“They can say what they want about her. She is my daughter and I will fight anyone who tries to harm her.”

“I want to be able to look my children in the eye with my honour intact.”

“As harrowing as it is to continually recount the horrors I experienced, I can now tell my story to the world without shame or fear.”

Comments from just three of the dozen women I met last week in Dewas, Madhya Pradesh. They are all clients of Jan Sahas, a remarkable NGO that works on the rights of migrant workers, prevention of sexual violence and early childhood education. Its name translates to People’s Courage.

Most of the women I met had been first brutalised by sexual predators, then by hostile or indifferent law enforcement and judicial mechanisms, and finally by their own families and communities. Some were mothers of girls who had been subjected to these atrocities.

These women and girls spanned a wide age spectrum and came from different religious communities and castes. Some lived in cities, others in remote villages. One common thread was the fact that most of the attacks had either happened on their way to or from work or because their children were unattended while they were at work. India has one of the lowest rates of work force participation by women in the world. The hazards of simply getting to and from a workplace and the absence of any child care support were sharply highlighted by the experiences of the women I met.

Another pattern was the solitariness of their struggles for justice. Often targeted for their vulnerabilities as single women – widows, divorced or abandoned by partners — they are also shunned by their communities for their ‘dishonour’ or by a culture of victim shaming and blaming. Most have received little, if any, formal schooling, hampering their ability to understand the complex legal processes they have had to navigate.

None had heard of Jan Sahas prior to their ‘incidents’ and most were stunned that strangers would provide them the advice, support and solidarity that they had been denied by those they knew. Most of the perpetrators of these crimes have been convicted or are currently on trial, but it’s clear that the NGO has enabled more than just legal redress or economic support. I have seldom met women who better embodied the term ‘empowered’.

If there is any reason to feel optimism in India today, it’s thanks to women and girls across the length and breadth of our country who are refusing to be cowed or intimidated into submitting to the barbarity that feudal, patriarchal, caste and religious norms routinely inflict upon them. We are lucky to have these women, the more than twenty thousand others that Jan Sahas has served, and millions more every day, wage these battles for justice for all of us.