November 2025 Report: Under the Clerical Regime, Nowhere Is Safe for Women in Iran, part 1

Moderator’s Note: This post has been brought to you in cooperation with the NCRI women’s committee. NCRI stands for the National Council of Resistance of Iran. You can learn more information as well as see this original article by clicking this link. A description of their Council can be found at the end of this post.

Women Are Killed in Iran with Complete Impunity

November 2025 Report: Under the Clerical Regime, Nowhere Is Safe for Women in Iran

Under the rule of Iran’s misogynistic clerical regime, Iranian women, from childhood to old age, are unsafe in all spaces and circumstances. If they manage to escape the brutality of security forces in the streets, they may still fall victim in their homes to so-called “honor suspicions,” resisting forced marriage, requesting a divorce, or even attempting to defend their own rights. Many of these killings take place in front of children or other family members, feeding a cycle of violence across generations. Among the victims are pregnant women or mothers killed alongside their children.

Monthly November 2025_ENDownload

Beatings and torture of women in prisons, firing pellets into the eyes of protesting women, sexual assault in detention centers, and the attacks by morality police patrols enforcing compulsory hijab in public all legitimize and encourage violence against women inside the home and within families.

As a result, state violence against Iranian women is far more widespread than domestic violence. Iran, under clerical rule, remains the world’s largest executioner of women—women who are often victims of forced marriages, child marriages, and domestic abuse, then condemned to death in unjust courts.

Fact-Finding Mission Report

“Systemic Impunity” for killers, an expression used in the recent United Nations Fact-Finding Mission report on Iran, is a phrase that should trouble anyone with a conscience. It reflects a truth that Iranian women and girls face every day. Under the Iranian state’s laws, this “systemic impunity” effectively exempts perpetrators of violence against women from prosecution and proportionate punishment.

In the UN report published on October 30, 2025, which examines human rights violations in Iran, Sara Hossain, the Chair of the UN Fact-Finding Mission, said:

“The acts of denying justice are not neutral. Failure to address injustice prolongs the suffering of victims of victims and undermines the State’s obligations under international human rights law to ensure accountability, truth, justice, and reparations.”

Rising Numbers of Femicides in Iran

Each year, femicides in Iran grow in scale. The lack of transparent official statistics reflects the state’s deliberate intention to hide the truth. Still, even the partial data published by state-run media reveal a tsunami of violence.

Zahra Eftekharezadeh, founder of the Atena Safe Shelter in Tehran, recently said: “We are facing an increase in domestic violence, but the lack of scientific and national statistics prevents us from having an accurate picture of the reality. No official institution in Iran has taken responsibility for collecting precise data in this area, nor have any comprehensive studies been conducted.” (Shargh newspaper, October 11, 2025)

She also stated elsewhere: “Every day we see an increase in femicides in Iran. Even without exact statistics, we can see that every two days a woman is killed, an extraordinarily high number. Just in Shadegan, in Khuzestan Province in southwest Iran, at least five women were killed. These figures were gathered even though no institution in this country feels obligated to provide statistics; so, these numbers are based on verbal reports. Therefore, we must multiply them to reflect the real scale.” (Ham-Mihan newspaper, October 26, 2025)

Shirin Ahmadnia, President of the Iranian Sociological Association, said about femicide: “This phenomenon has deep structural roots, while we witness silence and negligence in the face of it… The accumulated inequalities and injustices in society ultimately result in the physical elimination of a woman. Violence inside the home directly reflects the unequal policies that exist on a macro scale.” (Ham-Mihan newspaper, October 26, 2025)

The statistics published by state institutions and media are merely the tip of the iceberg.

According to the data collected by the NCRI Women’s Committee, from January 2025 to the end of November 2025, an 11-month period, at least 175 women were killed by male family members. This number is extremely conservative, because in many cases family members, under the pretext of “honor” or in their role as the vali-ye-dam (literally means the owner of blood or the relative who holds the right to pursue charges), remain silent about the killings of women and girls and do not file any complaints.

Unofficial academic estimates have previously suggested that between 375 and 450 women are victims of honor killings and domestic femicides in Iran each year, a staggering figure that reveals a structural and state-driven catastrophe.

Part 2, tomorrow

INFO: NCRI The NCRI Women’s Committee works extensively with Iranian women outside the country and maintains permanent contact with women inside Iran. The Women’s Committee is actively involved with many women’s rights organizations, NGOs, and the Iranian diaspora.

The NCRI Women’s Committee is a major source of much of the information received from inside Iran with regard to women. Attending meetings of the UN Women, the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), the Human Rights Council, and other international or regional conferences on women’s issues, and engaging in a relentless battle against the Iranian regime’s misogyny are parts of the activities of members and associates of the NCRI Women’s Committee.

The NCRI Women’s Committee is one of the 25 committees of the National Council of Resistance of Iran.

For more on this women’s committee click here.