Rape and sexual assault are among the fastest-growing reported crimes in India, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. Rape also has a plunging conviction rate, with only 26.5 percent of reported rapes successfully prosecuted in 2010. And the response from the authorities across India has been strikingly obtuse. As public anger grew over the Guwahati attack, the police responded by declaring that bars in the city should shut down by 10 p.m. The announcement was widely seen as an attempt to distract attention from their own shortcomings in handling the case.

After a woman was raped in Kolkata this year, the police directed bars to stop serving drinks after 11:30 p.m. After a female journalist was shot and killed some years ago while driving home, Delhi’s police chief suggested that women should not drive late at night without proper escorts. And after the rape of a woman in Gurgaon, a city near Delhi, some months ago, the municipal administration suggested that women should not work after 8 p.m.

These responses shift blame away from the men responsible for the crime. But they also reveal a continuing tension, as traditional communities and groups attempt to process the changes that have accompanied India’s modernization. In many discussions of sexual assault and rape in the news media and elsewhere, the issue is often framed as one of how far women’s freedoms should extend. What kinds of jobs or working hours are considered respectable for a woman? Can a woman go to a bar or restaurant with friends without inviting censure or sexual advances? If a woman is out in a public area after dark, is she, to use a term that often crops up, a “loose” woman? The question of how much freedom a woman should have, and who should control that freedom, underpins the debate over sexual violence.

Three days after the attack in Guwahati, the local village council in Aasra, a small village in Baghpat District, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, issued a set of decrees. Most village councils in Uttar Pradesh are dominated by men, and their pronouncements are taken seriously. (In the past, village councils have even been known to endorse so-called honor killings.) A few have banned young women from wearing jeans or using cellphones. The Aasra council went further, banning women under 40 from using cellphones, visiting local markets or appearing in public with their heads uncovered.

Baghpat epitomizes some of the strains that beset urban and semirural India in a period of rapid transition. Its population has only 858 women and girls for every 1,000 men and boys — an imbalance extreme not just by national standards, but by those of Uttar Pradesh, the state with the greatest gender disparity. It has slightly higher levels of female literacy than the national average, but few women in the paid work force. This suggests a tension in a community modern enough to educate women, but traditional enough not to want them to seek jobs. Girls walk an average of 2 kilometers, or 1.2 miles, farther than boys do to get to their schools, because there are fewer schools for girls.