What the Nuclear Sanctions Did to Iranian Women? Part 1
An Epoch of Precarization and Destitute
The global Media tends to hear and spread the familiar stories about Iranian woman; her adventure to revolt against compulsory hijab. Although, the other aspects of her struggles are being muted and untold; including the lethal strikes of international nuclear sanctions on her welfare, education and life.
This article sheds light on the fact that the all these sanctions led to precarization of Iranian women in a vastly country-wide scale.
Background
The international community has been suspicious of Iran nuclear program over the years. The intense regime of financial and economic sanctions were imposed by the UN on Iran in 2012 to require Tehran to halt its nuclear ambitiousness. As the predictable consequence, these internationally supported boycotts, froze Iran’s economy. Export of oil drastically dropped and countries income extremely shrank. It can be translated to distribution of poverty and deterioration of life quality for millions of Iranians. The plight of sanctions hit hundreds of thousands of families, and the size of middle class waned in the expense of expansion for the poor class longitude. Both men and women were victims of this dead end, however, women were blown harder.
Sanctions, Housewives and Cases of Divorce
In the first place, one can investigate the situation of the women and daughters who are economically dependent on their husbands and fathers. However, the destiny of all these families was in control of a board of decision makers in the SC. In 31 July 2006 SC adopted the 1696 Resolution and warned Iran to diminishes its non-translucent nuclear activities.[x] Even though, Ahmadinejad never heeded attention and provoked the SC by a very informal Persian saying. He advised SC to adopt as much sanctions on Iran till it gets tired.[xi] Instead SC issued 5 more sanctions and hauled Iran into a strict island of isolation both politically and economically. In the climax of the embargo in 2012 U.S. law went into effect giving Obama the power to sanction foreign banks, including the central banks of U.S. allies if they fail significantly to reduce their imports of Iranian oil.[xii] As the result, the oil export of Iran sharply dropped. Almost at the same time, SWIFT halted all its interaction with Iranian banks. All in all, the oil export volume of Iran decreased more than 50% and the state’s income drastically plunged. Government had not enough money or international credit to import the essential production factors for the domestic factories. Consequently, the rate of unemployment boomed severely up to 35% which touched the everyday life of millions of Iranians.[xiii] As time went by, millions of Iranians came across hardship of lacking enough money to afford the basics of life including drugs, meat, sugar, etc. As M. Emadi acknowledges “it has become a humanitarian issue”.[xiv]
This was a perplexity of precariousness for the fathers and husbands as the breadwinners of the families. Nevertheless, the situation of the ones who were dependent on these men were more precarious. M. Abhari an Iranian sociologist contends that the joblessness of the breadwinners ends up in a cluster of social flaws including divorce and addiction. He explicitly acknowledges that the sanctions has boosted up the number of the divorces in Iran.[xv]
This warning can make more sense while one puts this pattern in the context of Iran’s society. As a matter of fact, the divorced women are one of the most vulnerable groups of the society. In the societies like Iran which still has sub-cultural groups with rooted patrimonial mindsets, a typical divorced woman experiences the station of insecurity in her everyday life. For instance, in the commoner language there are some sayings and slang which vividly express the uncertain and subordinate place of the divorced women.
There are loads of bloggers who share their bitter experience of being a divorced woman in Iran and elaborately mirror how the divorced women are shortchanged.[xvi] Other than that, in extensive research of S. Isari et al. “objectification” by society is the first feedback which the divorced Iranian woman encounter right after the divorce.[xvii] In this way, society downgrades a typical divorced women like an abject who urgently needs economic support and is ready to serve her buddy to anybody who patrons her. Some interviewees in Isari et.al. study mention how after the divorce, the society assumes them as preys of sex for money. The flood of sexual harassment overwhelms them from any sides, not only the employers but the relatives and the others offer them “Sigheh”. “Sigheh” in Shia terminology is called to a sort of short term marriage in which the male part offers and pays a certain amount of money to the female part in order to have sex with her.[xviii] As one can guess, the very main root of trouble here is that the divorced woman all of the sudden loses all financial patronage which she used to had before with her husband. She is like a unequipped solder in the battlefield of the life, alone against all the economic and dignity hardships. Of course the well-off parents can support their daughters after the divorce but, it is not the case for hundreds of thousands of Iranian parents who live under the poverty line[xix] and have no ability to cast shade of abutment over their divorced girls.
