On Monday, August 11, 2025, Sheida Kardgar, a 15-year-old girl from a village near the northern city of Babol in Mazandaran Province, was brutally stabbed to death by a man whose marriage proposal she had rejected.
According to local sources, Sheida Kardgar had previously been harassed and pressured by the man. Her family had firmly opposed the marriage. Enraged by the refusal, the suitor confronted Sheida outside her grandmother’s home and attacked her with multiple knife blows, killing her on the spot.
The Root Cause
Such tragedies cannot be seen as isolated acts of violence. They are rooted in the oppressive and misogynistic policies of Iran’s ruling clerical regime, which fosters a culture of discrimination and violence against women and girls.
The murders of Sheida Kardgar and others—such as Mona Heydari—are not only the result of an assailant’s blade. They are enabled by the legal impunity and entrenched patriarchal norms enshrined in the clerical regime’s laws, many of them explicitly or implicitly sanctioning the subjugation of women.
