Representative image (Heavenhated, Creative Commons)

As more females are beginning to go to school, take seats in parliament and have the freedom to choose their own spouses, the changing role of women has been said to be a factor.

The gradual increase in the prominence of women may have appeared "as a threat and a challenge,” said Ranjana Kumari, social activist and Director of the Center for Social Research in New Delhi.

According to Slate, a contributing factor to the series of rape cases is "the extremely skewed sex ratio, the product of India's centuries old son-preference and modern technology that, while technically illegal but still widely available, allows parents to abort unwanted girl fetuses, leaving just 830 women to every 1000 men in Haryana state."

"As such, Haryana sees high levels of rape and violence in general, a finding typical of male-dominated societies," Slate.com columnist Jen Swanson wrote.   

Khap panchayats, village caste councils that are self-appointed but dominate many of the rural regions, suggested that lowering the legal age for marriage would resolve the problem, reasoning that then unmarried boys would not feel the urge to take out their sexual frustration on unknowing victims. 

“I think that girls should be married at the age of 16, so that they have their husbands for their sexual needs, and they don’t need to go elsewhere,” a village leader, Sube Singh, told IBN Live, a news channel. “This way rapes will not occur.”

In response, the United Nations said that lowering the age limit for marriage was not a solution.

"Child marriage is not a solution to protecting girls from sexual crimes including rape," Krishna Nirath, a member of the Indian National Congress wrote in an open letter to the country's minister for Women and Child Devlopment. "In fact, child marriage denies a girl of her childhood, disrupts her education, limits her opportunities, increases her risk to be a victim of violence, jeopardizes her health and therefore constitutes an obstacle to the achievement of nearly every Millennium Development Goal and the development of healthy communities."

The issue has been called to international attention after more victims began speaking out, despite the difficulty of the "hierarchy of caste."

The most vulnerable are poor women of the Dalit caste, who can often fall prey to higher-caste members with more power. The assailants often exploit their inherent authority within society, in some cases even going as far as to videotape the rapes and threaten to kill the victims' families if exposed.

In one case in the town of Dabra, a man discovered that his daughter had been gang raped when the video recording was circulated throughout his village. He became so distraught that he committed suicide by drinking pesticide.  

Another report by New Delhi Television (NDTV), said that a six-year-old girl in Gurgaon, a Delhi suburb, was "lured with chocolate to a secluded place" and raped by three men. 

The New York Times reported that rape cases in India have increased by around 25 percent in six years, a proportion of which may simply reflect a rise in the number of reports being filed. 

The discussion alone speaks volumes for India, a rapidly changing nation with a history of political injustice and gender imbalance. 

In 2011, 733 rapes were reported throughout the area of Haryana, described as "a relatively sparsely-populated state."

Reach Assistant News Editor Michelle Toh here.