The newspaper “Etemad” reported on femicide in Iran, stating that in the first quarter of the years 2022 to 2024, at least 85 femicide cases were recorded in Iran, with most of the accused being husbands.
Etemad emphasized that news of the murder of women and girls, referred to in government literature as “honor killings” or family disputes, is often not reported by the media.
honor killing is the killing of a relative, especially a girl or woman, who is perceived to have brought dishonor on the family.
According to the newspaper, such killings have been on the rise in Iran over the past three years.
Etemad wrote that in the first quarter of the past three years (from March 21 to June 20), at least 85 women and girls were killed by their husbands, fathers, brothers, and other close male relatives.
According to this report, in the first quarter of 2022 (from March 21 to June 20), at least 22 women and girls, in the first quarter of 2023 at least 28 women and girls, and in the first quarter of 2024 at least 35 women and girls were killed in various cities in Iran.
The report also mentioned the geographical distribution of the murders, stating that in the first quarter of 2024 (from March 21 to June 20), the highest number of murders occurred in the cities of Urmia, Talesh, Tabriz, Mashhad, Iranshahr, and Tehran.
According to Etemad, “Tehran with five femicides” topped the list in this period. Similarly, during the same period in 2023, the highest number of murders occurred in the cities of Divandarreh, Kuhdasht, and Tehran, with “Tehran having 11 femicides” at the top. In the first quarter of 2022, the highest number of murders also occurred in “Tehran with 10 femicides,” most of which were committed by the victims’ husbands during the same period.
The report emphasized that most of the killers were husbands, with statistics showing that in 2022, 16 women, in 2023, 15 women, and in 2024, 27 women were killed by their husbands.
According to reports, 156 cases of “femicide” were recorded in Iran in 2023, averaging 13 murders per month.
In 92% of recorded femicide cases, the killer knew the victim, with the killer being the woman’s husband in half of the cases and violence being perpetrated by relatives other than the husband in 57 cases.
Women’s rights activists say the lack of judicial strictness towards femicide perpetrators has led to an increase in these cases. In recent years, there have been many instances where a father or brother killed a young woman on the pretext of not observing hijab or having a relationship with another man, and the killer faced minimal punishment.
Some academic articles and theses have reported an annual statistic of 375 to 450 cases of femicide in Iran, referred to as “honor killings” in official government literature.
According to the laws of the Iranian regime, a victim’s father, if he is the killer, is practically immune due to the right of blood and what is called “guardian of the blood” in regime laws. In cases of uxoricide or femicide, Islamic penal laws also leave openings for the killer to gain immunity under pretexts such as “honor” or suspicion of “illicit relations.”
According to the regime’s Islamic Penal Code, the punishment for “murder” is “retribution,” but according to Article 630 of the Islamic Penal Code, “if a man sees his wife committing adultery with another man and knows that the woman has consented, he can kill them both at the moment. If the woman was coerced, he can only kill the man.”
Civil activists and human rights defenders have protested against discrimination against women in Iranian regime laws for decades. International organizations and the United Nations have repeatedly called on the regime’s officials to abolish discriminatory laws in their periodic reports, a demand that has remained unanswered for the past four decades.
