(Adnkronos) – In Iran, the challenge to the obligation to wear the hijab officially risks ending up in “clinics” for the “psychological treatment” of women who dare not to comply with the rules on the veil. Outraged women and activists, human rights associations. It was a woman, Mehri Talebi Darestani, head of the Department for Women and the Family of the headquarters for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, who announced the opening of a “clinic for the treatment of the removal of the hijab”. A structure that, she said, will offer “scientific and psychological treatment”.
A “shameful” decision, says Sima Sabet, an Iranian journalist living in the UK who escaped an assassination attempt last year, quoted by the Guardian. “The idea of opening clinics to ‘treat’ unveiled women is chilling,” she says. An initiative “neither Islamic nor in line with Iranian laws”, echoes the Iranian lawyer Hossein Raeesi. “It will not be a clinic, it will be a prison,” says a young woman from Iran.
The announcement by the Iranian authorities came after Iranian media reported the transfer to a psychiatric hospital of a university student arrested after undressing in Tehran in what was reportedly a protest at being assaulted by campus security officers for violating hijab provisions.
