Violence against women in Iran encompasses various forms of "gender-based violence" and may include emotional, physical, sexual or mental abuse, most commonly committed by a man against a woman. Common forms of violence against women in Iran include acts such as domestic abuse, rape and murder.
Behavior, or even the threat of behavior, that is violent and based on gender and that results in physical, sexual or psychological harm and suffering to women is defined as violence against women. Under this definition, coercion and the arbitrary deprivation of liberty of women, whether occurring in public or in private life, fall within the definition of violence against women. The concept of structural violence was first proposed by Johan Galtung in 1969.
Violence against women is a phenomenon in which a woman is subjected to the use of force and the violation of her rights by the opposite sex because of her gender, simply because she is a woman. In general, any act or behavior that results in physical, sexual or psychological harm to a woman, or in her deprivation or suffering, is called violence against women. The threat of such acts and behaviors, and the deprivation of liberty whether by coercion or by choice, in personal or collective life, is also considered violence against women.
Domestic violence most often refers to a man's assault on his wife (a female intimate partner). Domestic violence against women can be defined as any gender-related act or omission that results in death, or physical, sexual or psychological harm and moral injury to women, committed by persons who are connected to them through family ties, or even without such ties, through kinship or verbal relationships, including casual relationships.
Police violence against women, including beating them on various pretexts, is a manifestation of violence against women in some countries.
Concept Violence against women is an old and relatively widespread phenomenon in all societies. "Violence against women" is a term or concept used broadly and inclusively to cover verbal abuse, intimidation, physical harassment, murder, rape and sexual assault.Dobash, R. Emerson. and Russell Dobash. Rethinking Violence against Women. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998. Print. This form of violence is gender-based: the violence occurs precisely because of the victims' gender, in particular because the victims are women.
The United Nations defines as "violence against women" behavior, or even the threat of behavior, that is violent and gender-based and that results in physical, sexual and psychological harm and suffering to women. Under this definition, coercion and the arbitrary deprivation of liberty of women, whether occurring in public or in private life, fall within the definition of "violence against women".
Among the reasons for the emergence of this concept are changing gender roles and, consequently, changes in the position of women and in the balance of power between men and women within the family and society, which ultimately led to a re-examination of the description of women's rights. According to human rights definitions, physical violence, psychological violence, sexual violence, economic violence, state violence and social violence can be named as types of violence against women. The concept of structural violence was first proposed by Johan Galtung in 1969. In Violence, Peace, and Peace Research, Galtung writes:
Systemic violence affects every aspect of women's lives, from their personal health and safety to the mental health of their children. Women who are deprived of their fundamental rights because of structural inequalities face physical harms such as unwanted pregnancies, unsafe abortions, HIV/AIDS and lifelong disabilities, as well as psychological harms such as fear, anxiety, depression, sexual dysfunction and obsessive behaviors. In fact, this violence is not a behavior directed at an individual but stems from unequal power relations between men and women, which make the exercise of such violence possible.
Types
Police violence Police violence against women in the Islamic Republic, including beating them on various pretexts, is a manifestation of violence against women in Iran.
On Friday 16 Ordibehesht 1401 (6 May 2022), in the area of Latyan Dam, a police officer beat a woman and then, together with two other officers, forced her into a police vehicle. A video of this police violence against an Iranian woman was widely circulated on social media.
Femicide
Femicide is defined in a World Health Organization report as "the intentional murder of women because they are women".“Understanding and Addressing Violence against Women. ” World Health Organization, World Health Organization, 2012, apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/77421/WHO_RHR_12.38_eng.pdf;jsessionid=2E636E5F0740BAC96712F0F2C005A00A?sequence=1. Similarly, it is defined by UN Women, the Alliance to End Violence against Women, and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights as the "violent death of women for gender-related reasons". Femicide is classified as a specific type of violence against women or gender-based violence, which the United Nations in 1979 described as "a mechanism of domination, control, oppression and power over women".Pick, Susan, et al. “Violence against Women in Mexico. ” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, New York Academy of Sciences, 5 Dec. 2006, nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1196/annals.1385.014.
Under Iranian domestic law, because the male head of the family holds guardianship over the "body and soul" of the women under his care, as father or husband, femicide carries the lightest punishments, and many men have committed femicide or killings under the pretext of honor. The father of Romina Ashrafi, who was killed on 21 May 2020 (Khordad 1399), was sentenced to only nine years' imprisonment and the payment of blood money. According to the lawyer of Romina's mother, the verdict was not unexpected. Iranian law not only fails to prohibit violence against women but, by protecting the perpetrator, systematically encourages such violence in many cases.
