In Iran’s 2022–2023 “Woman, Life, Freedom” rebellion, ladies’s our bodies fairly actually grew to become battlefields.
The protest motion erupted after the loss of life in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa (Jina) Amini, who was arrested by Iran’s morality police for improperly sporting a hijab.
Her loss of life grew to become a robust image of the federal government’s patriarchal management over ladies’s our bodies, and ignited protests that uncovered the regime’s use of sexual violence as a weapon of repression.
Testimonies from survivors, shared regardless of stigma and worry, revealed harrowing abuses: ladies protesters have been crushed, sexually assaulted, raped (together with gang rape and rape with objects), stripped bare and tortured throughout their arrests, transfers and detention in each official and unofficial websites, and all through interrogations.
These weren’t remoted acts however calculated methods to punish dissent and instil terror.
An Iranian girl protests the loss of life of Mahsa Amini, who died after being detained by the morality police in Tehran in September 2022. This picture was taken by a person not employed by the Related Press and obtained by the AP outdoors Iran.
(AP Picture/Center East Photos)
Marking, punishing, controlling ladies
One of the chilling testimonies belongs to a younger girl detained through the protests:
“My friends and I removed our veils in public and we were chanting. The thought never crossed my mind that the security forces would arrest us… From the moment we were arrested, they beat us violently… They told us ‘There is no God here. We are your God.’”
She was later subjected to a violent gang rape.
The Iranian authorities apparently views ladies’s our bodies as territories to be marked, disciplined and punished. Its patriarchal ideology reduces ladies to bearers of household honour and non secular purity, legitimizing state management over their look, behaviour and motion.
As French materialist feminist Colette Guillaumin theorized with the idea of “sexage”, patriarchal techniques cut back ladies to “natural objects” — beings whose our bodies, time and sexuality are appropriated and managed. Nicole-Claude Mathieu additional underlined how this appropriation operates throughout various contexts of domination.
In Iran, these insights assist clarify how the state instrumentalizes ladies’s our bodies as symbols of ideological domination and as assets to be regulated and exploited. Forcibly veiling or unveiling ladies, as Guillaumin argued, signifies public possession over their our bodies, remodeling their visibility and autonomy into objects of state management.
An Iranian girl and not using a obligatory Islamic scarf flashes a victory signal as two veiled ladies stroll by at a market in Tehran in June 2024.
(AP Picture/Vahid Salemi, File)
The politics of sexual violence
The Iranian state seemingly perceives unveiled ladies not merely as disobedient residents however as our bodies which have escaped management and refused their assigned standing of possession.
For this transgression, punishment seeks to annihilate them: via humiliation, torture and rape. Media experiences have point out that safety forces have intentionally focused feminine protesters’ eyes and genitals, additional exemplifying how ladies are diminished to mere sexual and reproductive objects.
This focused violence exposes how, within the eyes of the authorities, ladies’s identities are crudely diminished to their faces and genitals, symbols of their visibility and sexuality.
Removed from remoted acts, rapes and sexual violence dedicated by Iranian state forces through the “Woman, Life, Freedom” rebellion embody what feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon defines as a “system of sexual terrorism”, the place sexual violence is neither personal nor incidental however a methodical instrument of political domination.
Rape permits the authorities to self-discipline ladies who’ve dissented, to humiliate them and to reassert management over those that dared reclaim their our bodies and voices.
Activists in pink ‘Handmaid’s Story’ robes maintain placards with portraits of ladies who have been killed in Iran throughout an Worldwide Ladies’s Day demonstration in London in March 2023.
(AP Picture/Kin Cheung)
Stigma, silence and authorized abandonment
However sexual violence by no means ends with the act itself. Its aftermath carves deep and lasting scars in survivors’ lives.
In Iran, rape survivors endure not solely trauma but in addition social exclusion, stigma and judicial abandonment. The Iranian authorized system, which narrowly defines rape beneath “zina” (fornication), usually punishes the sufferer if she can’t produce 4 male witnesses. This usually silences survivors.
As one other survivor, interviewed by Amnesty Worldwide, declared:
“I will never be the same person again… But I hope that my testimony will result in justice, and not just for me … so maybe we can prevent similar bitter events from happening again in the future.”
The Iranian authorities’s obsession with controlling ladies extends past their our bodies to techniques of surveillance. In 2025, Tehran authorities have deployed 15,000 new AI-powered surveillance cameras, alongside drones and facial recognition applied sciences, explicitly to implement obligatory hijab legal guidelines.
In Iran, veiling is just not solely spiritual however profoundly political, a public signal of submission to patriarchal rule.
In the meantime, executions in Iran have surged to alarming ranges, with no less than 972 individuals executed in 2024 alone, the very best in eight years. Amongst these focused are ladies activists, notably from ethnic minority teams, going through loss of life sentences for his or her resistance.
The 2025 report by the United Nation’s Reality-Discovering Mission highlights the continuing instances of Pakhshan Azizi, Sharifeh Mohammadi and Varisheh Moradi, all sentenced to loss of life.
Their instances, alongside Iran’s skyrocketing execution charge, expose a terrifying sample of state femicide: the execution of ladies who dare to struggle for gender justice and human rights.
International accountability
These will not be home Iranian issues — they’re crimes in opposition to humanity.
As MacKinnon reminds us, sexual violence is just not personal, it’s a political weapon and a civil rights violation. The world should act by imposing focused sanctions on perpetrators, providing asylum to survivors and supporting Iranian feminist actions demanding justice.
To let these crimes go unanswered is to give up ladies’s our bodies to impunity. Iranian ladies have proven extraordinary braveness. The worldwide response should match their bravery with motion.
