Saba Vasefi is an Iranian women’s and children’s rights activist who is now living in Australia. Her documentary, Do Not Bury My Heart–for which I have not been able to find much information on the web–about the execution of minors in Iran was screened recently in the underground documentary section of the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival. She’s written an article, which I found on the Tehran Bureau website and which was originally published in Mianeh, about the increase in Iran of the number of women accused of murdering their husbands. “This is,” she writes, “a significant shift in Iranian society, where murders involving spouses have in the past almost always involved men killing women, often in what is known as an ‘honour crime.'” Moreover, these murders are usually, nominally, legal since “Article 630 of Iran’s Islam-based criminal code makes it legal for a man to kill both his wife and her partner if he finds them in the act, and it is consensual.” This burden of proof, she goes on to say, “is rarely met,” with most honor killings being more about “jealousy, suspicion or merely a way of ending a marriage.”
One of the things I found most interesting about Vasefi’s article is the difference between what her research reveals about women who’ve been accused of murdering their husbands and what the available research says.
In the case of wives who kill their husbands, the available research indicates that two-thirds of cases are motivated by a desire for revenge for the husband being unfaithful.
The survey that Moazzami and Ashouri conducted across 15 provinces of Iran showed that in 58 percent of cases, the women had been unable to get a divorce because their husbands or families would not agree to it, or had children and would have had no means of supporting themselves if they had separated from their spouses.
My own research indicates that many women who resort to violence are themselves victims of abuse, and have been unable to find justice through the legal system.
She points out that many of the women who murder their husbands fit the same profile: they are poor, relatively uneducated, often forced into marriage at an early age to men who are much older than they are, circumstances which combine to make much more difficult for them to get help through the legal system or to find other ways out of their situation. Murder is, for them, “a last act of desperation.”
Akram Mahdavi, one of the women Vasefi interviewed, is in Rajayi Shahr prison under a suspended death sentence for hiring a man to kill her husband, whom her father had forced her to marry–she was 20 and her husband was 75. Her motive? That she’d discovered her husband was sexually abusing her daughter and her attempts at securing a divorce had failed. Yet it’s not that there aren’t people in Iran trying to call attention to the plight of such women. Women’s rights activists have been calling on the government to set up shelters for battered women for years, but the government has always refused, “citing Islamic laws that state it is wrong for a woman to leave home without her husband’s permission.” I confess that reasoning leaves me almost speechless, as it still does all these many years later when I remember the cop who asked me, when I was sixteen and calling for help because my mother’s boyfriend had forced her into her bedroom and locked the door behind them because she’d finally asked him to leave and he didn’t want to,”Are you sure your mother’s in their against her will, son?”
I don’t want to erase the differences between what happened to my mother and what happened to Akram Mahdavi, nor do I want to trivialize the significance of the fact that, in Iran, the reasoning that makes it so difficult for battered women, or women like Mahdavi, who was trying to protect her daughter from abuse, to find justice is couched in an absolutist religious rhetoric–though it’s not as if religion has not been used here in the States to justify treating women, not to mention people of color, as second class citizens–but I find right now the similarities more compelling than the differences. In each case, the woman’s autonomy is understood to be circumscribed by the authority of the man who possesses her sexually. In Islam, the husband must give her permission to leave the sphere of his authority (and, therefore, of his protection) without him1; in the case of the cop on the phone, his assumption was that I might have mistaken some kind of sexual play, in which my mother was enjoying the force her boyfriend was using to keep her in the room, for a situation in which the boyfriend was unwilling to let my mother go outside the sphere of his authority and in which he might turn–was already turning–violent because she did not obey him. That the authority is legal in the case of Islam and, for want of a better word, cultural in the case of my mother and her boyfriend, does not change the fact that the nature of the authority, a man’s right to rule his women, is the same.
Cross posted on The Poetry in the Politics and The Politics in the Poetry.
- One of the oddest experiences I’ve had being married to a Muslim woman who occasionally travels to Iran has been the requirement, imposed by the Iranian government, that I write her a letter giving her my official permission to travel without me. [↩]
I wonder if there have been increased restrictions on women’s ability to get relief from abusive/bad marriages in Iran. I forget where, but I was just reading that in the States, there has been a large decline in wives murdering husbands over the decades, and it’s thought that this is basically because women have many more options nowadays; women in extreme situations who used to be driven to kill their husbands are much likelier to be able to leave or otherwise get relief from the legal system.
Robert:
It’s a good question. I was actually wondering something like the opposite: If the increase in wives murdering their husbands has something to do with a greater sense of resistance against the restrictions that already exist. In other words, not so much that there has been an increase, but that women feel the restrictions more strongly–perhaps because there is a greater awareness that other possibilities exist–and so they kill more often. But that’s just me blowing smoke out of my ears.
This article was originally published on Mianeh website, unfortunately Tehran Bureau has poor and incomplete citation:
Thanks for that, Mani. I will add the citation for Mianeh.
