When Azam Jangravi saw video of an Iranian woman walking around a university campus in Tehran stripped to her underwear, she was overcome with emotion.
“I started to cry first,” Jangravi, an Iranian-Canadian who’s protested against Iran’s regime in the past, told CBC Radio’s Day 6.
“This is [a] very, very big decision because it has lots of cost for her.”
The video, seemingly filmed from inside the university, shows the woman — identified later as Ahoo Daryaei — with arms crossed over her chest, sitting on a set of stairs and then pacing down the sidewalk.
According to the Washington Post, the BBC and other local sources, the act was one of protest against Iran’s mandatory Hijab law. CBC has not independently verified the video or the woman’s identity.
The university’s public relations director Amir Mahjoub and the Iranian government later said Daryaei was mentally unwell and that she was taken to a psychiatric treatment centre following her arrest.
Daryaei has since been discharged from hospital and returned to her family, according to a Nov. 19 statement from the Islamic Republic’s judiciary spokesperson, Asghar Jahangir.
Jangravi says the Iranian regime is no stranger to calling protesting women mentally ill. “This is the … tactic the Islamic Republic of Iran [uses] to put pressure on all women who are fighting for their rights,” she said.
Experts on human rights and women’s issues in Iran agree.
Shahrzad Mojab, a professor of women’s studies focused on Iranian women’s studies at the University of Toronto, says the Iranian regime routinely calls women mentally unwell in an effort to discredit them.
“It has been done as a sort of a tool of punishment,” said Mojab. “Especially when [women] are using their body to express that rage. They all have been accused of mental illness, hysteria … of not having the mental capacity to understand their actions.”
The children of imprisoned Iranian women’s rights activist Narges Mohammadi accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on her behalf Sunday. They read from a defiant letter Mohammadi smuggled out of her prison cell, calling for resistance to the regime to continue.
Same-old tactic being used more frequently
Kaveh Shahrooz, a lawyer and human rights activist, says the regime also aims to dissuade would-be protesters with this technique by showing that stigma and institutionalization await them if they speak out.
But Shahrooz adds the move is nothing new for Iran. He says the regime, like many other “misogynistic governments” worldwide, have either labelled women as mentally ill or sexually promiscuous throughout history in order to silence them.
Other Iranian women, including Jangravi, shared their experiences of being labelled as mentally ill by the regime following the government’s comments about Daryaei’s mental state.
In 2018, Jangravi stood on top of an electrical box in Tehran, removed her hijab and held it up in front of a crowd of people. She was arrested for the act, says she was questioned for hours — and told that if she wrote a confession saying the act was caused by her own poor mental health, she would be let out of custody.
Jangravi, who later fled Iran and sought asylum in Newmarket, Ont., refused to lie and say she was mentally unwell. Her family also refused to make a confession, despite fear for what might happen to their daughter for refusing to comply.
Russia has also sentenced its political opponents — both men and women — to psychiatric hospitals for treatment. And China, too, runs “Ankang” (asylums), that hold political prisoners against their will.
Iran announced earlier this month that it would establish its own dedicated treatment clinic for women who refuse to wear hijab, according to a department head with the Tehran Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice Headquarters, a government body that enforces morality in the country.
Shahrooz says the trend of labelling female dissenters as mentally ill appears to be accelerating in Iran.
“I think that’s entirely consistent with the fact that women are pushing back in greater numbers and in more sort of radical ways,” he said, referring to the mass Woman, Life, Freedom protests in 2022 and 2023.
The demonstrations were sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian-Kurdish woman who, in September 2022, died in police custody following an arrest for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly.
Will the threats work?
Nahid Naghshbandi, the Iran director for Human Rights Watch, says Iran’s morality police have been less violent in the last year or so.
However, she says the shift is to avoid sparking more mass protests, and not a sign of positive change within the Iranian regime.
Shahrooz says many Iranians have spoken out in support of Daryaei’s protest on social media, commending her bravery and demanding justice for her.
“Iranian women have demonstrated that they are absolutely sick of this regime, that they’re willing to go out and protest against it,” he said. “They view its rules and its behaviour as barbaric and something out of the Middle Ages.”
Whether the threats will work is another question. Ultimately, Shahrooz says that the tactic — like the threats of violence and jail time that are usually levelled against protesters — is just another intimidation tool that he doubts will hold many protesters back.
Some 551 people were killed during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests, and a UN fact-finding mission found that Iran “arbitrarily executed” at least nine men for their role in the protests, while dozens more remain at risk of being executed in relation to the demonstrations.
Both Sharooz and Naghshbandi say that women will continue to speak up despite the added threat of being called mentally ill.
“What we see, the change that has happened in Iran, it’s not because the government is being more reformist. It’s because the women are pushing those limits,” Naghshbandi said.
“[Daryaei] took it to another level.”