From Decency to Dignity: Re-grounding Necrophilia Criminalization Beyond Consent
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This paper advances a normative and doctrinal shift from public-decency and burial-site offences to a direct, dignity based criminalization of a offence of necrophilia. It argues that the consent analysis collapses post-mortem, and that the protected interests should be framed as posthumous dignity and bodily integrity, with recognition of relational and public harms. Using Indian constitutional jurisprudence that extends dignity beyond death and comparative models such as the United Kingdom’s Sexual Offences Act 2003 (section 70) and Canada’s Criminal Code (section 182), the paper demonstrates that South Asian frameworks relying on ―indignity‖ and place based triggers are under inclusive and doctrinally misaligned. It proposes a standalone offence defining sexual contact with a corpse, clarifying a mens-rea (guilty mind), enumerating aggravations, and carving out lawful medical and funerary activities. The proposed approach improves legal clarity, prosecutorial practice, and consistency with constitutional values, even in cases where no living victim can give consent or make complain.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".