🔸 وقتی سرکوب سیاسی و خشونت خانگی یکدیگر را تقویت می‌کنند

🔻A report by Mitra Shajaii

The name “Vida Rabani” until today had been most closely associated with journalism and with her civil and political activities; a journalist, a political prisoner, a signatory to the so-called “17-person statement” for the transition from the Islamic Republic, a political activist, a republican, and… During the Women, Life, Freedom movement, she was arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison, and once again after signing the famous “17-person statement” she was detained in the month of Bahman last year.

According to her own writing, “over four years she was arrested four times, summoned repeatedly, and threatened by phone, and in every arrest she was kept for long periods in solitary confinement.”

Now, however, the name of Vida Rabani has also become linked to “domestic violence.” On 21 Mordad, she published a post on her Instagram page in which there are photos of her injured body and a photo of her husband along with a video in which a police force officer is shown locking an apartment door. Vida Rabani wrote that the officer helped her husband “shut the door firmly on her wife.”

She has accused her husband of beating her and “plundering her property.”

Naturally, Deutsche Welle cannot verify the truth or falsity of these claims, but the subject of this report is not Vida Rabani or her husband; rather, it is domestic violence, exposing it, and the misuse of the Islamic Republic’s misogynistic laws for additional suppression of women by some spouses.

Exposing domestic violence by well-known figures in Iran is not very common, especially when these figures are political activists and their spouses are also, for that reason, under the gaze of both the government and the public.

This is one of the few cases in which a well-known political figure, through the publication of photos and a document, has accused her spouse of violence— the same husband with whom she married in prison and in the course of legal processes and documentation, and who, like most young couples newly married, also had a loving relationship with her.

What does it indicate— and what impact does it have on the process of fighting violence against women— when such a woman who has repeatedly been subjected to political violence by the government, and who knows that she is under the scrutiny of security and intelligence agents, exposes her husband like this?

Samaneh Savadi, a legal scholar and gender equality activist, considers the very act of speaking about domestic violence as “breaking a taboo,” and tells Deutsche Welle: “Domestic violence has for years been tied to concepts such as ‘honor,’ ‘family sanctity,’ and ‘the private matter,’ meaning that we expected silence from a woman who has been subjected to violence so that the family, the social position, or the reputation of the abuser would be preserved. Even shame has been displaced; instead of someone who has committed violence feeling ashamed, the woman who talks about it has to constantly explain why she said it, why she made it public, and why she did not stay silent.”

Read the full text of the report on the Persian-language Deutsche Welle website.