Veiled in the Street, Stripped in Prison

Modesty, enforced in the street

The Islamic Republic takes women's modesty very seriously. Four years after Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the morality police, detained for a supposedly loose headscarf, the UN special rapporteur on Iran, Mai Sato, notes that hijab enforcement goes on, even though the chastity and hijab law was suspended in December 2024. Cafés, restaurants and shops are shut when an employee or a customer appears bareheaded, and arrests are reported. In Isfahan, Rasht and Mashhad, residents say the morality police and plainclothes enforcers are back on the streets. The state has deployed surveillance cameras, drones and a reporting app to protect women's modesty. Inside its prisons, it has other methods.

Undressed behind bars

At Tehran's Evin prison, female political prisoners now face increasingly invasive body searches, including forced undressing and the touching of their breasts, according to sources quoted by Iran International. Many now forgo medical transfers and meetings with relatives or lawyers rather than go through them. Visiting families are searched too: shoes off, mouths inspected, bodies touched. Even children and teenagers visiting a jailed relative are not spared. Women leaving the ward have been made to wear slippers and handcuffs.

Iran's own prison regulations allow searches without clothing only when necessary, and require electronic equipment wherever possible. The sources ask why the scanners are not used. The regulations call for machines. The guards apparently prefer their hands.

Security, the official excuse

The authorities justify the tighter rules by the arrival of more than 40 women jailed for financial offences, who now make up about half of the ward. When prisoners protested the overcrowding in July, special guards answered with batons. Some political prisoners see the mixing as a deliberate policy to break their collective resistance, in a ward that has become a hub of protests and hunger strikes against executions. A demand for dignity, in Evin, is met with a strip search.

Not a first

In October 2024, 22 female political prisoners at Evin had already demanded an investigation into what they called "sexual harassment" during searches. In August, a transgender prisoner wrote from Evin that she had been raped after her arrest in 2023 at an Intelligence Ministry detention facility, then threatened into silence. Former prisoners and rights groups have documented sexual violence against detainees since the 1979 revolution, as a tool of torture and humiliation. In March 2024, a UN fact-finding mission concluded that the crackdown on the "Woman, Life, Freedom" protests involved crimes against humanity, including rape and other forms of sexual violence, and gender persecution.

"We found cases of torture, particularly of sexual violence, gender-based violence."— Sara Hossain, chair of the UN fact-finding mission on Iran, March 2024

Mai Sato, for her part, refuses to despair:

"Those rights will not stay deniable forever."— Mai Sato, UN special rapporteur on Iran, September 2026

In the Islamic Republic, a woman's body belongs to the state twice over: covered by law in the street, uncovered by force in prison. Modesty was never the point. Control was.