Celine Minj was born in 1933 in a village in the forests of central India. She nearly starved as an infant — as a girl, she was considered a burden — and she fought to persuade her family to send her to school. She carried rocks on construction sites to help pay tuition. In 1947, as India became free from British rule, the 14-year-old Celine ran away from home, traveling hundreds of miles by train, and ended up on the doorstep of a new missionary hospital. She started as a cleaner, studied nursing and, by the time I met her in January, had retired after a long career as a nurse for India’s state-run oil company.

I thought of her often this year as I followed the stream of news about women and girls in India. Every atrocity is unique in its horror, but in 2018 there seemed to be another layer to the violence: girls brutalized by men asserting their caste power or motivated by the extremes of Hindu nationalist ideology. After the notorious 2012 gang rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi, the government appointed new watchdogs and passed new laws. And yet, it seems, men in India continue to enjoy impunity.

But I have recently seen things that give me hope for Indian women. A group of journalists denounced one of their colleagues who had preyed for years on young female reporters. Their persistence forced him to resign from his position as a cabinet minister. A group of Indian nuns stood up for one of their own after she accused a bishop of sexually assaulting her; they forced the church hierarchy and the police to take the crime seriously. Devotees of one of southern India’s most popular Hindu pilgrimage sites organized protests to open the shrine to women. Even Bollywood stars have dropped the glittery facade, sharing their stories of harassment and abuse.