Tomorrow, Tuesday, November 25, is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. November 25 marks the assassination of the Mirabal sisters; Patria, Minerva, and María Teresa who were murdered in 1960 for their political resistance against the dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. Their killing became the origin of this international day of struggle against violence toward women. After many years, a review of studies conducted around the world shows that violence against women continues, in varying degrees, in all societies. Even advanced capitalist societies still witness shocking examples of this inhumane violence.
In Iran, extensive research has been carried out by pioneering women and freedom-seeking, equality-minded men on the disturbing dimensions of violence inflicted on women, research whose publication has been banned by official authorities. The last official statistics on this issue come from a study conducted in 2004 and registered in the Ministry of Interior. According to this study, 66% of Iranian women are systematically subjected to violence.
Misogyny in Iran under the rule of the Islamic regime, after the 1979 revolution, began with the imposition of compulsory hijab, the repression of women, and the denial of freedom of dress. In the early years of its rule, the newly established Islamic regime rapidly invaded all aspects of women’s lives, intensifying various forms of oppression ranging from domestic violence and child marriage to honour killings and acid attacks on free-spirited women, and more. But this misogyny did not end there; it led to the drafting of laws derived from Islamic Sharia. Thus, violence against women was effectively transformed into a state-sanctioned criminal act. When even the country’s official laws institutionalise violence against women, women can rely on nothing but their own strength, resilience, and perseverance.
In 2022, during the Jina Revolution with the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom,” this misogyny was challenged by freedom-seeking and equality-seeking women and men in Kurdistan and across Iran. Yet this same period also revealed, more clearly than ever, the regime’s brutality and deep-rooted hostility toward women: the killing and targeted assassination of girls in the streets, mass arrests, the use of the long-standing tool of sexual violence and organised torture in prisons, the poisoning of schools and girls’ dormitories, all of these were criminal methods widely deployed against the just movement of Iranian women during this time.
In the three years since the Jina Revolution began, the Islamic Republic’s authorities have tried to confront women and girls who refuse compulsory hijab through implementing the Hijab Bill, the Noor Plan, and punishments such as heavy fines, property confiscation, and more. The answer to all of these colourful schemes has been given by free-spirited women in the streets and public spaces by casting off the compulsory hijab. Today, it can be clearly declared that in this struggle, free women have prevailed, and the Islamic regime is helpless and defeated.
The experience of the Jina revolutionary movement has shown, in the most striking way, that only a united global struggle by freedom-seeking, equality-seeking women and men can dismantle unequal power relations by uprooting the outdated culture of patriarchy and structural violence in political, economic, cultural, and social spheres, and bring the struggle for gender equality to fruition. Yet despite all this, we must emphasise that there is still a long road ahead to eliminate all forms of violence against women and all other inequalities in various domains. Without a doubt, the era of the oppression of women will also come to an end, and we will eventually reach the destination of freedom and liberation. Without a doubt, future humanity will be ashamed of the period in which half of society’s body was subjected to such abuse.
This year, on November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, we will by every possible means and in solidarity with other women’s-rights activists honour the achievements of this liberation movement and raise our voices for the inevitable freedom awaiting the women of tomorrow, under the slogan: “Woman, Life, Freedom – Jin, Jiyan, Azadî.”
