Reflections on investigating violence against Iranian protesters
Co-authored by Maddi Wong, Melinda Zou, Stephanie Andrews, and Sabreen Tuku
On September 16, 2022, Mahsa “Jina” Amini, a 22-year-old woman from Iran’s historically marginalized Kurdish ethnic minority, died in police custody in Tehran after being in a coma for three days. She had been detained for allegedly donning an “improper hijab” while on a family trip, and was found to have sustained severe beating at the hands of Iranian security forces. Amini’s killing sparked nationwide protests. Young women took to the streets — burning their headscarves, dancing, and calling for an end to the regime. Wide swaths of Iranian society joined the movement, including parents, grandparents, ethnic and religious minorities, LGBTQ+ persons, and people representing all genders and socioeconomic backgrounds, supporting the demands for “Woman, Life, Freedom” and calling for an end to the four-decade rule of Iran by the Islamic Republic.
In response, we joined a coalition of organizations to contribute to the creation of the Iranian Archive, led by Mnemonic, to preserve the open source content people in Iran risked so much to share online and ensure that preservation complies with legal standards in order to maximize the value of that content for court. We have shared our findings with the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, and initiated a series of reports based on the data collected to pursue accountability for specific crimes.
Since protests began in September 2022, hundreds of people have been blinded or suffered other injuries in or around their eyes from metal pellets or rubber bullets. As students in the Human Rights Center’s Investigations Lab, we collected hundreds of social media photos and videos posted by victims and witnesses, establishing victims’ names, genders, ages, the dates and locations where the violence occurred, and other details. We verified details of 124 blinding incidents. We also created profiles for each of the victims, and loaded all of their data into an interactive map.
Below is a reflection authored by several of our team members on how this investigation impacted us.
Melinda Zou: Last year, I co-led the Iranian Archive Investigation at the Human Rights Center with Maddi, working with a team of talented, dedicated, and resilient students. As a recent graduate, I look back on my time at the HRC with gratitude and am thankful to have been given an opportunity to develop my OSINT skills in human rights investigations. My experience these past five semesters have ranged from identifying oceanic coordinates from terrain maps to conducting discovery from social media content. While each project required different skills and had different deliverables, all of them had a profound impact on me. The Iran Archive investigation is no different. This time, I was engaged as a co-lead and was able to be a part of every step of the process — from planning and conducting the investigation to drafting the final report. Most importantly, Maddi and I were able to center our work on the personal stories of the victims, rather than just the violence they suffered. In past investigations, I worked to discover and verify many graphic videos, however this investigation’s focus on individuals’ stories meant that our work now consisted of not only verifying graphic videos of violence, but also learning about victims’ names, stories, and circumstances. This whole-person investigation added a little pressure, but I’m thankful to have the opportunity to share the victims’ stories, beyond the violence they experienced.
I have such a deep appreciation for my co-lead Maddi, as well as Stephanie, Sabreen, Cole, Kristie, Lene, Bianca, and our team members from Berkeley Law and have been inspired by each and every one of them. As for a leadership lesson, we realized a good amount of project management was required to successfully lead this investigation. Maddi and I put a lot of effort into developing a clear timeline for the project and setting out a vision for our team, breaking it down into manageable milestones, and we found this to be immensely helpful in keeping us on track, while also providing transparency for the team. What made this investigation unique was how we tailored specific tasks to each team member’s strengths, which differed from previous projects where the team often worked on the same tasks together. It was incredibly fulfilling to work as a cohesive unit, and everyone’s input and perspectives were vital to the success of our investigation. As a recent graduate, I feel a mix of sadness about leaving such an amazing team and Lab, but also gratitude for the time I’ve spent here. I’ve been inspired and learned something from each and every member of the team, and am truly so thankful to have been a part of this investigation.
Stephanie Andrews: Our research involved gathering demographic data on individuals blinded during protests and learning as much as we could about each victim’s experience — from their lives before the protests to the injuries they sustained and the challenges they faced afterward. Some victims did not survive their injuries. For those who did, life became incredibly difficult, with many continuing to endure debilitating pain and visual impairment. Some lost their jobs, faced arrest, or were displaced from their homes in the aftermath. In my role, Idesigned visualizations to enhance our understanding of the scale, scope, and impact of the incidents on the victims, their families, and their communities. I created a timeline of documented blinding incidents to anchor individual victim stories alongside artifacts used in our research. I also created a map to illustrate where blindings in our dataset occurred, comprising some 41 locations and 114 victims. The map also interactively provides additional details, such as the names and ages of victims aggregated by city.
This research process deepened my appreciation for stories of lived experiences — illustrating the profound impact of the blindings on both individuals and communities — and for my team. Spending countless hours reviewing graphic content about how people were irreparably harmed was challenging mentally and emotionally, and I appreciated having empathetic and dedicated peers to lean on for support.
Sabreen Tuku: Over the last year, I had the immense privilege of working on the Iran Archive team investigating the blinding of protesters in Iran following the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini and the resulting violence against the Women, Life, Freedom movement protesters. I was ecstatic to join the team, but was also apprehensive from an ethical perspective. Sometimes, people think the best way to get the general public to care about human rights abuses is to show the most gruesome moments of a victim’s life or death. Some people claim that by showing these images and using inflammatory language, more people will care and act out of outrage. But by doing this, we risk turning these people — who have and had dreams, goals, and lives beyond the abuse they experienced — into statistics or talking points. It dehumanizes a victim into a depiction or symbol of violence.
State media outlets of the Islamic Republic of Iran paint the victims of state violence as terrorists threatening national security. Through these narratives, these people become either victims or aggressors; they lose all the attributes that make them human. This is why it is essential that we — those with the privilege of investigating these cases — present these individuals as full people. This is what our team aimed to do throughout the investigation. We not only searched for their blinding incidents, but used various sources such as the report “Blinding as a Weapon of Suppression” to learn about their jobs, their goals, and their families to understand who these people were before their blindings, and to better understand the effects the blinding had on their lives.
Maddi Wong: I’ve worked on many different teams during my six semesters at the Human Rights Center — from data-driven teams, to teams focused on written reports, to a team focused on investigating specific individuals. In those teams we worked towards change through the compilation of data, verification of incidents, and identification of evidence — but we never focused on the individual stories of the victims impacted as we have with the Iranian Archive investigation. Discovering the stories of the impacted individuals, learning their names, and learning about their lives beyond the violence they experienced enabled me to connect with the research on a completely different level. I see myself in some of the victims and survivors — we’re the same age, or share similar interests, which makes their story sting that much more. This investigation didn’t just tell a story through the numbers, but through the lived experiences of the people directly impacted.
Our team was made of members bearing four different graduate degrees; undergraduates from seven different majors at UC Berkeley; and consistent support from a group of external experts and advisors. Each team member’s different skills have contributed to the creation of a fruitful, elaborate project. Varied strengths in quantitative, logistical, and investigative tasks from different team members made this investigation very dynamic. Some of our team members had worked on former human rights investigations as members of HRC’s Investigations Lab, but this investigation was more graphic than most of the other projects we had worked on before. Thus, implementing resilience strategies was crucial to the success of this investigation. We encouraged our team members to avoid working in isolation, instead opting to hold group investigation sessions. Other tactics we recommended included muting videos and minimizing photo or video content on screen to reduce the impact of graphic materials.
I am forever thankful for the opportunity to have worked on this project with such a brilliant team. If we don’t help tell the stories of the Iranian people, they are reduced to data points. And we want to make sure that the story is heard around the world.
If you want to learn more about this investigation, please visit our website.
