misogyny – Feminism and Religion

November 2025 Report: Under the Clerical Regime, Nowhere Is Safe for Women in Iran, part 2

Part 1 was posted yesterday.

Stories That Reveal the Depth of the Tragedy

Only in November 2025, the following murders were reported:

Mobina Zare, age 20, in Islamshahr (a city southwest of Tehran), was killed by her former fiancé. After murdering her, he burned her body in an aluminum-melting furnace at his father’s workshop. Her family searched for her for ten days before finding her half-burned body.

**Mobina Zare was burned in analuminum melting furnace**

Leila Aliramaii, age 40, in Marivan (in Kurdistan Province, western Iran), was killed with a Kalashnikov rifle because she refused the vile demands of a member of the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Leila was married and the mother of a young daughter and son.

**Leila Aliramaii, the mother of two young children**

Sarina Rostami, age 16, in Sarpol-e-Zahab (in Kermanshah Province, western Iran), was killed by a male relative because she refused accept a forcible marriage.

**Sarina Rostami, 16, victim of forced marriage**

A 40-year-old woman in Pakdasht (Tehran Province) was suffocated with a blanket by her husband.

Reyhaneh Dorzadeh, age 23, in Nikshahr (Sistan and Baluchestan Province, southeastern Iran), was suffocated by her husband because she opposed his desire to take a second wife.

A 29-year-old woman identified as J.D. was murdered by her father, who then dismembered her body and set it on fire.

Sakineh, age 80, in Tehran, was killed by her son using an iron rod.

Zahra Ghaemi, a women’s rights activist and member of the Women’s Study Group at the University of Tehran, was suffocated by her husband.

**Zahra Ghaemi, a member of the Women’s Study Group at the University of Tehran**

Shahla Karimani, age 38, mother of two, in Mahabad (Kurdistan Province), was strangled with a scarf by her husband and brother-in-law.

Sajedeh Sand-Kazehi, in Khash (Sistan and Baluchestan Province), was killed with a hunting rifle because her father-in-law wanted to forcefully take a gas regulator that belonged to her. Sajedeh was the mother of two young children.

Raheleh Siavoshi, age 26, in Nahavand, a town in Hamedan Province in western Iran, was fatally stabbed by her husband after participating in a sports camp. She died in the hospital two days later.

**Raheleh Siavoshi, a national wushu champion and coach**

Justice Has Lost Its Meaning

While women are sentenced to long prison terms for “removing their hijab” or protesting discrimination, men who murder their wives typically receive only a few years in prison. In many cases, they can pay money to buy their way out and return to their lives.

In notorious cases such as Romina Ashrafi and Mona Heydari, the murderers received only two to eight years in prison. Even state-run media sometimes acknowledge this “inverted justice”: “The punishment for beheading one’s wife: 8 years in prison; The punishment for removing one’s hijab: 10 years in prison!”

According to the regime’s laws, the father, who is also the “male guardian and blood-owner (vali-ye-dam),” is exempt from retributive punishment for killing his own child.

Zahra Eftekharezadeh, founder of one of Tehran’s safe shelters, said regarding the absence of deterrent laws: “When the law does not impose a punishment proportionate to the crime, perpetrators realize there is no serious consequence waiting for them. In many cases, the sentences issued by the judiciary are not only non-deterrent but encourage the offender. Romina Ashrafi’s father is an example. He openly said that if he killed his daughter, he would receive at most ten years in prison.” (Shargh newspaper – October 11, 2025)

Atrocities Rooted in Law and Politics

Under Iran’s misogynistic clerical laws, a woman is not recognized as an independent individual but as “subordinate” to a man. Without legal or structural protection, women are forced to endure domestic violence, and each day adds new names to the list of women murdered.

Article 1105 of Iran’s Civil Code assigns family leadership exclusively to men.

Article 1108 makes a woman’s right to financial support conditional on her “obedience.”

Article 1114 gives the husband the right to determine the wife’s place of residence.

In such a system, women seeking divorce must prove their lives are in danger, and their testimony is worth only half that of a man. Judges routinely force women who have been beaten or threatened back into the homes of their abusers.

