Iran Creates ‘Treatment Clinic’ for Women Who Defy Hijab Laws

Mehri Talebi Darestani, head of the Women and Family Department of the ominous Headquarters for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice in Tehran, announced on Wednesday that a “hijab removal treatment clinic” will be created to provide “scientific and psychological treatment” for women who refuse to obey Iran’s harsh headscarf laws.

“Visiting this center is optional,” Darestani claimed.

Iran International, a dissident news organization, was highly skeptical of this claim, noting that Dagestani reports to a male superior appointed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, few of whose edicts are “optional” or “voluntary.” The department that will be administering the “hijab removal treatment clinic” has been sanctioned for human rights violations.

Dagestani, who has “supported and promoted child marriage on state television,” was the head of the Ministry of Labor’s Inspection Center until she was dismissed under “unclear circumstances.”

“Iranian authorities have increasingly utilized mental health institutions to manage dissent, a method condemned by human rights advocates as psychologically abusive and manipulative,” Iran International observed.

Iranian women have been chafing against the theocracy’s hijab laws for years. In September 2022, the death of a young Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iran’s “morality police,” after she was abducted for allegedly failing to wear her headscarf correctly, triggered massive nationwide protests.

The protests, which came to be known as the “Women, Life, Freedom” Movement, were brutally crushed by the Iranian regime and its militia goon squads. Objections to the hijab laws persist, especially among younger Iranian women, but many of them have been terrorized into speaking anonymously.

“It won’t be a clinic, it will be a prison. We are struggling to make ends meet and have power outages, but a piece of cloth is what this state is worried about. If there was a time for all of us to come back to the streets, it’s now or they’ll lock us all up,” one such anonymous young woman told the UK Guardian on Thursday when news of the “hijab removal treatment clinic” broke.

“The idea of establishing clinics to ‘cure’ unveiled women is chilling, where people are separated from society simply for not conforming to the ruling ideology,” said British-based Iranian journalist Sima Sabet. 

Sabet was one of two Iranian dissident journalists targeted for assassination by an alleged Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) murder-for-hire plot in London two years ago.

The Iranian regime’s idea for treating hijab protesters as mentally ill was probably inspired by a young woman who stripped to her underwear at the Islamic Azad University in Tehran in early November. The police declared she was “under severe mental pressure and had a mental disorder” after they took her into custody.

“The perpetrator of this act has severe mental problems and, after investigations, she will most likely be transferred to a mental hospital,” Iranian media reported.

The fate of the young woman from Islamic Azad University is unknown to the outside world, but her situation is probably unpleasant, as she was accosted and beaten by the brutal Basij militia at the scene of her protest. According to several eyewitnesses, she only took off the rest of her clothing because the Basij thugs had already torn off her top. Some Iranian media outlets report the woman was confined to a psychiatric hospital after her arrest.