An 11-Year-Old Girl Is Gang Raped in India and Blamed for It,

CHENNAI, India — After school, when the 11-year-old girl rode her bicycle around the well-to-do apartment complex where she lived with her family in Chennai in southeastern India, an elevator attendant would find her and lead her to a basement, a rooftop or a public bathroom.

Once there, he would inject her with an orange liquid or feed her a cold drink likely laced with drugs to immobilize her, then tie a belt around her neck and rape her, she later told her older sister. He invited the complex’s security guards, plumbers and electricians to join.

Over the course of seven months, they, too, raped and molested her, possibly dozens of times, using makeup to cover any marks they left on her, her sister said.

“She was blackmailed on the edge of a pocketknife,” the 11-year-old girl’s sister, a university student, said in an interview. She said the men had told her younger sister: “If you tell your mother, we will kill her.”

A current of rage shot through Chennai last week after the police arrested 17 men, ages 23 to 66, for the assaults. Lawyers beat several of the men as they were curled up on the floor of a local courthouse.

Frantic residents of the building where the girl lived organized round-the-clock shifts guarding the entrance.

But a few days later, the police stopped answering calls from reporters. Around Chennai, people blamed the mother. They erroneously said the girl, who wears hearing aids and acted younger than her age, was “deaf and dumb.” They dismissed questions about women’s safety.

The girl’s older sister, whose name cannot be revealed by Indian law, said she was furious at the turn of events. As with other violent assaults against women and girls that have shaken India this year, the victim was getting the blame, shifting the focus from the men’s behavior, she said.

“If we shy away from conversations about sexual assault, the only thing we are conveying to young boys and girls is that the issue is not discussable,” the sister said. She referred angrily to a news report about a woman who said she was raped by 40 men over four days.

“That’s how men grow up in the society. They are taught to dominate women.”

Discussions about sexual assault are changing in parts of India, where harassment has long been dismissed indulgently as “eve teasing.” The transition accelerated in 2012, when a 23-year-old woman riding a private bus in Delhi was attacked by several young men, violated with an iron rod and left on the side of the road.

Two weeks later, the woman, Jyoti Singh Pandey, died from her injuries and protesters flooded streets all over the country. The government created a fast-track court for rape cases and introduced capital punishment for especially brutal sexual crimes.

But some of the country’s most vocal women’s rights advocates warned that passing tougher laws would not magically prevent crimes against India’s girls and women.