At night, vivid memories of sexual abuse haunt Smita Sharma’s dreams. During the day, they motivate her to document the stories of rape victims in India.

Ms. Sharma was 18 when a professor molested her one day after school. But when she spoke out about it, she was shamed and ostracized by teachers and classmates. That experience is all too common in India, where sexual abuse and rape are widespread but rarely discussed. Her younger cousin, Kamalika Das, also spoke out after an attack by a schoolmate and was blamed for reporting it.

Since then, Ms. Sharma has befriended and photographed dozens of rape victims and their families, collecting their horrifying testimonies, which include gang rapes of children and young teenagers, murder, police indifference and victims being forced to marry their attackers.

“They are shamed and victimized for life,” she said. “I want to give them a voice and start a discussion. We have to talk about this and we have to come up with a solution.”

Ms. Sharma is crowdfunding her project on Kickstarter to continue photographing and also to make a full-length film. Her images and testimonies of rape survivors are in the exhibit “Unearthed stories of Moral Courage In The Face Of Sexual Violence” in Delhi from Dec. 16 through Dec. 23. The exhibit at the India Habitat Center is produced by Proof in association with the Rape in India Project. Ms. Sharma’s work was partially funded by Proof.

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Ms. Sharma traveled widely to meet her subjects, spending hundreds of hours outside courtrooms and government hospitals, reading books while waiting for victims and their families to pass by. She became adept at spotting families of victims by their body language at the hospitals, she said.

“There are no private rooms for rape victims to be examined and interviewed, and the victims are often terrorized by the mistreatment of doctors,” she said. “There is no empathy. “

She also traveled to remote villages where small local nongovernmental organizations or health workers helped her contact rape survivors. To avoid being attacked herself, she sometimes disguised herself as a pregnant woman or took a friend with her. When she meets the survivors, she talks about her own experiences and often spends many days with them.

“I just sit with them, I talk with them and I eat with them,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t photograph at all. There have been other times when I could not shoot because I was crying too much and could not focus.”

Ms. Sharma added that she rarely talks with her subjects about their rapes but wants to know who they are as human beings — because “first they’re a girl or a woman and then there’s what’s happened to them.”

She discovered that girls in rural areas are often raped when they go outside to relieve themselves at night or in early morning — a problem that could be alleviated with a comprehensive program to build indoor toilets. Others are attacked while walking long distances through remote areas while returning home from high school. Wider availability of bicycles for poor girls would help protect them, Ms. Sharma said.

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The conversations Ms. Sharma has been having with strangers became even more painful last January when her 17-year-old cousin, Ms. Das, committed suicide by jumping out of a seventh-floor window. The girl’s death was a result of the reaction to her molestation and the verbal and emotional abuse she suffered after she spoke up, Ms. Sharma said. This caused Ms. Sharma to redouble her efforts to expose the crisis of sexual assault.

In recent years, disturbing and widely publicized accounts of several gang rapes have begun to make the subject of sexual assault somewhat more visible in Indian society. But in her research, Ms. Sharma found that most of her subjects had either been accused of bringing dishonor upon their families or blamed by the police and neighbors for provoking their rapes.

“The problem is not how women dress but how women are objectified by a patriarchal and feudalistic mind-set,” she said. “First the father owns them and then a husband owns them. They’re not treated as equals but second-class citizens.”

Follow @smitashrm, @JamesEstrin and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Smita Sharma is also on Instagram. You can also find Lens on Facebook and Instagram.