India, May 24 -- Young woman's death reignites debate over dowry harassment, family pressure, failures of social institutions.

When violence against a woman makes the front pages, something in us responds to the face and the name rather than the pattern they confirm. We mourn before we examine; we feel the particular horror clearly, and leave the structural logic that produced it unexamined, because that logic has no face, appears in no footage, and cannot be arrested.

There is a further complication. When the spectacle carries the right elements, it briefly convinces us that we are doing more than mourning: we are demanding accountability, calling for reform, applying pressure to a system. And then the system absorbs the pressure, the ...