Narinder Nanu / AFP - Getty Images, file

Indian students holds placards as they shout-slogans during an anti-rape rally in New Delhi during a protest in December 2012.

GOA, India – “India is a very spiritual and magical place,” gushed Paris Hilton when she visited for the first time last year, expressing a widely held view. Many visitors to India believe that the people are gentle, welcoming and that it is a safe place to travel.

But their perception is wildly at odds with the grim picture portrayed in the pages of India’s national papers and on its television screens on almost a daily basis.

Last Tuesday, a 30-year-old American tourist  says she was gang raped as she hitch hiked in the early hours of the morning near Manali, a popular tourist spot in the mountainous northern state of Himachal Pradesh. The attack came just days after a 21-year-old Irish aid worker was raped in Kolkata - an attack which took place, according to the police, after she had been drugged by a local businessman.

The attacks have reignited the debate over whether India has apparently become a more dangerous place to be a woman. What has changed in the culture? Is urbanization to blame? A change in modern morals? Or lax law enforcement? 

Brutal attack
The debate over violence against women has gripped the nation since December 2012 when a 23-year old Indian medical student named Jyoti Singh was brutally gang raped.

Singh was traveling home with a male friend after an early evening visit to the movies. Tricked onto a bus by a group of young men, she was raped so savagely that her intestines were torn from her body. She died on December 29, but not before identifying the men she said attacked her and becoming a symbol for women across the country of their daily struggle against violence.

Women - and some men - poured onto the streets to protest, clashing violently with the police, who many blame for failing to take rape seriously. 

The Indian government, rattled by the ferocity of the protests, rushed through new laws making provision for tougher sentences - including the death sentence - for rapists. The trial of the defendants in the Singh case is ongoing. 

But the government is battling sweeping changes in Indian society, largely due to rapid urbanization, which is having a profound impact on the traditional family structures as men migrate to the cities in search of work, leaving behind parents, wives and children.

Urbanization fueling crime?
“Migrant workers are living together with no female influence, just a bunch of men living together. They are developing a new cult of masculinity, being driven by the pornography industry,” said Ruchira Gupta, an Indian women’s rights activist and Emmy award winning documentary maker. 

Piyal Adhikary / EPA

Officers investigate the crime scene Monday where a 20-year-old girl was dragged into a walled compound, raped by at least six persons and murdered in Barasat, India.

“India is now the third largest user of pornography in the world and the porn narrative here is one of sexual violence and domination, which is sending signals to men to associate sex with violence.  They are attacking women all over the country, whatever their age or color,” said Gupta, who also lectures at New York University’s Center of Global Affairs.

She also warned that tourists should not take their safety for granted because “there is also a backlash against Westernization, which is embodied in the white female.”

Rape has soared in India in recent years.  Recorded rapes have risen by 873 percent since independence in 1947 and there were 24,206 rape cases in 2011, according to government figures. At the same time rape convictions fell by 44.3 percent between 1973 and 2011. 

Women’s empowerment activist Kathleen Suneja also cited urbanization as a driving force behind the rising rape figures.

“Urbanization has made Manali a high crime area and women are as likely to be raped in Delhi as in Manali,” she said, referring to the mountainous tourist destination where the American woman was attacked.

She blamed lax law enforcement and called for special police units to protect women's rights and prosecute violent crimes against women.

“India needs the equivalent of the [U.S.] Violence Against Women's Act,” she said.

Some activists in India hoped that Singh’s death would prove to be a turning point in attitudes towards women, yet the rapes have continued.

In March a Swiss tourist was gang raped while camping in Madhya Pradesh state. After the alleged assailants arrest, the state’s home minister Umashankar Gupta created embarrassment over comments that seemed to blame the victim for the attack.  “The rape of the Swiss national is unfortunate, but foreign travelers should inform the police about their movement so that they can be provided with adequate protection. They often don't follow state's rules," Gupta said.

In the same month a British woman told police she jumped from her first floor hotel window in Agra - near the country’s most famous tourist site, the Taj Mahal – because she feared being sexually assaulted by the hotel manager after persistent knocking on her door at 4 a.m. The woman injured her foot in the fall, but was otherwise not badly hurt. The hotel manager denied the allegations. 

Sajjad Hussain / AFP - Getty Images, file

Indian protesters hold candles during an anti-rape rally in New Delhi on Dec.29,2012, after the death of a gang rape victim.

