Complaining to police about her gang-rape was the beginning of a new nightmare for Kajal. Officers detained the young woman from Madhya Pradesh state in central India. They beat her with a stick, she says, until she agreed to drop the charges. She was abandoned by her husband and threatened by the accused men. “I have lost everything and everyone blames me,” said Kajal, an assumed name.

Five years since a brutal gang-rape that galvanised a movement against sexual assault in India, women who report the crime are still routinely harassed by police or bullied into silence, according to research released in Delhi on Wednesday.

The Human Rights Watch report found that willingness to report rape and other sexual offences had significantly grown, but was often stymied by regressive community attitudes, particularly outside big cities. In one case highlighted in the report, a “low-caste” woman from Haryana state was pressured by her village council to sabotage a trial against six men from a more powerful caste charged with raping her.

“[She] didn’t have another way,” a relative of the woman told HRW. “If you want to live in the village, you have to listen to the [councils].” Implementation of laws intended to protect women, passed after the 2012 attack on student Jyoti Singh, was also patchy, activists said.(theguardian)…[+]