American tourist gang raped in Manali, India

A 30-year-old American woman was gang-raped by three men in a truck in Manali, Himachal Pradesh, in the early hours of Tuesday, June 4, 2013.

Indian police said she had been hitchhiking back to her guest house after visiting a friend when three men picked her up and drove her to a secluded spot, where they raped her. She went to the police, who filed a rape case, and the attackers were being sought. (NPR)

She was far from the only foreign tourist attacked in India that year.

In March 2013, a Swiss woman was gang-raped by six men while camping in a forest in Datia, Madhya Pradesh, as she and her husband cycled across the country — her husband held back at gunpoint while she was attacked. (NPR)

In April, Germans Carolina De Paolo and Canan Wahner — on a six-week tour of India — were groped on trains to Goa: a man ran his hand up Wahner's leg on one train, and a different man grabbed De Paolo's breasts from behind on another. "I wanted to scream and do something, but he ran away," De Paolo said. (AP)

The damage to India's tourism image was real. An ASSOCHAM survey of 1,200 tour operators found that foreign women tourists to India had fallen 35 percent in three months, and overall tourist arrivals 25 percent, with 72 percent of operators reporting cancellations — mostly from women in Britain, the United States, Canada, and Australia. (Domain-b, Impact Lab)

India's travel industry disputed the numbers — the tourism minister said arrivals in January and February 2013 were actually up 2.1 percent, and tour-operator body IATO called the survey baseless. (TTG Asia)

But the perception had taken hold: after the December 2012 Delhi gang rape, several countries issued travel advisories about India, and a stream of attacks on foreign women was becoming the country's image abroad.