But especially grim acts, starting with the rape of the grandmother in September, have been hashed over with increasing intensity, feeding the anti-migrant sentiment that helped propel Mr. Hofer to first place in the first round last month.

“Is it just a feeling? Or actually the shocking reality?” the biggest-circulation daily, Kronen Zeitung, asked in early May, reporting on sex crimes and robberies in three Austrian cities. The newspaper asserted that women increasingly fear some public spaces, and questioned whether “one really cannot detect a trend in the statistics.”

Sylvia Bubits, 54, is living the conflicts dividing Austria. She is a longtime resident of Traiskirchen, the town just south of Vienna that hosts Austria’s largest center for refugees. Displaced people first arrived from the conflicts of the Cold War, then from the Balkans and now from the Middle East and beyond.

Ms. Bubits is also the daughter of the woman, now 72, who was raped while walking her dog on Sept. 1. Since the attack, Ms. Bubits said, her mother has gone from being healthy to ridden with anxiety and requiring close attention.

“It goes up and down,” Ms. Bubits said, but “it’s basically as if she was suddenly 90.”

On a visit to her home on Friday, her mother could barely shuffle a few steps without assistance. Ms. Bubits said she and her mother wanted to speak out about what had happened to emphasize that despite the problems many Austrians want to help refugees and make a place for them in their country.

According to court documents, her mother was walking her 13-year-old dog by the Schwechat, a river where refugees and residents often bathe. A young man helped her up a slope, but then, the documents said, “exploited her physical weakness,” threw her to the ground, “held her mouth shut, ripped her clothes and forced her to engage” in sex.