They chose 'the pretty ones': Witness accounts reveal how Iran's security forces use rape to quell protests
They’d choose the women who were pretty and suited their appetite …“They would sexually assault them there.”Covert testimonies reveal sexual assaults on male and female activists as a women-led uprising spreads
In hushed tones, they speak of female protesters in particular, and the horrors they say some have endured in Iran’s notorious detention facilities. Women have played a central role in Iran’s uprising since it ignited two months ago. The slogan “Women, Life, Freedom” reverberates through anti-regime demonstrations in its original Kurdish and in Persian . It is a nod to the 22-year-old Kurdish woman whose death sparked the protests — Jina Amini was believed to have been brutally beaten by Iran’s morality police for improper hijab and died days later.
With media access inside Iran severely constrained, CNN went to the region near Iraq’s border with Iran, interviewing eyewitnesses who'd left the country and verifying accounts from survivors and sources both in and outside Iran. CNN corroborated several reports of sexual violence against protesters and heard accounts of many more. At least one of these caused severe injury, and another involved the rape of an underage boy.
She was arrested in her hometown of Karaj, just west of Tehran, nearly a month after the onset of the demonstrations. In an October 29 statement, the government claimed she was “the leader of the riots” and that police discovered “10 Molotov cocktails” in her apartment. “When she first came in, said she was hemorrhaging from her rectum… due to repeated rape. The plainclothes men insisted that the doctor write it as rape prior to arrest,” wrote one member of the medical staff in one of the messages.
In its statement, the Iranian government said Abbasi was treated for “digestive problems.” Medics at the Imam Ali hospital said the claim did not tally with the symptoms Abbasi exhibited. Abbasi was also treated by a gynecologist and a psychiatrist, which the medics said was also inconsistent with the government’s account.
Abbasi is currently being held in Karaj’s notorious Fardis prison, according to the Iranian government. CNN has been unable to reach her or her family members for comment. Tehran’s crackdown on protesters has slowed the tide at the crossing between Iran and the mountains of northern Iraq. Fear of indiscriminate arrest has made many reluctant to risk the journey.Hana, a Kurdish-Iranian woman in her 20s, undertook a perilous journey along mountain paths to avoid the official crossing, fleeing Iran days after she says she was sexually assaulted in police custody.
Hana says she was held in a detention center at a police station in Iran’s northwestern city of Urmia for 24 hours.Sources: Kurdistan Human Rights Network, Kurdistan Freedom Party, The Washington Institute, Maps4news … and then in some cases moved from one location to another, their families left in the dark about where they are held. Hundreds have disappeared into this network of prisons and detention centers, according to rights groups.
“They will threaten not to talk about the abuse, who did it to her, who insulted her, and who sexually violated her.”She recounts how a girl had been corralled into another interrogation room as her teenage brother demanded he join her to make sure nothing “was happening to her.” Hana describes the police beating the boy with batons. He lay on the ground, wounded and having soiled himself during the beating, she recalls. Meanwhile, his sister was screaming in the interrogation room.
Alongside the authorities' widespread detention of protesters, the media blackout in the country has worsened. The stigma attached to victims of sexual violence adds another layer of secrecy to what’s unfolding.
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