In December 2012, a 20-year-old student was gang-raped on a Delhi bus, suffering such savage internal injuries that she died two weeks later. Afterwards, Indians united in grief and anger to decry a lack of safety for women in public places — forcing the government to toughen its rape laws.

This year, India has once again been shaken by a heinous rape — this time of an eight-year-old girl from a semi-nomadic tribe of shepherds in the northern Jammu region. Police say she was drugged and repeatedly raped in a temple for nearly a week and then killed and dumped in a forest. 

The crime has divided a society that is already fracturing along religious and community lines. The girl, Asifa, was Muslim; the seven men accused of her rape and murder are Hindus.