BARUIPUR, July 17 — On a Saturday evening this month, an 11-year-old girl left her home for a friend’s birthday party in a small town in eastern India.
She never returned.
She was kidnapped, raped, bundled into a sack and thrown into a pond while still alive by a gang of men, according to a local police officer involved in the investigation.
The assault is the latest example of the brutal sexual violence that remains widespread in 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 cases go unreported because of victim blaming and social stigma.
They say deep-rooted patriarchy and misogyny, understaffed police forces and lengthy judicial delays contribute to a belief among perpetrators that they can escape punishment, fuelling the persistence of such crimes.
The 2012 gang rape and murder of a student in Delhi triggered sweeping legal reforms, including tougher penalties and the establishment of fast-track courts. Although India’s economy has expanded significantly since then and the country has risen among the world’s major powers, its record on sexual violence remains grim.
In Baruipur, stunned residents, including the girl’s 46-year-old father, watched as her body, covered in bite marks and bruises, was recovered from a rubbish-strewn pond on the morning of July 5, a day after she went missing, according to interviews with police and local residents.
“My mind is not working. I have not been able to think straight in days,” the girl’s father told Reuters.
Reuters is withholding the identities of the victim and her family because Indian law prohibits the disclosure of details that could identify victims or survivors in such cases.
The incident has placed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party under scrutiny just months after it took power for the first time in West Bengal, where Baruipur is located, with women’s safety among its key election pledges.
However, activists argue that no change in government can resolve entrenched problems such as patriarchy, the lack of gender-sensitive officials in the police and judiciary, and sexual violence linked to caste hierarchies.
India recorded 29,536 rape cases in 2024, a figure that has remained largely unchanged in recent years, while sexual offences against children have risen sharply over the past decade. Cases registered under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO) reached a record 69,191.
In the past month alone, at least two other cases have attracted national attention.
In the northwestern state of Rajasthan, a 12-year-old girl was abducted, drugged and raped by multiple men over four days at various hotels before she was rescued, local police told Reuters. So far, 22 people have been arrested.
On Monday, the Times of India reported that a seven-year-old girl was raped and killed before her body was dumped in an empty shaft at an under-construction shopping mall in Ghaziabad, about 30km from India’s parliament.
Karuna Nundy, a lawyer who helped draft anti-rape legislation, said no government had seriously attempted to “uproot the misogyny and patriarchy” at the root 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.”
Nothing has changed
Tougher sentences were introduced after the 2012 gang rape and murder of a woman aboard a moving bus in Delhi, a case that shocked the country and sparked one of India’s largest public protests in recent years.
“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 initially projected that 2,600 fast-track special courts for sexual offences would be established by 2026. However, according to the latest government data, only 755 such courts, including 410 dedicated POCSO courts, have been set up nationwide.
India’s National Commission for Women, a government-appointed watchdog, said the Rajasthan case reflected “serious administrative lapses, policing gaps and inadequate monitoring mechanisms that allowed such criminal activities to continue”.
Hari Shankar Yadav, a senior Rajasthan police officer, said the department had acted swiftly to arrest the main suspect within hours of the case being registered and rescue the child.
In the Baruipur case, the girl’s family said a faster police response to the missing-person report could have saved her life.
“Apart from asking a few locals about her whereabouts, the police did not do much,” a close friend of the family told Reuters. Local residents later examined CCTV footage themselves and obtained recordings from two cameras.
Arvind Kumar Anand, a police officer in Baruipur, said the department was reviewing internal reports “to see who made what mistake”.
Extrajudicial killings
Public frustration over lengthy trials has also fuelled support for so-called “encounter” or extrajudicial killings, in which police shoot suspects under disputed circumstances, rights activists say.
In the Baruipur case, one suspect was killed after officers opened fire when he allegedly seized a weapon from a police team, police said.
Agnimitra Paul, a BJP state minister in West Bengal, said four suspects had been arrested and one had been “killed in an encounter”.
“The message is very clear from our government that we are not going to tolerate any kind of nonsense,” she said.
Opposition leaders and human rights activists argue that such killings circumvent due process and weaken the justice system.
“The police shooting of suspects is a spectacle designed to assuage society’s anxiety, creating the illusion that instant justice will make the crime disappear,” said lawyer and rights activist Vrinda Grover.
“Far from deterring crime, it gives impetus to the arbitrary powers of the police and the state over the lives of citizens.”
