NEW DELHI — Not long after telling the police that she had been raped, a woman from South Delhi looked out her apartment window and saw the man who had attacked her laughing with an officer who had given him a ride back from the police station.

“That officer then came over and asked me why I wanted to file a complaint,” the 30-year-old mother of two said in a recent interview. “He said I would be ridiculed unless I agreed to settle things without an investigation.”

After months of intimidation from her rapist and indifference from the police, she got a politically powerful acquaintance to intervene, and her rapist was finally arrested. A court case is under way.

A far more prominent case, the brutal gang rape on a bus in New Delhi last month, and the later death of the victim, has led to an anguished re-examination in India of many of the nation’s age-old attitudes toward violence against women. But even as India grapples with the polarizing issue, a powerful force stands in the way of any fundamental change: a police force that is corrupt, easily susceptible to political interference, heavily male and woefully understaffed.