April 19, 2019
Azam Jangravi is one of the women arrested last year for standing in a public place, taking off her headscarf and waving it like a flag on the end of a stick—much to the annoyance of the authorities.
In an interview with Reuters, she said her motivation was her daughter.
She said her heart was pounding when she climbed atop an electrical transformer box on Tehran’s Revolution Street a year ago.
She raised her headscarf in the air and waved it above her head. A crowd formed. People shouted at her to come down. She knew all along she was going to be arrested. But she did it anyway, she says, to change the country for her eight-year-old daughter.
“I was telling myself: ‘Viana should not grow up in the same conditions in this country that you grew up in’,” Jangravi told Reuters in an interview in a country Reuters did not name. She now awaits news on her application for asylum in that country.
“I kept telling myself: ‘You can do this! You can do this!’,” she said. “I was feeling a very special kind of power. It was as if I was not the secondary gender anymore.”
Soon, she was arrested, fired from her job at a research institute and sentenced to three years in prison for promoting indecency and willfully breaking Islamic law.
The court threatened to take her daughter away from her, but she managed to flee the country with Viana before her jail term began. “I found a human smuggler with a lot of difficulty. It all happened very quickly. I left my life, my house, my car behind,” she said.
As she spoke, Viana sketched pictures. They showed her mother waving the white hejab in the air.
Jangravi was one of at least 39 women arrested last year in connection with the dress code protests, according to Amnesty International, which says another 55 people were detained for their work on women’s rights, including women who tried to enter stadiums illegally and lawyers advocating for women.
Authorities go to “extreme and absurd lengths to stop their campaign,” said Amnesty’s Iran researcher, Mansoureh Mills. “Like searching people’s homes for pin badges that have ‘I am against forced hejab’ written on them.”
The badges are part of continued efforts to highlight the hejab issue, along with a campaign for women to wear white headscarves on Wednesdays.
Jangravi recalls stories her mother told her about life before the revolution: “She told me that the revolution caused a great deal of sexism and they separated men and women.”
She was inspired to act after two other women were arrested for similar protests on the same street.
“Of course, we don’t expect everyone to climb up the platform in Revolution Street,” she said. “But this made our voices heard by the entire world. What we girls did made this movement into something that continues.”