Wait what? Let me get this straight.
After being told that murder rates among husbands has been rising in a country, you talk about how most of the murderers were doing it out of justice, and how priveledged the husbands are? And you didn’t even say anything negative about the actual murders?
Rich, are you actually condoning murder now? Or are you just being too inconsiderate to actually say that it doesn’t justify murder?
Plasma,
You ask a fair question, and I realized after I wrote the post and responded to Robert that I hadn’t addressed it; I am so drowning in paper-grading right now that I just haven’t had the chance to come back to it in a substantive way. Here, though, are some thoughts:
1. I want for the moment to leave aside the question of the relationship between the law and the murders of which these women have been accused and/or convicted, not because I want to brush aside the fact that the women killed their husbands, but because, even though I do think there is a point where a battered woman’s killing of her husband might indeed be justifiable homicide, I am also mindful of the need to protect against vigilantism, and I just don’t know enough about the law to speak intelligently about it.
2. I do, however, know for a fact that the law in Iran–as well as what the law was like here in the States not too long ago–makes it difficult if not impossible for a battered woman, especially a poor battered woman, to get any kind of relief, and I mean any relief, in a situation in which she is being battered or otherwise abused by her husband. Note the reasoning behind the government’s refusal to set up battered women’s shelters, as well as, in the interview I linked to, the judge’s reasoning behind refusing Akram Mahdavi’ request for a divorce–something along the lines of, “This man is providing for you; what is he not giving you? Why should you want to leave?” And this after she pointed out that her husband was sexually abusing her daughter.
3. Consider as well that, in Iran, as well as many other places in the world, it is entirely appropriate and probably more often than not the norm for a battered wife’s family to care more about the shame that her leaving her husband will bring on them than whatever she is suffering within the confines of her marriage. In other words, the woman’s family will not provide her a refuge/protection from the abuse either.
4. Now, consider as well that living with an abusive husband–and just to be clear: I am not talking here about a husband who has once lost control of himself and has never again raised his hand against his wife; I am talking about a husband who batters her, along with all the other kinds of abuse that usually accompany battering–is not just like, it is living in a state of occupation analogous to military occupation, especially in that even when overt violence is not present, daily life still takes place in a constant state of violence. In the absence of legal or any other form of relief/protection–really, can you put yourself in the position of someone who has no way out? Someone who is really and truly alone and otherwise helpless; and please do not engage in well-she-could-just-leave-wishful-thinking–what level of resistance would you permit someone who is beaten on a daily basis, raped, humiliated; has had her nose broken more than once, or other parts of her body, from the beatings she has endured; who has been threatened with death, who has beaten near death. How do you measure what level of resistance is permitted when? And I mean this not as a rhetorical question to silence discussion; I mean it as a real question.
5. If your daughter were being sexually abused by your spouse and you had no way of protecting her against it because the law and your family had turned its back on you, how far would you go to stop the abuse? Again, I mean this as a real question. When I ask myself, I can answer intellectually that I would do anything it takes, but emotionally there is a point where my brain just stops: I can’t imagine what it must be like to be so desperate that I would actually, not in the abstract, but concretely consider killing the abuser. I have to force myself over that line even to begin to feel what that kind of desperation might be like.
6. And, I touched on this above, but I feel the need to say this more fully: Since we are talking about Iran, I need to point out that even if a woman had the means to leave an abusive husband, it would be so difficult socioeconomically and culturally for her live on her own, that the possibility would likely occur to her only as an impossibility, especially if she had children.
I wish I had the time to weave these thoughts into a more coherent and cohesive response, one that actually makes the argument that is implicit in them, but this is all that I have time for right now.
If a woman who has no other recourse kills a man who has been physically abusing her it’s not murder, it’s self-defense. It’s not vigilantism, either – a vigilante is someone who enforces and punishes someone in the name of the law without authority from the state to do so. A woman who does something like this has no thought of enforcing the law – she’s trying to survive. Maybe if a few thousand women did this the Iranian state would have to re-think the law.
Yeah, vigilantism seems to be more in line with what the woman in Medium season 6 was doing. She was detaining and beating, then killing paroled sexual offenders – out of a sense of revenge (was a victim herself) and trying to accomplish the law on her own (maybe considering they weren’t punished enough by the system). She eventually killed an undercover cop and got found out by the main character’s visions. She did kill many more than just her rapist though.
What she did, though, shows the huge flaw those sexual offender registries have: people can find out who and where they are, and think they weren’t punished enough and go do it themselves. The fact that it largely reduces their employment chances could also more likely drive them back into crime, like robbery or drug-selling. I think the police should know, and maybe others on a need-to-know basis, but not everyone who has internet.
Yes, vigilantism was not the right word. Thanks, both Ron and Schala. I would like, however, that subsequent comments on this post not go down the road Schala’s comment starts down. It would be a massive derail.