No, the compulsory hijab hasn’t made Iranian women safer

The use of force to implement a religious dress code is a legacy that the Islamic Republic has preserved with varying degrees of success since 1979. The late Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, killed in a helicopter crash last year, wasn’t the politician to introduce the morality police or roll out the hijab rules. But if there’s one thing he accomplished during his incomplete tenure, it is the unprecedented polarisation of the Iranian society around this cultural fissure.

Raisi made hijab a hot-button issue and recklessly added to its complexity. His rigid instructions for enforcement at government offices, updated codes for universities, banks, businesses and cultural events, aggravated by the excessive violence of the morality police, will haunt the nation’s psyche for the foreseeable future.

The crescendo of the collective trauma gripping Iran was the death of Mahsa Amini in September 2022 and the protests that came in the aftermath. Now the parliament – deplorably unpopular – is seeking to trigger that fault line anew. The establishment exponents tout the rationales for the hijab compulsion as being for the protection of women, even if as a penalty for “violations” women lose their driving license or are barred from traveling overseas – and extrajudicially beaten by state-sanctioned vigilantes.

This coercive structure is inhumane and degrading. United Nations experts have described it as “gender apartheid”. But the Islamic Republic’s favourite counterargument is to claim the compulsory scarf is for women’s own protection.

One gauge of women’s safety is the prevalence of domestic violence. According to UN statistics, out of 157 countries surveyed between 2000–18, Iran ranks 40th for women subjected to physical or sexual violence by a current or former partner. The results, reflecting the trends in the “previous 12 months” shows Afghanistan, which under the Taliban also requires women to be covered, at the top of the list with its frequency of intimate partner violence standing at 33.6%. But at 15.2%, Iran fares worse than Sudan, Chad, Egypt and Haiti.

Defying the false narrative rehashed by the Islamic Republic that women are more vulnerable to abuse in Western states where Sharia law doesn’t exist, there is no member state of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development among the top 40 countries on the UN rankings for gender violence. The United States records a 4.2% frequency of domestic violence against girls or women aged 15 and over, and the last nation in the line-up is Switzerland. Canada (1.7%), Australia (2%), France (3.5%) and the United Kingdom (3.6%) are nowhere near the numbers reported in the only two countries with a hijab mandate.

These numbers, however, aren’t the only markers of the failure of unsolicited protection. If observing the dress code is meant to prevent infringement upon women’s personal safety, the recurring scenes of self-appointed enforcers physically assaulting unveiled women in public spaces don’t bear the hallmarks of dignity and respectful treatment.

In a rare incident on 2 November last year, a 30-year-old doctoral student of French literature stripped down to her underwear on the premises of the Islamic Azad University, Tehran’s Science and Research branch, in protest against the school-affiliated Basij militiamen verbally abusing and ripping her headscarf over “compliance” issues. Ahoo Daryaei walked around the campus for a few minutes after disrobing and was unsurprisingly, shortly arrested.

Despite the stringency with which the theocracy pushes the dogma, there is little evidence of any collective feeling of safety across the community. In 2020, Iranian women took to social media to reveal harrowing stories of rampant sexual abuse at workplace at the hands of their employers, co-workers and mentors. Some prominent names were implicated. A comprehensive anthology, edited by academic and writer Claudia Yaghoobi, documented these revelations in 2023. Before that, the crime thriller Holy Spider directed by Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abbasi, depicted the true story of Saeed Hanaei, a serial killer from the city of Mashhad, who embarked on a personal mission of social cleansing inspired by his religious values, killing 19 women between 2000 and 2001.

Although statistics don’t always necessarily capture what’s at the heart of social realities, they cannot be dismissed as mere numbers, either. In the last edition of the Women’s Danger Index created by journalists Asher and Lyric Fergusson, Iran was named the 5th most unsafe country for solo female travellers.

If this metric mirrors the experience of those visiting the country, Georgetown University’s Women Peace and Security Index doesn’t have better news for Iranian citizens. The ranking has identified Iran as 140 of 177 nations studied for women’s share of inclusion, justice, and security. Some of the most troubling figures are found in the variable of Iranian women’s perception of community safety.

The theocracy still insists its draconian dress codes are only meant to protect women.