and emotional maturity, among other things.The court held that the 18-year-old woman, with hearing and speech impairment, was completely dependent on her mother and was not competent to testify. Additional sessions judge Amit Sehrawat found the mother’s eyewitness account “consistent and trustworthy”. He concluded that the prosecution had proved the charge beyond reasonable doubt.The prosecution, led by Aaditya Kumar, said the crime happened in April 2022, when the woman and her mother were sleeping outside their jhuggi. The mother woke up to the woman’s screams and found the accused, Mohd Shaan, committing a “wrong act” on her. The man was arrested.During trial, the defence sought to cast a doubt on the prosecution’s case by pointing to a six-hour delay by the survivor in filing the complaint. The court rejected the contention. Judge Sehrawat said: “The victim is a specially-abled child and if a misdeed has taken place with her, then it is matter of ordinary prudence that, first of all, the family members shall console and settle the victim and thereafter only the matter can be reported.”The court took note of the woman’s medical assessment by the Institute of Human Behaviour and Allied Sciences. Its report, apart from mentioning the woman’s social age, said that she had a “corresponding social quotient of 8, indicating profound intellectual impairment.” Keeping this in mind, the woman was not made a witness.The defence cited the absence of independent witnesses. The court, however, viewed this as a lapse in the investigation. “The reliability of the complainant cannot be decided merely on the basis of lapse on the part of IO,” it said.Mohd Shaan denied the allegations and claimed that the case stemmed from a past quarrel. The court rejected the defence. “Only on the basis of previous issues, the reliability of a complainant cannot be doubted,” it said. Rather, the defence needed to give “substantial proof”, which was missing, the judge said.