Five men were formally charged in an Indian court on Thursday with the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student on a bus in New Delhi, as further cases of sexual violence continued to be reported around the country.
The attack on 16 December has caused outrage across India and led to demands for tough new rape laws and better police protection for women. It has also sparked an unprecedented debate about social attitudes to women.
The five men, who were not present in court, are accused of rape, tampering with evidence, kidnapping, murder and other charges that could incur the death penalty. The charge sheet was not released. A sixth accused claims to be under 18 and is due to be tried separately in a juvenile court.
The attack, which took place on a bus in New Delhi, left the victim with such severe internal injuries that she died two weeks later. A new fast-track court in south Delhi, inaugurated on Wednesday, will deal specifically with crimes against women.
Police will ask for the death penalty, a move supported by the victim's father(video) who told reporters: "The whole country is demanding that these monsters be hanged. I am with them."
Executions are rare in India, where a "rarest of the rare" principle means that most of those who receive a death sentence are jailed for decades instead.
In a sign of the depth of feeling surrounding the case, the bar association at the court said none of its members was willing to represent the accused. The court is expected to assign a defence lawyer for the men.
Protests, though less numerous than over recent days and weeks, continued in the Indian capital and elsewhere.
Recent incidents include a politician in north-east India reported to have assaulted a woman on Wednesday night, a teenage schoolgirl attacked by at least two men in the southern city of Puducherry, and a 17-year-old in Delhi who has accused two cousins of repeated rape.
Altamas Kabir, the Indian chief justice, said the accused should be tried swiftly, but cautioned that they needed to be given a fair trial and not be subjected to mob justice. Police officials told the Guardian they were "taking maximum security precautions" to avoid "any mishap" when the accused are finally brought to the court. Hearings are likely to last several weeks, they said.
Four other fast-track courts are planned in the capital to hold trials in sexual assault cases, which often get bogged down for years in India's notoriously sluggish court system. The country has a chronic lack of judges. Even if there were no new cases, it would take courts decades to clear the backlog of hundreds of thousands across the country.
The new courts will work to provide swift justice "so that the message is sent to all and sundry that these matters are going to be dealt with seriously", Kabir said.
Indian states are also introducing new measures to combat sexual violence. In the northern state of Bihar, officials have asked the police to complete investigations in all 500 pending rape cases and charge the accused.
Many cases never reach court. There is intense social pressure against families reporting sexual assaults and women are often blamed for attacks. When rapes are reported, police often refuse to file charges and pressure the victims to reach a compromise with their attackers. An investigation by the news magazine Tehelka revealed widespread misogyny among officers.
Delhi police on Wednesday started new training sessions for thousands of investigating officers.
In a sign that official attitudes towards such behaviour might be changing, authorities in the state of Punjab dismissed two police officers and suspended a third last week over accusations that they delayed investigating a reported gang rape and harassed the victim, who then killed herself.
A number of other cases are being re-examined, with a 16-year-old case in the southern state of Kerala involving the alleged gang rape of a teenager over a period of weeks by more than 40 men now to be heard by India's supreme court.
Women's activists hope that the rape and killing of the university student last month will mark a turning point in India's attitude toward women. The victim, whose name has not been revealed, was attacked after boarding a bus with a male companion after watching an evening showing of the film Life of Pi. The vehicle was a charter bus that illegally picked up the two passengers, authorities said. The driver was among the six arrested.
The pair were attacked for at least an hour as the bus drove through the city, even passing through police checkpoints during the assault. They were eventually dumped naked on the side of the road. The woman was assaulted with an iron bar and suffered severe internal injuries that eventually caused her death on Saturday at a hospital in Singapore.
Media reports say police have gathered 30 witnesses, and the charges have been detailed in a document running to more than 1,000 pages. Police also detained the owner of the bus over allegations that he used false documents to obtain permits to run the private bus service.
Since the attack, women have held near-daily protests and candlelit vigils in New Delhi, demanding action to stop the daily harassment they face, from groping to more violent attacks.
The Indian supreme court was on Thursday also expected to hear a petition demanding that Indian lawmakers facing sexual assault charges be suspended from office.
Six state lawmakers are facing rape prosecutions and two national parliamentarians are facing charges of crimes against women that fall short of rape, said Jagdeep S Chhokar, an official with the Association for Democratic Reforms, which tracks political candidates' criminal records.
The petition from retired government administrator Promilla Shanker also asks the court to force the national government to fast-track thousands of rape cases across the country.