By Nilo Tabrizy (Nilo Tabrizy is a video reporter for The Washington Post’s Visual Forensics team. Before joining The Post, she worked as a video journalist at the New York Times, where she covered Iran, race and policing, and abortion access. She was also a reporter at Vice News covering drug policy and harm reduction.)
A young Iranian woman was recorded this month arguing with security forceswhile stripped to her underwear at her university in Tehran. The videos, first shared by a citizen journalism account online, showed her arrest by plainclothes authorities — and quickly went viral as yet another symbol of Iranian women standing up to government repression.
The woman’s identity and whereabouts remain unclear, as does a full accounting of the incident that took place at Islamic Azad University on Nov. 2. Iran’s mission to the United Nations declined to comment on the case. In a statement, Amnesty International said the woman was “violently arrested” after removing her clothing in protest of the “abusive enforcement” of Iran’s strict Islamic dress code.
The incident recalled a similar arrest two years ago, when 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in police custody after she was detained for an alleged dress code violation. Her death set off months of nationwide protests, which were eventually crushed. Since then, the government has cracked down hard on dissent to prevent a repeat of that unrest, enacting even more laws restricting women’s rights.
The two publicly availablevideos from Nov. 2 show that the woman’s exchange with police happened in plain view of students on the university campus in northern Tehran, but was far from the central bustle of the capital.
“I can’t believe [what I’m seeing],” someone says off camera duringthe first video. The footage, which was taken around midday in Iran and lasts just one minute, is filmed from behind a curtain as the woman outside, dressed only in her bra and underwear, appears to be arguing with university security personnel on the steps of the school.
A video recorded some time later shows the still-undressed woman walking down a street and captures the moment when several people in plain clothes hustle her into a car.
The image of the woman, crossing her arms and surrounded by a crowd of bystanders, has spread widely inside Iran and across the world. “This is not just a momentary solitary act of defiance,” said Khosro Isfahani, an open-source investigator with the Atlantic Council who tracked the spread of the video online. “She’s rebelling against the whole system of oppression that women face in Iran.”
An eyewitness who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals said the situation escalated because security forces used violence to enforce the university dress code.
The witness, who is a student at the university, said the episode began when a member of the Basij, a volunteer paramilitary force within Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, grabbed the woman’s arm with both hands and dragged her toward him. The Basij is active at universities and even middle schools, and acts as a campus enforcer of the government’s hard-line Islamist ideology.
“I saw that this girl wasn’t wearing a maghnaeh and her hair was out,” the witness said, referring to the mandatory conservative hijab that female students must wear to school.
He then watched as two universitysecurity officers — one male and one female — started beating the woman and tried to force her inside a security post near the university’s entrance. And because they were “pulling her by [grabbing] her clothing,” her top was ripped off in the struggle. The girl began screaming “shameless,” a frequent insult against those aligned with the regime, before taking off her pants and throwing them at the security guards.
On the same steps that were seen in the video, she addressed the security officers who confronted her, the witness said.
“You’ve turned the university into a whorehouse, and now you’re worried about what I’m wearing?” she said, referring to the officers tearing off her blouse,according to the witness. The security officers didn’t react, he added, and instead started making calls on their cellphones.
As the woman walked “proudly, without fear and without paying any mind to how cold it was,” according to the witness, a car with four male security officers approached her. They attacked her and smashed her head onto the body of the car, he said, before throwing her in the back seat in broad daylight and driving away.
Later that day, the university’s public relations director said the woman suffered from a “mental disorder.” A government spokesperson told Iran’s Hammihan newspaper that she was taken from the police station directly to a “center for treatment. ”
Nahid Naghshbandi, an Iran researcher at Human Rights Watch, said these claims are part of the government’s playbook for suppressing hijab-related incidents — falsely reframing the situation as a mental health crisis. “They want to say that these people are not in their right mind,” she said, noting that this is a tactic used to “humiliate” women who resist wearing the hijab.
At the same time, the government has released little to no information about the case.
“This is a case that, because [the government] knows it’s getting lots of attention, they’re trying to make sure no information is coming out,” Naghshbandi said.
And with new restrictions that mandate steeper consequences for dress code violations, she said, women in Iran are “putting their lives in danger to just resist on an everyday basis.”
Source: The Washington Post