The following month, the crowds were back on the street to protest after a 5-year-old girl was raped over a four day period in the Gandhi Nagar neighborhood of Delhi. Anger was fueled by the revelation that came out in an official investigation that police had tried to pay off her father with $38 dollars to drop charges. 

A spokesman for the Ministry of Home Affairs defended the government’s actions Friday, saying they had "taken all necessary action" to address the issue of rape and the reporting of rape by victims, including the introduction of new legislation.  

The spokesman for the Ministry of Home Affairs said that in the aftermath of the Jyoti Singh rape case, the government had set up a commission of investigation headed by retired High Court judge Usha Mehra. The commission found that there were shortcomings in the police handling of the case, and called for reforms which included better police training to handle complaints of rape more sensitively. The spokesman also said the commission branded the response of the police to victims' complaints as "callous.” Police have responded to the criticism by introducing reforms and training officers to be more sensitive to women’s complaints  

But police aren’t the only ones who have come under fire for their response to the rape issue.

Despite the fact that the most powerful person in the country, Sonia Gandhi, is a woman; that several states are ruled by autocratic female chief ministers; and the mother figure is deeply revered in Indian culture, there is little sense of sisterhood at the top.

Mamata Banerjee, West Bengal’s chief minister, notoriously dismissed a gang rape victim’s allegations as an attempt to undermine her government and earlier this year she claimed rising rapes were a result of a growing population and a youth with modern views.

Related:

• Calif. victim of Indian gang-rape identifies three suspects
• Lawyer: Delhi rape suspect beaten, poisoned in prison
• Defense attorney blames victim in India gang-rape
• Female tourists shun India after gang-rape, murder

This story was originally published on Fri Jun 7, 2013 2:56 PM EDT

Police in India on Thursday were preparing to charge three men detained in connection with the gang-rape of a 31-year-old California woman who hitched a ride in a truck in the early hours of Tuesday.

Investigators obtained a cellphone number believed to belong to the principal suspect and used it to track down the men, said B. Kamal Kumar, director of police in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh.

“With the help of this number we check out the previous calls,” he said. “We contacted the previous numbers. It helped a lot in tracing the [suspects].”

Kumar said the victim identified all three men in a police lineup.

AFP - Getty Images

Indian police stop a tourist bus Thursday at a checkpoint put in place following the rape of a U.S. tourist in Manali.

“Two of them were locals and our team of special police found them,” Kumar said. “The other fellow was trying to escape through a nearby town about 60 kilometers (37 miles) away. He was caught at a checkpoint.”

The victim, earlier said by police to have been between 35 and 40, had been visited by U.S. diplomatic officials and was “all right,” Kumar said.

It was unclear what city she was from or how long she had been in India when the attack occurred. The resort town of Manali, where she was staying, is known for its lush valleys and towering mountains.

After she was picked up in the truck, promised a ride to her hotel, she was driven to a remote area and gang-raped, police said.

The suspects will be taken in front of a magistrate to be officially identified and formally charged, Kumar said, adding that he expected that to happen Thursday afternoon.

The attack has drawn further international attention to the issue of serious sexual assaults in India.

Several other sex crimes in the country have been highly publicized, particularly the fatal December gang-rape of a 23-year-old student by six men on a bus in New Delhi.

That attack set off angry protests across the capital and in other cities.

Kumar said he would advise female tourists to use extreme caution when traveling in India.

“She has taken a lift in a truck at 1:15 at night,” he said, adding that she had been visiting friends and was on her way back to her hotel but could not find a taxi. “I’m warning all tourists who are coming here. She should have avoided the truck. If she wanted any help, she should seek police.”

Related:

• Lawyer: Delhi rape suspect beaten, poisoned in prison
• Defense attorney blames victim in India gang-rape
• Female tourists shun India after gang-rape, murder

Manan Vatsyayana / AFP - Getty Images

Indian private security guards man the entrance to the Lok Nayak hospital in New Delhi on May 15, 2013. A defendant on trial over a fatal gang-rape in New Delhi last December is critically ill after being attacked in prison, his lawyer said Wednesday, weeks after the main accused died in the same jail.

One of the men on trial for the fatal gang rape of a student on a bus in India has been beaten and poisoned by prison inmates and is unconscious in the hospital, his lawyer said on Wednesday.

Prison authorities denied any mistreatment of Vinay Sharma, who has been at New Delhi's Tihar Jail since he was arrested on suspicion of attacking a woman in December. The attack stunned India and brought thousands of protesters onto the streets.