Living a normal life among the patriarchy layers of Iran’s society is not an easy deal for substantial number of Iranian women who ended up in divorce due to the economical hardships of the sanctions. The empirical research of A. Samadi Rad portraits that 71% of divorced women take care of their children while solely 16% of them work[xx]. Additionally, 90% of all them suffer from chronic anxiety which arises from insecure future of their children.[xxi] Other than all these psychic abrasions, the situation gets tougher when it comes to material aspects of life. In the other words, it is not an easy deal for divorced woman to rent or buy a shelter. Samadi acknowledges that 39% of them face intricate situation to have accommodation without introducing a man as their husband or father (or brother).[xxii] In the way explanation, some conservative men are still drowned to this old fashioned mindset that signing a contract with a lonely woman presages bad luck. These are the remnants of pre-modern mentality in Iran which still survive in the lingual-mental interactions of society. Samadi’s extensive research also mirrors a considerable proportion of divorced women who have whose freedom is confined buy family. It means that 40% of them are deprived of the freedom they used to have as a girl before marriage.[xxiii] These confinements are posed on the time of leaving home, the time of staying outside at night, the expanse of social interactions, etc. Noteworthy is that family (parents and brothers) can exercise this power on the divorced woman much easier solely due to fact that the she is coming from a failure life and psychologically and economically depends on her family.
All in all, these disorders can push the divorced woman in a very harmful valley of getting married fast in order to get rid of this conjuncture. Obviously, these fast marriages are not backed to enough insights of two side from each other and probably will be a new case of failure.
To wrap up, one clearly sees that boomed rate of divorce after the sanctions has led to more precarization of a lot of Iranian women.
Sanctions, Dropouts and Marriage of Children
Another aspect of consolidation of women’s precarity after the sanctions is the dropouts of girls from school. The drop of the income for multitude of Iranian families after the SC’s sanctions has led to a trend which deserves real concern of policymakers in IRI. This trend is the dropouts of the girls from schools. A. Gharaei Moghaddam an Iranian sociologist specifies two pivotal causal factors for girls dropouts which economic factor is one of them.[xxiv] The poor and hurt families ought to select between limited choices and should decide whether cut some necessary expenditures of life or send their daughters to school. G. Ghavami holds that in so many instances, the destitute families have deprived their daughters of the school in order to be able to keep the family financially surviving.[xxv] In these cases the girls are the first groups who their right is shortchanged especially in the outcast parts of the country. For instance, M. Arefi reveals the remarkable role of poverty for girl’s dropouts in rural parts of West-Azerbaijan province.[xxvi] On the other hand D. Sakhaei declares at the heavy contract of economic problems in one of the most industrial and richest provinces of Iran on the girl’s dropouts. His study highlights that loads of parents in Isfahan (a province with the relatively highest share of Iran’s GDP and lowest trend of unemployment) are financially impotent of affording the schooling expenses of their children. What happens next is that the family prefers to send the boys to school and encourage (in some cases force) the girls to get married earlier.[xxvii] Thus, they can slash the expenditure of family and reschedule the financial priorities.
Furthermore, the issue that exacerbates the precarization of Iranian women after the sanctions, is the enhancement of the children marriage trends. S. Molaverdi vice president of Iran in the section of Women and Family Affairs acknowledges that poverty is the main cause behind the increasing number of the children marriage in Iran.[xxviii] She even points out that in some regions the age of marriage has fallen to 10 years old. Therefore, a big group of Iranian girls experience hazardous repercussions of marriage before the appropriate age. United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) explains the harms of child marriage and indicates that:
“Evidence shows that girls who marry early often abandon formal education and become pregnant. Moreover, maternal deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth are an important component of mortality for girls aged 15–19”… Child brides are at risk of violence, abuse and exploitation. Finally, child marriage often results in separation from family and friends and lack of freedom to participate in community activities, which can all have major consequences on girls’ mental and physical well-being.[xxix]
In the same way, the children who marry early, most probably lose the chance of the secondary education. Though, it is not the only loss for the Iranian girls. In accordance with the economic hardships in Iran, the age of marriageable Iranian men has surged up. It implicitly means that girls lose the chance of marriage with boys in the same age-group of themselves. A. Mahzun the Chief Manager of Iranian Register Office confirms that in 77.5% of the marriage cases the husbands are older than the wives.[xxx] This incompatibility between the couples induces some generational mismatches and once again rise the chance of being trapped into the dead-end road of divorces.
