Rape and brutal assaults… How is the Iranian regime trying to rein in women’s protests?
One measure of the Iranian regime’s hypocrisy is credible reports that it is enforcing its supposedly strict moral code by arresting and then sexually assaulting women and girls accused of preaching debauchery. In a scathing report on the rape of protesters by security forces, CNN revealed how a 20-year-old woman allegedly led the protests was arrested and later taken by police to a hospital in Karaj – shaking violently, shaking with her head shaved and being assaulted – before being sent back to prison.
Assaults and torture
The New York Times, confirmed that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have independently documented several cases of sexual assault. Hadi Ghemi of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, a monitoring organization in New York, said of a 14-year-old girl from a poor neighborhood in Tehran who protested the removal of her headscarf in school. She was identified as blindfolded after being arrested from school. Shortly afterwards, the girl was taken to a hospital where she was being treated for heavy bleeding as a result of the assault. She later died, and her mother disappeared after initially saying she would publicly disclose what had happened to her daughter.
It said it was not easy to learn about the brutal physical torture inflicted on girls, and sometimes the authorities portrayed these assaults and subjected them to protesters in detention as a form of psychological torture.
Iranian repression
Nika Shahkarami , a 16-year-old girl who had her headscarf burned in public, was arrested by security forces and days later, pronounced dead. An autopsy reportedly found that her skull, pelvis, arms and legs were broken.
According to the U.S. newspaper, the uprising across Iran is not about covering their heads, they are on the verge of toppling a dysfunctional, corrupt, repressive, brutal regime. The regime is trying to cover up what is happening at home, by banning most foreign correspondents from covering the demonstrations. So there are no television teams on the streets to register schoolchildren risking their lives to confront the regime thugs.
The newspaper added that what is striking is even the refusal of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to the regime, with one of them telling a foreign correspondent, “How can we emigrate, so we want to leave the hell of the mullahs’ regime?” After more than four decades, desperate Iranians are trying to extricate themselves from this well, led by girls who have persevered despite the threat of arrest, torture and execution, they understand that gross debauchery does not lie in a girl’s exposed hair but in the government that rapes her because of it, and they must receive more international support.
