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On June 19th, Taraneh Mousavi was arrested at a post-election protest. Several weeks later she had disappeared. The last record of her life was a medical document stating that she had been briefly
hospitalized for an ‘unfortunate accident’ in which her womb and anus had been ruptured.

Sexual violations have long stained Iranian prisons (and detention centres around the world). In 1986 Ayatollah Montazeri, now renowned in the West for his fiery criticism of Ahmadinejad’s regime, penned an outraged letter to then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini asking “Did you know that young women are raped in some of the prisons of the Islamic Republic?” And though gender-based violence is generally associated with the abuse of women, the recent accusations of opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi highlight the use of rape against detained women and men alike. One young Iranian man writes of his incarceration in July, “They ... >>>