One Saturday evening this month, an eleven-year-old girl left home to go to a friend's birthday party in a small town in eastern India.
She never came back.
A group of men kidnapped her, raped her, put her in a bag and, while she was still alive, threw her into a pond, said a local police officer involved in the investigation.
The attack is the latest example of brutal sexual violence rampant across India, where more than 80 rapes are reported to police every day, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau. Activists say many more attacks go unreported because of victim blaming and shaming.
Deep-rooted patriarchy and misogyny, insufficient police forces, and long delays in court proceedings contribute to many perpetrators believing they can escape punishment for attacks on women. Activists say this sense of impunity fuels the continued spread of such cases.
The gang rape of a student on a bus in Delhi in 2012 sparked sweeping legal reforms, including tougher sentences for those convicted and the establishment of fast-track courts. India's economy has since boomed and the country has become a world power, but its devastating record on sexual violence has remained unchanged.
In Baruipur, shaken locals, including her 46-year-old father, watched as the girl's lifeless body, covered in bite marks and bruises, was pulled from a garbage-filled pond on the morning of July 5, the day after she disappeared, according to interviews with police and residents.
"I can't think. I haven't been able to collect my thoughts for days," the girl's father told Reuters.
The case has embarrassed Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party, just months after it first took power in the state of West Bengal, where Baruipur is located, and women's safety was one of its main campaign promises.
However, activists say that no change in government can eliminate deep-rooted problems, such as the patriarchy that prevails in most Indian communities, the lack of leaders in the police and judiciary who have more progressive views on gender equality, and sexual violence linked to caste hierarchies.
India recorded 29.536 rape cases in 2024, a figure that has not changed significantly in recent years, while the number of sexual crimes against children has increased sharply over the past decade. The number of cases filed under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act reached a record 69.191.
In the past month alone, at least two more cases have attracted public attention across the country.
In the northwestern state of Rajasthan, a 22-year-old girl was abducted, drugged and raped by multiple men in different hotels over four days before she was rescued, local police told Reuters. Twenty-two people have been arrested so far, police said.
The Times of India newspaper reported on Monday that a seven-year-old girl was raped and then murdered, after which her body was thrown into an empty shaft of a shopping mall under construction in Ghaziabad, about 30 kilometers from the Indian Parliament.
Karuna Nandi, a lawyer who helped draft the anti-rape law, said no government has seriously tried to "erode the misogyny and patriarchy" that are at the root of the problem.
“Long-term efforts are needed to change behavior at the community level,” she said. “It is crucial to hire appropriate police officers and appoint judges who have a progressive understanding of gender issues.
In the Baruipur case, the girl's family alleged that a quicker police response to her missing report that evening could have saved her life.
"Apart from asking a few locals if they knew where he was, the police didn't do much," a close friend of the family told Reuters. The locals then decided to review the surveillance footage themselves and obtained footage from two cameras.
Arvind Kumar Anand, a police officer in Baruipur, said the police were reviewing internal reports “to determine who made what mistake”.
Public anger over slow trials has also contributed to support for so-called "enforcement" killings, or extrajudicial killings, in which police shoot suspects under questionable circumstances, human rights activists say.
In the Baruipur case, a man suspected of the crime was killed after officers opened fire when he snatched a weapon from a member of a police team, police said.
Agnimitra Paul, a BJP minister in the West Bengal government, said four suspects had been arrested, while one was "killed in the encounter," adding: "The message from our government is very clear - we will not tolerate any lawlessness."
Opposition leaders and human rights activists say such killings circumvent due process and weaken the justice system.
"Police shooting of suspects is a spectacle designed to calm fear in society, with the message that immediate justice will make crime disappear," said lawyer and human rights activist Vrinda Grover.
"Far from deterring crime, it only encourages the arbitrary power of the police and the state over the lives of citizens."
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