Five women sit in a crowded auto rickshaw, shoulder to shoulder, begging the driver to hurry. A large mob of enraged men surround the vehicle, their angry voices piercing the quiet evening. The women soon realize their seemingly innocent decision to buy alcohol had violated deeply entrenched social conventions in this rural community in central India. They had not meant to cause offense, but it was too late. Stranger’s hands quickly grasp at my chest through the open windows, and attempt to keep us from leaving. As the driver races down the road, expertly evading the throng of indignant onlookers, the women breathe shakily, looking at each other with anxious eyes. “We’ll be OK,” I say with less confidence than I feel. “We just have to get back to the house. We’ll be safe there.” Safety for female travelers, and women in general all over the world, is an important, yet complicated topic. With a population of over a billion people, this complexity has become extremely evident in India in recent years, with increasing numbers of high-profile rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment cases gaining national and global attention. Stories of women raped on a bus after visiting the cinema or by the side of the road while trying to fix a flat tire inundate readers with gory details but often offer little in the way of solutions. The women in the house surrounded by men threatening violence were all white, educated women from Western countries volunteering at a local human rights organization in Raipur, India. This is in clear contrast to the over 30,000 reported rapes cases in India each year largely involving poor, rural, marginalized women and girls. Despite the many highly publicized cases involving educated, urban women in public spaces, there are many more women whose stories are not told and who continue to suffer silently, behind closed doors. Suffering women like the unnamed housewife who lived next to me. As the sun rises above Raipur in a breath-taking splash of purple and red, screams pierce the early morning stillness. I can’t see her, but I can hear her pain and feel her fear. A booming voice quickly follows, and then the sound of something, or someone, slamming into a wall. I don’t speak her language, but in my heart, I can only imagine she is bellowing, “No! Please stop. You’re hurting me. Why are you doing this? Stop!” But he doesn't stop. During our night of uncertainty, we braced ourselves inside our two-story house, hoping fiercely the weak fence surrounding the property would deter anyone from attempting to enter. For hours, strangers paced outside, throwing rocks at the windows in sync with our movements inside. We knew we were being watched, and we knew we had no one to help us. The thoughts kept repeating like a battering ram in my brain, “What are they planning? How can we survive if they choose to attack us? Who should we call? If they come inside, I’ll grab a knife from the kitchen to protect myself.” When I first arrived in India, alone, with my passionate yet naive dream of “making a difference,” I had no idea the roller coaster of emotions I would face. Gazing at the majestic marble and history of the Taj Mahal filled me with wonder, in stark juxtaposition to the unbearable pain I saw in the eyes of traumatized female torture survivors. On the other hand, I will never forget the exhilaration of traveling across the countryside, sitting with my legs dangling outside a speeding train crammed beyond capacity with hundreds of people, holding on tightly but breathing freely. After four months in a land of sacred temples, complex history, and diverse culture, I was not the same idealistic traveler as when I started. Although it doesn’t come close to the pain and trauma so many women have had to endure, the fear, sexual harassment, and threats of violence I experienced have given me new eyes. My passion still blazes, whenever I read about another woman terrorized anywhere in the world, and I am much more aware how important it is to look for and acknowledge the suffering happening behind closed doors.