News Center- Amnesty International published a 120-page report titled, “They violently raped me”: Sexual violence weaponized to crush Iran’s “Woman Life Freedom” uprising”. The report documents in detail the harrowing ordeals of 45 survivors, including 26 men, 12 women and seven children, who were subjected to rape, gang rape and other forms of sexual violence by intelligence and security forces following their arbitrary arrest for challenging decades of oppression and entrenched gender-based discrimination.

“To date, the Iranian authorities have not charged or prosecuted any officials for the instances of rape and other sexual violence documented in the report,” said Amnesty International.

“Our research exposes how intelligence and security agents in Iran used rape and other sexual violence to torture, punish and inflict lasting physical and psychological damage on protesters, including children as young as 12. The harrowing testimonies we collected point to a wider pattern in the use of sexual violence as a key weapon in the Iranian authorities’ armory of repression of the protests and suppression of dissent to cling to power at all costs,” Amnesty International’s Secretary-General Agnés Callamard said.

“Iran’s prosecutors and judges were not only complicit by ignoring or covering up survivors’ complaints of rape, but also used torture-tainted ‘confessions’ to bring spurious charges against survivors and sentence them to imprisonment or death. Victims have been left with no recourse and no redress; only institutionalized impunity, silencing and multiple physical and psychological scars running deep and far.”

The report revealed that perpetrators of rape and other forms of sexual violence included agents from the Revolutionary Guards, the paramilitary Basij force, and the Ministry of Intelligence, as well as different branches of the police force including the Public Security Police, the Investigation Unit of Iran’s police, and the Special Forces of the police.  Survivors included women and girls, who had defiantly removed their headscarves, as well as men and boys who took to the streets to express their outrage at decades of gender-based discrimination and oppression.