Through its laws, media, and judiciary, the clerical regime perpetuates these crimes. Violence extends from home to the school, from the street to the courtroom, widening its reach every day.

But beyond the laws, today’s social tragedies in Iran stem from political roots. The misogynistic clerical regime is founded on the subjugation of women. The horrific killings of women are not isolated acts of personal fanaticism; they are the product of a system that authorizes violence against women.

The rising number of honor killings must therefore be understood as the direct result of the regime’s anti-woman policies and the patriarchal culture embedded within its structure. The Iranian people blame not society but the regime itself, an oppressive, misogynistic establishment that preserves its power through the suppression and elimination of women.

Data compiled over the past three years by the NCRI Women’s Committee shows a sharp upward trend in the number of women murdered under the misogynistic rule of the clerical regime. These figures are drawn entirely from documented and published reports by state-run media and other available sources. They therefore represent a minimum estimate, as the regime deliberately obscures such information, and many families, fearing the perpetrators, avoid publicizing the killings of their daughters and female relatives.

According to these findings, at least 105 women were murdered in 2023, 160 in 2024, and during just the first eleven months of 2025, no fewer than 175 women have been killed in Iran.

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.

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_EN Download

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.

From the Archives: Careful Criticism: Resisting Hetero-Patriarchy while Resisting Trump by Sara Frykenberg

This was originally posted on May 2, 2017

My students are taking their final exams this week, which means I will be spending the week frantically, but attentively grading in order to make our grade submission deadline next week. End of semester grading is a mountain of careful criticism we educators scale one step at a time, with deliberateness, towards an ultimate goal of student success (if not in our classes, then in the next, or in life, relationships, etc.). Thus, I often find myself returning to the question: what am I hoping to create in what I say and write, and in how I critique?

One of the goals of feminist pedagogies is to help us prevent recreating the domination of kyrio-patriarchy in classroom spaces. While activism is not the same thing as education, and strategies of resistance are different than pedagogy in important ways, the concern for careful critique is warranted in both praxes. What do we create in how we critique, resist, and protest? What do we recreate, wittingly or no? I have found myself concerned with this since the election of Trump, DT (cause I can only write that name so many times), to the presidency. Continue reading “From the Archives: Careful Criticism: Resisting Hetero-Patriarchy while Resisting Trump by Sara Frykenberg”

Seeing Double by Esther Nelson

I’ve often thought that we (in the USA) have been somewhat, albeit reluctantly, willing to discuss and perhaps even change our minds, behavior, policies, and laws when confronted about the long-lived presence of racism in our local and national institutions. However, when it comes to misogyny—not so much.

Shirley Anita Chisholm St. Hill (1924 – 2005), was an American politician who, in 1968, became the first black woman to be elected to Congress. “Chisholm represented a district centered in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, for seven terms from 1969 to 1983. In 1972, she became the first black candidate for a major-party nomination for President of the U.S. and the first woman to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Throughout her career, she was known for taking ‘a resolute stand against economic, social, and political injustices’ as well as being a strong supporter of black civil rights and women’s rights” (Wikipedia).

Chisholm noted that “…she had faced much more discrimination during her New York legislative career because she was a woman than for her race” (Wikipedia). Why are not more of us aware of Chisholm’s confession?

Resistance Checklist: Do It Loud. Do It Quiet by Karen Tate

Despite what you’re hearing out there, because it’s outdated information just being repeated in the echo chamber, Trump did not win by a landslide. He has no legitimate mandate. As of this writing one percentage point of the population separates how many votes each candidate got in this election and counting has not finished.