One of Sharma's co-accused, Ram Singh, the alleged ringleader, was found hanged from a ceiling grill inside his cell in March. Police described his death as suicide although a judicial inquiry is pending.

Sharma's lawyer, A.P. Singh, accused inmates of "beating him on the chest" and poisoning his food, and said he was admitted to Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Hospital on Tuesday after being treated at another city hospital since Sunday.

"Vinay was beaten by four or five fellow inmates inside the jail premises," he told Reuters, adding he was in an unconscious state.

Sunil Gupta, a spokesman for Tihar Jail, said Sharma was being treated in a city hospital for a fever.

"There was no such beating of Vinay to my knowledge. All the allegations are false," he said.

Police arrested Sharma and Singh, along with three other adult men and a teenage boy, on charges of raping the 23-year-old physiotherapy student on a moving bus and fiercely beating her and her male friend on Dec. 16.

The woman died of her injuries in a Singapore hospital two weeks after the assault, which enraged Indians, who protested in the thousands for days to demand better law enforcement to fight gender crimes.

The city court where Sharma has stood trial since early this year asked jail authorities and doctors on Wednesday to file reports on his health on Thursday.

Sharma was falsely implicated in the case, his lawyer said at the start of the trial.

Saurabh Das / AP

An Indian woman holds a poster as she protests with others about the handling of sex crimes in India, Monday.

NEW DELHI - A second suspect was arrested Monday in the rape of a 5-year-old girl who New Delhi police say was left for dead in a locked room, a case that has brought a new wave of protests against how Indian authorities handle sex crimes.

Pradeep Kumar, a 19-year-old garment factory worker, was arrested Monday in the eastern state of Bihar, about 620 miles from New Delhi, and was being brought to the capital, police said.

Police said questioning of the first man arrested in the case, Manoj Kumar, led them to the second suspect. Manoj Kumar, 24, was arrested Saturday in Bihar and flown back to New Delhi. Kumar is a common last name in India and the two men are not related.

The men are accused of abducting, raping and attempting to murder the 5-year-old, who went missing April 15 and was found two days later by neighbors who heard her crying in a locked room in the same New Delhi building where she lives with her family. The girl was alone when she was found, having been left for dead by her attackers, police say.

The girl was in critical condition when she was transferred Thursday from a local hospital to the largest government-run hospital in the country. D.K. Sharma, medical superintendent of the state-run hospital in New Delhi where the girl was being treated, said Monday that she was responding well to treatment and that her condition had stabilized.

"She is much better today and her wounds are healing well," Sharma told reporters.

The attack came four months after the fatal gang rape of a woman on a New Delhi bus sparked outrage across India about the treatment of women in the country.

For the third consecutive day, sporadic protests erupted in at least three places in New Delhi. Scores of supporters of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party dodged a huge police cordon and managed to reach the gates of India's Parliament where they shouted slogans against the Delhi police's tardy handling of the case. About 100 BJP supporters were detained. Police said they would be held at a nearby police station and then releases in a few hours.

Separately, about 100 women protested at another venue near the Parliament building. Most of the protests were directed against the Delhi police officers who failed to act after the girl's parents told them she was missing.

The protesters have demanded that the Delhi police chief be removed from office and that police officials accused of failing to act on the parents' complaint be dismissed.

"Police and other officials that fail to do their jobs and instead engage in abusive behavior should know that they will be punished," said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director of New York-based Human Rights Watch.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called for changes in attitudes toward women in India. "The gruesome assault on the little girl a few days back reminds us once again of the need to work collectively to root out this sort of depravity from our society," Singh said Sunday at a meeting with civil servants.

The December gang rape on a New Delhi bus sparked outrage and spurred the government to pass tough laws for crimes against women, including the death penalty for repeat offenders or for rape attacks that lead to the victim's death.

Related:

PhotoBlog: Protests build in New Delhi after child rape

Defense attorney blames victim in India gang-rape, murder case

A Japanese court on Friday sentenced two U.S. sailors to up to 10 years in prison for raping a woman in Okinawa last year, the U.S. government's Voice of America news service reported.

A district court judge in Naha, the capital city of Okinawa, sentenced Seaman Christopher Browning, 24, to 10 years in prison for gang rape and robbery. Petty Officer 3rd Class Skyler Dozierwalker, 23, received a sentence of nine years for gang rape, VOA and several Asian newspapers reported.

Both men pleaded guilty last week.

