Forced into marriage at age 11. And she's anything but a victim.

Trigger warning: This post deals with violence against women and may be distressing for some readers.

The stories being reported out of India recently have been devastating.

Last month two teenaged cousins were gang-raped and found hanged from a tree in the impoverished Katra village. Two more women have since been found hanging from trees in the state with at least one a possible victim of a so-called “honour killing“. And last week, a woman claimed she had been gang-raped by four police officers.

But against this frightening and oppressive backdrop, the courage of one group loudly fighting the system is difficult to ignore.

That group is the Gulabi Gang, and they’re different to any gang you’ve heard of before. They all wear bright pink saris; they all wield sticks; and they’re all unified by one aim: the struggle against discrimination and violence.

The gang’s leader Sampat Pal Devi, who married an older man at the age of 11 and bore her first child at 15, says her own turbulent experiences in her early life shaped her desire to fight for women’s rights.

“I used to listen to the women around me. They used to get beaten by their men a lot,” she tells Al Jazeera. “So I thought, nowadays man and women are like the two wheels of a vehicle… Why do women put up with this slavery?”

When she witnessed her neighbour attacking his wife, Devi stepped in and beat the attacker away with a stick — and unintentionally became a local heroine. News of her brave move spread quickly and by 2006, so many local women were seeking Devi’s help that she decided the group needed a uniform and a name. She chose pink to signify “womanhood and understated strength,” according to the group’s website, and the Gulabi Gang was born.

It has since expanded to encompass an incredible 400,000 women across 11 districts of Uttar Pradesh

The gang originally started punishing domestic violence and desertion, but it has also stopped child marriages, protested the traditional practice of dowry and tackled female illiteracy. And while it seeks solutions through rallies, negotiations and hunger strikes in the first instance, Al Jazeera reports, the Gulabi Gang sometimes also use their sticks to seek redress injustice.

“Yes, we fight rapists with lathis [sticks]. If we find the culprit, we thrash him black and blue so he dare not attempt to do wrong to any girl or a woman again,” Devi  told Al Jazeera.

“We pick up our sticks and we use them well. We beat people to protect ourselves. Now they’re scared of us, so we don’t have to use them.”

The group’s unconventional tactics may surprise some — but in the context of questionable local law enforcement mechanisms, experts say, the gang fulfils a vital social role.

“The justice system in Bundelkhand (in Uttar Pradesh) is dysfunctional and unreliable,” says author of Pink Saree Revolution, Amana Fontanella Khan. “The Gulabi Gang has stepped into the vacuum left by the state and offers an alternative means of attaining justice.”

And it’s not just gender discrimination the group opposes: Devi is also staunchly opposed to the caste system, which remains so rigid in rural India that she was shunned by members of her own family when she began working with rural Dalit women, formerly known as “untouchables”. Although “untouchability” has been formally abolished by the Indian constitution, lingering caste-related stigmas mean that rural Indian women, who generally rank lower on the caste system, suffer doubly and benefit from the strength in numbers that the Gulabi Gang represents.

One of the ways the group empowers lower-caste rural women is through self-defence training, which takes place during women’s inititation into the gang, as Devi explains in the Witness documentary.

“I am training them. Telling them we are losing out because we are women, and men don’t let women lead a proper life,” Devi says.

Devi also encourages Gang members to work with male leaders to tackle crimes against women, she told Al Jazeera — although she is uniquely and impressively direct in her approach to these men.

In an award-winning HBO documentary about the gang, for example, Devi is shown insistently pressing the police to register a criminal case over the death of a 15-year-old girl allegedly burnt to death by family members.

On another occasion, a police officer attacked Devi when she registered a complaint at the local police station– and she retaliated by beating him on the head with her stick, the gang’s website says.

As far as women’s rights go, there remains much room for improvement in Uttar Pradesh: Infanticide and child marriages are rampant in the state, while female illiteracy is at over 47 percent.

But those devastating statistics are all the more reason for women to band together in the struggle against violence, Devi says. As she reflects in an interview with Al Jazeera: “Can anyone fight alone? Power comes from struggle… I have seen the pain women suffer, and they just keep on joining me.”

“As long as I draw breath, I will not stop this struggle.”