BARUIPUR, India — One Saturday evening earlier this month, an 11-year-old girl stepped out of her home in a small eastern Indian town, headed to celebrate a friend’s birthday. She never came back.
According to a local police investigator, the girl was abducted, raped, stuffed into a sack and thrown — still alive — into a nearby pond by a group of men. Her lifeless body, covered in bite marks and bruises, was pulled from the trash-filled pond the following morning, July 5, as horrified residents and her 46-year-old father looked on.
“My mind is not working. I have not been able to think straight in days,” the girl’s father told Reuters. Under Indian law, the identities of the victim and her family are being withheld because disclosure of identifying details in such cases is prohibited.
The murder is the latest in a long string of brutal sexual assaults that advocates say reflect a deeply rooted crisis across India. Government data from the National Crime Records Bureau shows more than 80 rapes are reported to police each day, and activists warn that many more go unreported due to victim blaming and social stigma.
Experts point to entrenched patriarchy and misogyny, chronically understaffed police departments, and a judiciary plagued by severe backlogs as factors that embolden perpetrators. That sense of escaping consequences, activists argue, is fueling a relentless cycle of violence.
India recorded 29,536 rape cases in 2024, a number that has remained largely stagnant in recent years. Meanwhile, sexual crimes against children have climbed sharply over the past decade, with cases filed under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act reaching a record 69,191.
The Baruipur case has placed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party under scrutiny, as the party recently took power in West Bengal state — where Baruipur is located — with women’s safety as one of its central campaign pledges.
The incident is not isolated. In the past month alone, at least two other cases have captured national attention. In the northwestern state of Rajasthan, a 12-year-old girl was abducted, drugged and raped by multiple men across four days at various hotels before being rescued. Police said 22 people have been arrested in that case. Separately, the Times of India reported Monday that a 7-year-old girl was raped and killed, her body discarded in an empty shaft at an under-construction shopping mall in Ghaziabad, roughly 30 kilometers from India’s parliament.
Karuna Nundy, an attorney who helped craft India’s anti-rape legislation, said no government has made a serious effort to “uproot the misogyny and patriarchy” at the heart of the problem. “There needs to be a sustained effort towards changing behaviour at the community level,” she said. “It is crucial to recruit the right kind of police personnel and appoint judges who have a gender progressive understanding of these issues.”
A sweeping legal overhaul followed the 2012 gang rape and murder of a woman on a moving bus in Delhi — a case that shocked the nation and sparked massive public protests. Tougher sentencing and fast-track courts were introduced. Yet advocates say little has changed in practice.
“Nothing is going to change simply because the regime changes. This is a deep-rooted problem embedded in our patriarchal culture, not just in West Bengal but across India,” said Satabdi Das, a gender rights activist based in Kolkata.
The government had originally planned to establish 2,600 fast-track courts dedicated to sexual crimes by 2026, but the latest official data shows only 755 have been set up, including 410 courts exclusively handling child sexual abuse cases.
India’s National Commission for Women, a government-appointed oversight body, said the Rajasthan case exposed “serious administrative lapses, policing gaps and inadequate monitoring mechanisms that allowed such criminal activities to continue.” A senior Rajasthan police officer, Hari Shankar Yadav, countered that the department acted quickly to arrest the primary suspect and rescue the child.
In the Baruipur case, the girl’s family believes a faster police response to their missing-person report that night could have saved her life. “Apart from asking a few locals about her whereabouts, the police did not do much,” a close family friend told Reuters. Community members ultimately took it upon themselves to review footage from two nearby security cameras. Police officer Arvind Kumar Anand said the department is reviewing internal reports “to see who made what mistake.”
Public frustration over slow-moving trials has also fueled support for so-called “encounter” killings — cases in which police shoot suspects under disputed circumstances. In the Baruipur case, one suspect was shot and killed after officers said he grabbed a weapon from a police team. West Bengal BJP state minister Agnimitra Paul confirmed four suspects had been arrested and one “killed in an encounter,” declaring: “The message is very clear from our government that we are not going to tolerate any kind of nonsense.”
Human rights advocates and opposition figures, however, warn that such extrajudicial killings undermine the legal system. “The police shooting of suspects is a spectacle designed to assuage the anxiety of society; that instant justice will make the crime disappear,” said Vrinda Grover, a lawyer and rights activist. “Far from deterring crime, it gives impetus to the arbitrary powers of the police and the state over the lives of citizens.”