Authorities in Japan said the two sailors followed a 27-year-old woman to her apartment complex, then raped and robbed her in the parking lot about 4 a.m. on Oct. 16. Police said a third sailor witnessed the assault and was taken into custody but eventually released to the Navy.

The sailors, who were on overnight leave when the attack occurred, were crew members on a U.S. Navy cargo plane that was in Okinawa only for a couple of days to carry out a delivery, military officials said.

The incident infuriated many in Japan, including Okinawa Gov. Hirokazu Nakaima, and raised anti-American sentiment, particularly toward servicemen. About 40,000 U.S. forces are deployed in Japan, nearly half of them in Okinawa.

In January, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe acknowledged the the difficulty for Okinawa of hosting U.S. forces.

"I recognize ... a heavy burden is imposed on the people of Okinawa regarding the issue of the bases of the U.S. Forces in Japan," Abe said.

After the rape, military officials imposed a curfew on personnel in Okinawa, but that has done little to ease tensions.

U.S. Ambassador to Japan John Roos called it a "terrible situation" and scrambled to meet with officials to alleviate their concerns.

In an Oct. 19 news conference in Tokyo, Roos got personal. "I would like to reiterate this message to the Okinawan people and to the people of Japan as a whole: I understand the anger that many people feel with respect to this reported incident.

"I have a 25-year-old daughter myself, so this is very personal to me," he said. "We will put forward every effort to make sure that incidents like this do not happen."

Related:

US sailors sue Japan's TEPCO for post-quake radiation exposure

US Navy ship stuck on reef nearly a day after running aground off Philippines

This story was originally published on Fri Mar 1, 2013 7:56 AM EST

Altaf Qadri / AP

Protesters near the Indian parliament Thursday complain that a new sexual violence law is inadequate. Their signs call for the removal of the deputy chairman of the parliament's upper house, P.J. Kurien, who is facing rape allegations.

NEW DELHI -- Police were searching villages in western India on Friday for suspects in the rape and killing of three young sisters, as Indians still angry over the fatal gang rape of a woman on a New Delhi bus in December face another heinous sexual attack.

The bodies of the sisters — ages 7, 9 and 11 — were found Feb. 16 in a village well in Bhandara district in Maharashtra after they had gone missing from school two days earlier, said police officer Abhinav Deshmukh. The area is more than 600 miles south of New Delhi, the capital.

The victims' mother said police did not take the case seriously and did nothing for several days until villagers held protests.

Deshmukh said Friday that 10 teams of 30 investigators were working on the case and that he was confident they would find the killers soon.

Police first dismissed the deaths as accidental, the Press Trust of India news agency reported. The girls' mother accused police of a shoddy investigation and said they did nothing for two days. Enraged villagers forced shops to close, burned tires and blocked a national highway passing in the area for hours earlier this week, demanding justice.

Police eventually registered a case of rape and murder after a post-mortem of the girls found that they had been sexually abused and brutally killed, PTI said.

One police officer has been suspended for not acting promptly, Indian Heavy Industries Minister Praful Patel, who represents Bhandara district in Parliament, said Thursday.

Cabinet Minister Manish Tewari called the killings a "very, very heinous assault" and said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was sending 1 million rupees ($18,300) to the girls' family.

The case has horrified Indians two months after they were outraged by the gang rape and killing of a young woman on a moving New Delhi bus.

The gang rape sparked nationwide protests about India's treatment of women and spurred the government to hurry through a new package of laws to protect them.

The gang rape victim and her male friend, who also was badly beaten up in the attack, were dumped naked on the roadside, and the woman died from her injuries two weeks later in a Singapore hospital. Five men are being tried on rape and murder charges in that case, while a sixth, who is underage, is in juvenile court.

A new law enacted by the government has increased the prison sentences for rape from the existing seven to 10 years to a maximum of 20 years. It also provides for the death penalty in extreme cases of rape that result in death or leave the victim in a coma.

Related:

Report: Six held over another bus gang rape

PhotoBlog: India considers tougher punishment for sex crimes

Video: Father of rape victim recalls daughter's tears

Mexico has arrested six men who confessed to the rape of six female Spanish tourists in Acapulco, a crime that drew global attention to the popular Mexican resort.

"We have six detainees who have confessed, totally confessed," Mexican Attorney General Jesus Murillo said on Wednesday at a news conference in Acapulco.

Early on Feb. 4, hooded gunmen forced their way into a beach house the women rented, roughed up their seven male companions and raped the women.

