NEW DELHI — When 19-year-old Umang Sabarwal set up a Facebook page urging her friends to support an event with the provocative name SlutWalk Delhi, she may not have appreciated what she’d set in motion.

Ms. Sabarwal, a student who returned to India four years ago, was reacting out of frustration at the Indian capital’s history of violence against women. Of India’s major cities, Delhi has among the highest rates of rape (489 reported in 2010), street violence and harassment of women.

“The way the men stare, you feel like meat,” Ms. Sabarwal said.

The headlines for just the past week in and around the capital were depressingly familiar: The police were investigating the gang rape of a woman whose attackers had videotaped the act; a woman was assaulted by a property broker and thrown from his moving car when she resisted. And in the case of the rape of a 15-year-old girl, a court awarded the rapist a reduced prison sentence on the grounds that he was his family’s only wage earner.

Still, Delhi hadn’t yet experienced the kind of activism that quickly turned an event of the same name in Toronto into a global movement. The first walk was held there in April, after a Toronto police officer said that if women wanted to avoid rape, they should “avoid dressing like sluts.” Sonya Barnett and Heather Jarvis organized the event to protest the ways women are judged by their sexuality. Participants are encouraged to dress as they please, without restriction or fear. The movement went viral, with marches in Amsterdam; São Paulo, Brazil; Seattle; Sydney, Australia; and other cities.