Media outlets IranWire and Iran International have learned that the Islamic Republic regime forced Iranian secondary schoolgirls to watch pornographic videos to deter them from joining the protests that have rocked Iran since September.
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According to their reports, Iranian security forces visited schools in several cities across Iran, including Tehran, to force girls to watch these pornographic films. Most of them came in civilian clothing.
The first instance, as reported by IranWire, came in October last year when schoolgirls in the courtyard of the Shahid Reihane-ul-Nabi school in Bandar-e Mahshahr gathered to protest and chant slogans against the regime.
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Shortly after, a cleric accompanied by men wearing uniforms and plain clothes and a woman wearing a hijab visited the school and gathered girls in 10th, 11th, and 12th grades in a classroom.
They then forced schoolgirls to watch films depicting graphic scenes of rape and even sexual intercourse between humans and animals, hoping to discourage them from joining the women-led demonstrations and to convince them that their demands would lead to sexual and moral decadence in Iran.
Members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and the paramilitary group Basij have reportedly taken similar action against schoolgirls in Tehran’s fourth and fifth districts, according to journalist and education expert Nejat Bahrami.
One student, given the pseudonym Maryam to protect her identity, recalled how the security forces violated their right to a respectful and safe learning environment in their school.
“The visitors randomly or intentionally selected around 60 students from three different grades for counseling and threats,” Maryam said. “These protesting students were then expelled from school for three days. The school authorities brought this group of uniformed forces to threaten us and prevent us from participating in protests,”
“They tried to change our opinions about protesting and even threatened to report us to security agencies if we chanted slogans,” she added. "After talking for a while, we remained unconvinced, and they turned on the projector. They showed us all kinds of rape films and warned us that if we participated in protests, we could have the same fate.”
Maryam told IranWire that the films caused so much emotional and psychological trauma to the schoolgirls that tenth graders broke into tears while the eleventh and twelfth graders left the class in the middle of the session. One student even suffered a nervous breakdown; she had to be hospitalized for two days.
The action impacted the students, with only 50 of the 400 attending class the next day. This incident comes as many schoolgirls have been hospitalized for suspected poisonings across many schools all over Iran.
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Many families protested against this attention and even threatened to pull their children out of school. Education officials, however, countered this threat with another one, saying they would report them to authorities.
This action also reflects the threat felt by the Islamic Republic toward women, who are at the forefront of the massive demonstrations that spread across the country. One hardline parliamentarian, Hamid Rasaei, said the protesters' goal is “to sleep with someone every night and graze like animals.”
Disclaimer: This article was previously published on Atheist Republic blog.