ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Amnesty International condemned Iranian security forces’ use of rape and other forms of sexual violence to suppress the “Woman Life Freedom” Movement during the Islamic republic’s crackdown on demonstrations that shook the country following the death of Zhina (Mahsa) Amini, the young Kurdish woman killed at the hands of the morality police last year, in a report published on Wednesday.
The report chronicles the experiences of 45 survivors who were sexually abused following their arbitrary arrest for their participation in the protest movement that swept through Iran in response to the death of twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman Amini while in police custody on September 16, 2022.
She had been arrested for allegedly wearing a lax hijab. Her death sparked nationwide protests that posed the biggest threat to the Iranian regime in 40 years. Protesters chanting “Jin Jiyan Azadi” (Woman Life Freedom) began by calling for greater freedoms, the movement grew into an anti-government revolution as the authorities responded with violence. Hundreds of people were killed and thousands were arrested.
The testimonies documented in Amnesty’s report include the stories of 26 men, 12 women, and seven children. Amnesty obtained and reviewed medical records, photographic evidence of the abuses, and written complaints by the survivors themselves or their family members.
“Sexual violence was used by state agents with total impunity as a weapon of torture to crush protesters’ spirit, self-esteem and sense of dignity, to deter further protests, and to punish them for challenging the political and security establishment and its entrenched system of gender-based discrimination,” stated the report.
According to the document, the intelligence and security forces responsible for arbitrarily arresting protesters and subjecting them to sexual violence include Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the paramilitary Basij force, and the Ministry of Intelligence, as well as various police force bodies.
Rape and other forms of sexual violence, which, in the case of women included grabbing, groping, beating, and kicking their breasts, genitals, and buttocks, as well as stripping them of their clothes, and in the case of men often featured the administration of electric shocks and sticking needles into their genitals; were frequently accompanied by other forms of torture and ill-treatment which caused injuries that intelligence and security forces routinely denied survivors medical care for.
Amnesty International’s Secretary-General Agnes Callamard stressed the need for the international community to stand with the survivors in pursuit of justice by supporting the extension of the UN fact-finding mission on Iran, emphasizing that “Iran’s prosecutors and judges were not only complicit by ignoring or covering up survivors’ complaints of rape, but also used torture-tainted ‘confessions’ to bring spurious charges against survivors and sentence them to imprisonment or death. Victims have been left with no recourse and no redress; only institutionalized impunity, silencing and multiple physical and psychological scars running deep and far.”
