India, Aug. 13 -- No history of gender justice laws in India can be written without drawing a direct, scarred line from the brutal assault on Bhanwari Devi in 1992 to the gut-wrenching tragedy of the 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder. Not as isolated crimes, but as eruptions of women's long-endured trauma into public and legal arenas.

The story of Vishakha v. State of Rajasthan (1997) begins not in the hushed halls of the Supreme Court, but in a village in Rajasthan, where Bhanwari Devi, a grassroots worker with the Women Development Programme, dared to challenge age-old patriarchal traditions by trying to prevent the child marriage of a one-year-old girl in her village. As punishment, she was brutally gang-raped by five Gujjar landlords....