Data indicate a sharp upward trend in familial femicide in Iran: the organization Stop Femicide in Iran reported 93 known killings in the first half of 2024 alone, an increase of nearly 60 percent over the same period in 2023. According to the organization, there were 149 known cases in the whole of 2023, an average of nearly one killing every two days. The newspaper Etemad reported that in the first three months of the Iranian year 1403 (2024), at least 35 women and girls were killed by their male relatives, a 25 percent increase over 2023 and 59 percent over 2022, while the newspaper Shargh noted that at least 165 women had been killed by men in their families since July 2021.
Reported killings of women represent only a small fraction of actual cases in Iran, since no accurate statistics exist because of the many cases that go unreported or are wrongly reported as suicide or accidents. Every study conducted so far has shown a significant number of such killings and a continuing increase in them. The killers are mostly husbands (or ex-husbands) who use brutal methods, and the victims include women of all ages but mostly under 30, with children often witnessing the act.
Honor killings
Honor killings occur mostly in traditional societies with a patriarchal and religious culture. The perpetrators of honor killings in Iran are generally close male relatives (mahram) of the women, who commit femicide under the cover of the law, in the name of religion and the protection of gheyrat (honor). In Ordibehesht 1387 (April–May 2008), ISNA, quoting Colonel Mokhtari Fard, head of the criminal investigation police of Khuzestan province, wrote that more than 40 percent of murders in Khuzestan were honor killings. According to him, in terms of honor-killing statistics Khuzestan was second in the country after Sistan and Baluchestan province. Fereydoun Abdi, head of the Welfare Organization office in Dezful, announced that in 1397 (2018–19), 225 cases of violence against women were recorded at the social emergency service of Dezful County.
A descriptive-analytical study conducted in 1386 (2007–08) at the School of Public Health of Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, with a sample of 1,820 women aged 14 to 56 covered by health centers in four cities (Ahvaz, Abadan, Dezful and Andimeshk), showed that the prevalence of physical violence at any time during married life was 20.2 percent, and the prevalence of psychological violence, sexual violence and any form of violence was 41, 10.9 and 47.3 percent respectively. Another study, conducted in 1394 (2015–16) by the deputy for education, research and technology of Abadan University of Medical Sciences, showed that the overall prevalence of violence was 72.3 percent, and that psychological, physical, life-threatening and sexual violence among these women were 71.7, 17.8, 8.3 and 7.1 percent respectively.
The Welfare Organization of Kerman province, in a study conducted with the help of Kerman University of Medical Sciences on violence against women in the marginal areas of Kerman, found that violence against women in these areas is high. The most common types of violence were, in order, psychological, verbal, physical, economic and sexual. Of the participants in the study, 46 percent had experienced some type of violence; of these, psychological violence accounted for 78.6 percent, physical for 55.6 percent, sexual for 28.6 percent and economic for 34.7 percent.
Establishment of safe houses
Kerman is one of the provinces in which a shelter for women who have experienced violence has been established, and in the whole country 33 safe houses have been built in various cities. These houses serve as centers for women at risk of violence, for women who face problems in society and in their personal lives.
Law After the murder of Romina Ashrafi, the Vice Presidency for Women and Family Affairs of the Rouhani government proposed a plan to increase the punishment for fathers who kill their children, but it had no effect in the court that tried Romina's father. On this case, the lawyer told the newspaper Shargh about the importance of reviewing the law:
Most girls and women who fall victim to honor killings are those who stand up against the ruling patriarchal and domineering laws. Civil activists and human rights activists believe that the frequency of honor killings is due to the misogynistic laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran. A spokesperson for the Campaign to Stop Honor Killings said: "In the past 20 years, the number of honor killings in Iran has increased." In one study of the honor-killing cases of 1,220 women killed over the previous 20 years (up to 1398 / 2019–20), the research findings show that the number of killings over the last two decades has not only increased but has passed the crisis threshold. Of these killings, 286 were carried out with firearms, followed in frequency by killings with rope (hanging), knives, cleavers, acid attacks and fire.
Works
In cinema
Several films on this subject have been made in Iranian cinema, including the following:
Orion – Ali Zamani Paternal House – Kianoush Ayari The Girl's House – Shahram Shah-Hosseini Sadeq the Kurd – Naser Taghvai Qeysar – Masoud Kimiai Lottery – Mohammad Hossein Mahdavian Butterfly Swim – Mohammad Kart
Human trafficking and forced prostitution
According to the annual report on human trafficking published by the United States Department of State in 2016, the number of Iranian women and girls taken to Dubai and to Iraqi Kurdistan for forced sexual services has increased. At the beginning of the section on Iran, the report states: