Marjan Greenblatt: Femicide in Iran is the result of legal and cultural disempowerment of women
Marjan Greenblatt, founder of the Coalition for the Rights of All Minorities in Iran and a member of the Middle East Minorities Section of the Anti-Defamation League, says the prevalence of “femicide” – a sexist hate crime aimed at killing women because they are women – in Iran is “a direct result of the patriarchal reengineering of social structures and the legal and cultural disempowerment of women and girls by the government.”
“Femicide in the name of honor and culture, like other injustices and brutalities revived in Iran, is being reintegrated into a society that uses propaganda as a primary tool for intimidation and coercion,” Greenblatt wrote in a Newsweek article on Thursday.
He added in the article: “For those who do not follow this path, the regime resorts to execution, torture, and imprisonment to silence voices, suppress freedom, and eliminate the appearance of dissent.”
According to Greenblatt, “Femicide reinforces Iran’s social hierarchy, in which some individuals—in the name of God, country, or honor, even in the most shameless or bizarre customs—control the fate of others.”
“Those who have set themselves up to determine the fate of the people are usually unelected government officials, the moral security police who make the initial arrests, the judges who determine the sentences, and the torturers and executioners who carry out the sentences,” Greenblatt writes.
“Post-revolutionary laws dictate that brothers, fathers, and husbands are the ‘owners’ of women during their lifetime,” she writes. “They have emerged as the ones who hold women’s fate in their hands. They have been allowed to take control of women’s fate by monopolizing money and the right to choose marriage, while simultaneously taking their lives as judges and executioners.”
Greenblatt notes that “since the beginning of the 1979 revolution, Iranian women have gradually lost their equal status before the law, as well as their right to self-determination.”
“In the courts, women are worth half as much as their male counterparts,” she writes. “In society, women are largely seen as property. From the right to choose their clothing, education, and employment to marriage, divorce, and child custody, women are in a weaker position [than men]. At every stage of life, a woman’s fate is determined by the men in her family.”
According to Greenblatt, “In life and in death, women are always considered less valuable. A woman’s martyrdom is worthless and less than a man’s. Her right to inherit is less than that of her brothers. Her initiative for divorce is of little value. In death, her life is fleeting, and this makes honor killings all the more justifiable, especially given the paltry penalties [for honor killings].”
Greenblatt emphasizes that in Iran, “treating women as lesser beings promotes a dangerous, even deadly, power dynamic that places men in a position of ultimate power and control over women. Men are conditioned to expect women to be submissive and obedient in order for [men] to affirm their dominance over them.”
According to Greenblatt, current laws in Iran allow men to make decisions about women’s income and livelihoods. Men, he writes, “consider women as part of their property and therefore feel entitled to oppress their bodies in any way they wish and to decide about their reproductive capacity. Most significantly, they feel they can take their lives without major punishment.”
Greenblatt warns that “until fundamental social and legal changes occur, more lives will be lost.”
Source: Voice of America