Murillo said one of the suspects was apprehended on Tuesday, and the other five were detained overnight. Local officials said there was physical evidence that implicated the suspects.

Acapulco Mayor Luis Walton set off a media storm when he downplayed the seriousness of the attack, saying it could have happened "anywhere in the world," and that it hurt the image of the city, one of Mexico's most famous tourist destinations.

Acapulco is the biggest city in the state of Guerrero, which has been increasingly plagued by drug-related violence, prompting some exasperated residents in small towns to form "community police" forces.

The violence turned Acapulco into the murder capital of Mexico last year, with more than 1,000 murders reported by Mexican media in the city of approximately 800,000 people.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has vowed to reduce the violence that soared after his predecessor Felipe Calderon launched an assault on drug cartels.

Pena Nieto, who launched a program to boost tourism on Wednesday, pledged to create a new militarized police force and increase spending on security to cut crime.

"We will keep working to improve public security conditions, which, without a doubt, is a fundamental and indispensable condition for the development and promotion of our country," Pena Nieto said in the beach resort of Bahia de Banderas in the state of Nayarit.

Published at 10 p.m. ET -- BREDASDORP, South Africa - Hundreds of South Africans chanting "enough is enough" gathered on Friday at a building site where a 17-year-old girl was mutilated and left to die after being gang-raped.

Their tribute was testimony to how the killing of Anene Booysen has stirred outrage in a country where many people have become oblivious to rampant sex crimes and violence.

People marched in a procession to the site in the sleepy town of Bredasdorp, 80 miles east of Cape Town, where they placed flowers and candles by a simple wooden cross.

Booysen was found by security guards lying only a short distance from her house after partying at a nearby bar last Friday evening. She later died in hospital.

Her foster mother, Corlia Olivier, recounted the moment when she saw her daughter dumped amid the gravel and grass, her stomach slit open down to her genitals.

"I heard her saying ‘Mommy help me, Mommy help me' and I rushed over...and just saw her guts hanging out," Olivier told reporters, tears welling up in her eyes.

The incident and the public response has echoes of the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student on a New Delhi bus last year, which caused a national and international outcry.

President Jacob Zuma expressed shock and outrage, calling for the harshest possible sentences for the killers and a concerted campaign "to end this scourge in our society."

In Geneva, U.N. Human Rights chief Navi Pillay said South Africa must tackle a "pandemic of sexual violence" and she was concerned about low conviction rates for rapists.

"There is a need for very strong signals to be sent to all rapists that sexual violence is absolutely unacceptable and that they will have to face the consequences of their terrible acts. The entrenched culture of sexual violence which prevails in South Africa must end," said Pillay, herself a South African.

South Africa has the highest number of reported rapes per head of population of any Interpol member country, with more than 64,500 reported in 2011/2012.

Even when suspects are caught, only 12 percent of cases end in conviction. But sexual crimes seldom cause little public concern beyond some soul-searching editorials and anguished radio phone-ins.

The Womens' League of the ruling African National Congress is trying to mobilize the public into similar action to the protests against anti-female violence that took place in India after the New Delhi attack.

On Friday, Cape Town radio station KFM broadcast a "bleep" every four minutes as a reminder to listeners that another South African woman will, on average, have just been raped.

Death penalty?
At the Bredasdrop site, religious leaders and politicians linked arms with Booysen's relatives as they sang hymns and laid a wreath by the cross, adorned with a pink ribbon.

"I still hear her footsteps," Olivier said as a stream of well-wishers arrived to offer condolences.

Maree Louw, commander of the local police station, said the murder was one of the worst cases she had seen in a long career.

"The brutality and the slaughter of this young teenager is beyond belief," Louw told Reuters.

Like many towns in South Africa's Western Cape, Bredasdorp, with a population of 35,000 people, has problems with drug and alcohol abuse but, Louw said, most people would go to bed at night with their back doors open and windows unlocked.

Booysen managed to reveal the name of one of the attackers, a family friend, before dying. Three men in their early 20s have been arrested and are expected to appear in court on Tuesday on charges of rape and murder.

They face the prospect of life in prison if convicted.

Under a constitution drawn up after the end of apartheid in 1994, Nelson Mandela's "Rainbow Nation" abolished the death penalty. Some in Bredasdorp wish that were not the case.

"This crime was very sadistic and deserves the death penalty," said mother-of-three Sophia Europa. "What they did was worse than anything done to an animal."