Many of us might still be recovering from the election disappointment and we’re trying to find our way forward. Consider this:

“Many of us have been brought up on stories of praying to God the Father to save us, waiting for our prince to come, submitting to the greater wisdom of our husband or priest to guide us. We need to move from this way of being, into our own agency. But we must also recognise that we cannot do it all, nor do it alone, in the martyr mother myth so many of us have learned to embody.
This is not the time for being nice, biting our tongues or not rocking the boat. And yet these are also not times for making enemies or picking fights. Can we find other ways of engaging and challenging, visioning and contributing to transformation? What might these look like?” From Weaving Our Way Beyond Patriarchy – a compendium of over 80 women’s voices, launching today exclusively from Womancraft Publishing. com

Abundant Life Is for Women, Too by Liz Cooledge Jenkins

I lived in East Palo Alto, CA, for two years in my mid-twenties. During the first year, a man was killed down the street from my apartment building, in the parking lot of the building where my friends lived. I walked through that parking lot often, as a shortcut back to my own place from wherever I could find street parking. I didn’t know the man, but I knew people who knew him. His death was both disturbing and tragic. The neighborhood mourned. My friends and I got together and wrote a prayer for our community. The murder changed my experience of living there.

A GOOD HEART by Esther Nelson

In spite of organizations such as “Black Lives Matter” and the three or four waves of feminism over the past century, both racism and misogyny remain stubbornly alive. We’ve made positive strides on both fronts, yet much remains to be done. Curiously enough, I’ve noticed more sensitivity in our current society regarding racism than misogyny. People claiming to be “woke” seem more inclined to be woke to the manifestations of racism—not so much to misogyny.

According to Merriam-Webster, the term woke is about being “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).” Merriam-Webster’s second definition of the term is “politically liberal (as in matters of racial and social justice) especially in a way that is considered unreasonable or extreme.”

Men Just “Know Things” by Esther Nelson

One of my Facebook friends, a young woman academic, recently posed a question, inviting discussion. (I’ve abbreviated her post for the sake of space.)

“What is it about white male liberals that just MUST have me buy [into] their ideas when they diverge from mine? I am struck that over the years, I have had a handful of white male liberals make it a mission to convince me that I am WRONG about Hillary. When I say, listen, the case is closed, she cheer led the Iraq war, I am done, [t]hey just cannot handle it.” Continue reading “Men Just “Know Things” by Esther Nelson”

Bake the Damn Cake: Owning Up to and Mitigating Our Traditions’ Trauma Histories by Chris Ash

Christy at the beach

“We have learned that trauma is not just an event
that took place sometime in the past;
it is also the imprint left by that experience
on mind, brain, and body.
This imprint has ongoing consequences
for how the human organism
manages to survive in the present.”
— Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

While I’m not a trauma therapist, I work in a field in which I regularly support people who have experienced trauma. Sometimes I’m accompanying a recent survivor of assault at the emergency room for a rape kit, speaking warmly, offering compassion, providing distraction. Other times, I’m holding space over the phone while a fifty-something year old survivor tearfully discloses, for the first time in her life, the things done to her during childhood. Recent or old, those experiences shape us and our responses to them, even those that might not serve our health, are efforts to protect ourselves, to avoid pain, and to seek an elusive sense of safety.

“Trauma isn’t what happened to us.
Trauma is what happened inside us as a result of what happened to us.”
— Gabor Mate, in his presentation “Addressing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma”
during the Healing Trauma Summit

Our attempts to resolve trauma, to escape it, may be labeled dysfunctional and may not, ultimately, serve our highest good. They are, however, the actions of someone who wants to feel secure, who wants to feel loved.

My desire to understand trauma and trauma recovery serves my professional development as well as my personal journey, and learning more about the how trauma relates to the body has proven helpful in both of these areas of my life. I’m not a mental health clinician — I’m a crisis advocate and consent educator. But the process, as I understand it, is something like this: Continue reading “Bake the Damn Cake: Owning Up to and Mitigating Our Traditions’ Trauma Histories by Chris Ash”

Careful Criticism: Resisting Hetero-Patriarchy while Resisting Trump by Sara Frykenberg

One of the goals of feminist pedagogies is to help us prevent recreating the domination of kyrio-patriarchy in classroom spaces. While activism is not the same thing as education, and strategies of resistance are different than pedagogy in important ways, the concern for careful critique is warranted in both praxes. What do we create in how we critique, resist, and protest? What do we recreate, wittingly or no? I have found myself concerned with this since the election of Trump, DT (cause I can only write that name so many times), to the presidency. Continue reading “Careful Criticism: Resisting Hetero-Patriarchy while Resisting Trump by Sara Frykenberg”