Iranian Legal System Sees Women as Actual Properties
And it may be the goal of your politicians too
I’m sure by now you’ve heard about Iranian women’s courageous protests and seen videos of them cutting their hair, burning their scarves, and dancing in the streets while shouting Woman, Life, Freedom. You might think their main fight is against the compulsory hijab which is on its own a good enough reason to fight. However, the fight is against the entire medieval legal system which treats women as the property of the men in their lives.
A daughter is legally owned by her father to a point that he is allowed to physically and verbally abuse her, ban her from studying or working, force her into an arranged marriage, or even murder her with little to no consequences! As a girl, if your father beats you up and tortures you daily and you decide to leave him and become independent, he can file a complaint that you ran away from home or became a prostitute. The police will arrest you and hand you back to your owner to continue his abuse because “father knows best.”
In 2016, a father shot his daughter with a hunting gun in front of her university just because there were rumors that she might have a boyfriend. He did not even allow the emergency paramedics to help her. Later the town governor said such incidents are common all around the world and the media must not make a big deal out of it.
In 2019, Romina Ashrafi, a 13-year-old girl with an abusive father fell in love with a 28-year-old man and wanted to get married. In Iran, the legal age of marriage for girls is 13 but if the father desires it, he can even marry off his 9-year-old daughter to a much older man. On the other hand, even a 40-year-old woman cannot get married without her father’s formal permission.
Romina’s father did not approve of this marriage so she escaped to her lover’s sister’s house hoping they could find a way to get married in secret. The police found the couple and even though Romina begged them not to send her back to her father, the police handed her over to her owner. The next day, Romina’s father decapitated her in her sleep to protect his masculine honor. A dead daughter is better than a disobeying one.
This decision of Romina’s father was not out of spontaneous anger but it was well planned and researched. When he was asked why he killed his own daughter and not the man Romina fell in love with, he answered because he knew by killing a man he will receive a death sentence. Just because this case became viral on social media he was sentenced to 9 years of prison but most of the similar cases before him were all sentenced to only 1 or 2 years of prison at most.
With everything mentioned about fathers, a husband’s power and authority over his wife is even more horrific. Not only there is absolutely no law to support women against domestic abuse and marital rape, but also they lose so many of their basic rights by getting married.
A married woman cannot leave the country without her husband’s permission. She needs a legal written statement of permission from her husband to get a passport and of course, the husband can always ban her from leaving the country without any specific reason.
In February 2021, Samira Zargari the coach of the national women’s alpine ski team was banned from leaving the country after a fight with her husband and she could not accompany her team to international matches in Italy. So many women have lost great life opportunities this way.
Moreover, a woman does not have the right to continue her studies or work without her husband’s approval and the husband can legally ban her from going to university or working. At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, a doctor lost her job at the hospital due to her husband’s disapproval of the night shifts she had to spend at the hospital twice a week. They had even filed a legal agreement before the marriage that the wife will be allowed to stay a doctor however, that wasn’t enough to protect her basic right to practice the profession she tried for years to build.
A husband has the full right of choosing their place of residence. He can suddenly decide to move to a different state and the wife will be legally obliged to leave her education and work and follow her husband. If the wife does not follow her husband immediately, he can stop his financial support and remarry without divorcing the first wife.
Getting a divorce for Iranian women is almost impossible while men can get a divorce whenever they desire. There are only a few reasons which give the wife the right to file for a divorce but they should be proven in court which is a difficult and very expensive process for women who might not have financial independence thanks to the same legal system. For example, one of these reasons is severe addiction which affects marital life negatively. Although, the judge has the full authority on determining what is considered a negative effect. There was a case where the husband had extreme addiction to opium and the wife was under sexual, physical, verbal and financial abuse from her husband but the judge decided this wasn’t a good enough reason for her to request a divorce.
In 2008, Khadije, a young woman with an addicted abusive husband, tried to file for a divorce. The husband started a rumor that she wanted a divorce because she was having an affair with another man. Her two uncles, to protect their masculine honor and dignity and prove they have full control over her, kidnapped her and started decapitating her with a knife while asking her with whom she was having an affair and why she wanted a divorce. She survived this attack but as always, justice was not served for those men.
If the woman is lucky and finally gets a divorce, there comes the question of the child’s custody. The mother only has custody of her children until they turn 7 years old and if she decides to remarry, she can lose the custody. She can also lose custody for different reasons including immorality which can be defined as anything a patriarchal system desires, including her choice of clothing.
Even during these 7 years, she does not have full custody and the right to important legal, financial and educational decisions remains with the father. Girls after the age of 9 and boys after the age of 15 can decide which parent they want to live with but as I mentioned, the right to important decisions remains with the father since “father knows best.”
Some of the stories I told are unfortunately happening much more often than you might think. When the whole legal system is broken, it becomes so easy to take women’s autonomy, freedom, or even their lives. As an Iranian woman, it’s so painful for me to see so many legal systems around the world get more and more broken every day by taking women’s rights away. The Polish government which lets women die during fatal childbirth or the American government which doesn’t let a teenage rape victim get an abortion are not much better than the Iranian regime that kills women for improper hijab. They function on the same mentality and if they are not stopped, they can get more similar to Iran in no time.
I wonder when the patriarchy and radical religious ideas will stop controlling women’s lives and I believe that all women around the world, not just in Iran or the Middle East, need to shout loud and clear to their politicians “Woman, life, freedom.”
Jin, Jiyan, Azadi
Zan, Zendegi, Azadi
Kobieta, Życie, Wolność
…..
For more stories about women or other disempowered groups, follow Fourth Wave. Got one of your own? Submit to the Wave!
