Marjan Greenblatt: Femicide in Iran is a Result of Legal and Cultural Disempowerment of Women
Marjan Greenblatt, founder of the “Alliance for the Rights of All Minorities in Iran” and member of the Middle Eastern Minorities section of the “Union Against Defamation,” says that the prevalence of “femicide” – which is a crime stemming from gender-based hatred aimed at killing women because they are women – in Iran “is a direct result of patriarchal restructuring of social structures and legal and cultural disempowerment of women and girls by the government.”
Greenblatt wrote on Thursday in an article in Newsweek: “Killing women in the name of honor and culture, like other injustices and revived brutal behaviors in Iran, is being reintegrated into a society that uses propaganda as a primitive tool for threatening and coercion.”
She added in this article: “The regime resorts to execution, torture, and imprisonment for those who do not fall in line to silence voices, suppress freedom, and eliminate the appearance of difference.”
According to Greenblatt, “femicide reinforces Iran’s social hierarchy, according to which some people – in the name of God, country, or honor, even by the most shameless or bizarre customs – control the fate of others.”
Greenblatt writes: “Those who have positioned themselves as determiners of people’s fate are usually unelected government officials, the moral security police who carry out initial arrests, judges who determine punishments, and torturers and executioners who carry out the sentences.”
She writes: “Post-revolution laws dictate that brothers, fathers and husbands are ‘owners’ of women during their lifetime. They have appeared as those who hold the fate of women in their hands. They have been allowed to take control of women’s fate by monopolizing money and the right to choose marriage, and at the same time as judge and executioner, take their lives.”
Greenblatt recalls that “since the beginning of the 1357 revolution, Iranian women have gradually lost their equal status in the eyes of the law as well as the right to self-determination.”
She writes: “In courts, women are worth half their male counterparts. In society, women are largely regarded as the property of others. From the right to choose clothing, education and work to marriage, divorce and child custody, women are in a weaker position [compared to men]. At all stages of life, a woman’s fate is determined by the men of her family.”
According to Greenblatt, “in life and in death, women are always considered less valuable. A woman’s testimony is worthless and worth less than a man’s testimony. Her right to inherit is less than her brothers’ right. Her initiative for divorce is of little value. Regarding death, her life is overlooked and this is why honor killings are considered more justifiable, especially given the minimal punishments [honor crimes].”
Greenblatt emphasizes that in Iran, “treating women as lesser beings promotes a dangerous and even deadly dynamic of power that places men in a position of ultimate power and control over women. Men become conditioned to expect women to be submissive and obedient so that [men] can affirm their dominance over them.”
In Greenblatt’s view, current laws in Iran allow men to make decisions about women’s income and livelihood. She writes that men “regard women as part of their property and therefore feel they have the right to abuse their bodies in any way they wish and make decisions about their reproductive capacity. Most importantly, they feel they can take their lives without being subject to major punishment.”
Greenblatt warns that “until fundamental social and legal changes occur, more lives will be lost.”
Source: Voice of America
