Women Are Killed in Iran with Complete Impunity
November 2025 Report: Under the Clerical Regime, Nowhere Is Safe for Women in Iran
Under the rule of Iran’s misogynistic clerical regime, Iranian women, from childhood to old age, are unsafe in all spaces and circumstances. If they manage to escape the brutality of security forces in the streets, they may still fall victim in their homes to so-called “honor suspicions,” resisting forced marriage, requesting a divorce, or even attempting to defend their own rights. Many of these killings take place in front of children or other family members, feeding a cycle of violence across generations. Among the victims are pregnant women or mothers killed alongside their children.
Beatings and torture of women in prisons, firing pellets into the eyes of protesting women, sexual assault in detention centers, and the attacks by morality police patrols enforcing compulsory hijab in public all legitimize and encourage violence against women inside the home and within families.
As a result, state violence against Iranian women is far more widespread than domestic violence. Iran, under clerical rule, remains the world’s largest executioner of women—women who are often victims of forced marriages, child marriages, and domestic abuse, then condemned to death in unjust courts.
Fact-Finding Mission Report
“Systemic Impunity” for killers, an expression used in the recent United Nations Fact-Finding Mission report on Iran, is a phrase that should trouble anyone with a conscience. It reflects a truth that Iranian women and girls face every day. Under the Iranian state’s laws, this “systemic impunity” effectively exempts perpetrators of violence against women from prosecution and proportionate punishment.
In the UN report published on October 30, 2025, which examines human rights violations in Iran, Sara Hossain, the Chair of the UN Fact-Finding Mission, said:
“The acts of denying justice are not neutral. Failure to address injustice prolongs the suffering of victims of victims and undermines the State’s obligations under international human rights law to ensure accountability, truth, justice, and reparations.”
Rising Numbers of Femicides in Iran
Each year, femicides in Iran grow in scale. The lack of transparent official statistics reflects the state’s deliberate intention to hide the truth. Still, even the partial data published by state-run media reveal a tsunami of violence.
Zahra Eftekharezadeh, founder of the Atena Safe Shelter in Tehran, recently said: “We are facing an increase in domestic violence, but the lack of scientific and national statistics prevents us from having an accurate picture of the reality. No official institution in Iran has taken responsibility for collecting precise data in this area, nor have any comprehensive studies been conducted.” (Shargh newspaper, October 11, 2025)
She also stated elsewhere: “Every day we see an increase in femicides in Iran. Even without exact statistics, we can see that every two days a woman is killed, an extraordinarily high number. Just in Shadegan, in Khuzestan Province in southwest Iran, at least five women were killed. These figures were gathered even though no institution in this country feels obligated to provide statistics; so, these numbers are based on verbal reports. Therefore, we must multiply them to reflect the real scale.” (Ham-Mihan newspaper, October 26, 2025)
Shirin Ahmadnia, President of the Iranian Sociological Association, said about femicide: “This phenomenon has deep structural roots, while we witness silence and negligence in the face of it… The accumulated inequalities and injustices in society ultimately result in the physical elimination of a woman. Violence inside the home directly reflects the unequal policies that exist on a macro scale.” (Ham-Mihan newspaper, October 26, 2025)
The statistics published by state institutions and media are merely the tip of the iceberg.
According to the data collected by the NCRI Women’s Committee, from January 2025 to the end of November 2025, an 11-month period, at least 175 women were killed by male family members. This number is extremely conservative, because in many cases family members, under the pretext of “honor” or in their role as the vali-ye-dam (literally means the owner of blood or the relative who holds the right to pursue charges), remain silent about the killings of women and girls and do not file any complaints.
Unofficial academic estimates have previously suggested that between 375 and 450 women are victims of honor killings and domestic femicides in Iran each year, a staggering figure that reveals a structural and state-driven catastrophe.
Stories That Reveal the Depth of the Tragedy
Only in November 2025, the following murders were reported:
Mobina Zare, age 20, in Islamshahr (a city southwest of Tehran), was killed by her former fiancé. After murdering her, he burned her body in an aluminum-melting furnace at his father’s workshop. Her family searched for her for ten days before finding her half-burned body.
Leila Aliramaii, age 40, in Marivan (in Kurdistan Province, western Iran), was killed with a Kalashnikov rifle because she refused the vile demands of a member of the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Leila was married and the mother of a young daughter and son.
Sarina Rostami, age 16, in Sarpol-e-Zahab (in Kermanshah Province, western Iran), was killed by a male relative because she refused accept a forcible marriage.
A 40-year-old woman in Pakdasht (Tehran Province) was suffocated with a blanket by her husband.
Reyhaneh Dorzadeh, age 23, in Nikshahr (Sistan and Baluchestan Province, southeastern Iran), was suffocated by her husband because she opposed his desire to take a second wife.
A 29-year-old woman identified as J.D. was murdered by her father, who then dismembered her body and set it on fire.
Sakineh, age 80, in Tehran, was killed by her son using an iron rod.
Zahra Ghaemi, a women’s rights activist and member of the Women’s Study Group at the University of Tehran, was suffocated by her husband.
Shahla Karimani, age 38, mother of two, in Mahabad (Kurdistan Province), was strangled with a scarf by her husband and brother-in-law.
Sajedeh Sand-Kazehi, in Khash (Sistan and Baluchestan Province), was killed with a hunting rifle because her father-in-law wanted to forcefully take a gas regulator that belonged to her. Sajedeh was the mother of two young children.
Raheleh Siavoshi, age 26, in Nahavand, a town in Hamedan Province in western Iran, was fatally stabbed by her husband after participating in a sports camp. She died in the hospital two days later.
Justice Has Lost Its Meaning
While women are sentenced to long prison terms for “removing their hijab” or protesting discrimination, men who murder their wives typically receive only a few years in prison. In many cases, they can pay money to buy their way out and return to their lives.
In notorious cases such as Romina Ashrafi and Mona Heydari, the murderers received only two to eight years in prison. Even state-run media sometimes acknowledge this “inverted justice”: “The punishment for beheading one’s wife: 8 years in prison; The punishment for removing one’s hijab: 10 years in prison!”
According to the regime’s laws, the father, who is also the “male guardian and blood-owner (vali-ye-dam),” is exempt from retributive punishment for killing his own child.
Zahra Eftekharezadeh, founder of one of Tehran’s safe shelters, said regarding the absence of deterrent laws: “When the law does not impose a punishment proportionate to the crime, perpetrators realize there is no serious consequence waiting for them. In many cases, the sentences issued by the judiciary are not only non-deterrent but encourage the offender. Romina Ashrafi’s father is an example. He openly said that if he killed his daughter, he would receive at most ten years in prison.” (Shargh newspaper – October 11, 2025)
Atrocities Rooted in Law and Politics
Under Iran’s misogynistic clerical laws, a woman is not recognized as an independent individual but as “subordinate” to a man. Without legal or structural protection, women are forced to endure domestic violence, and each day adds new names to the list of women murdered.
Article 1105 of Iran’s Civil Code assigns family leadership exclusively to men.
Article 1108 makes a woman’s right to financial support conditional on her “obedience.”
Article 1114 gives the husband the right to determine the wife’s place of residence.
In such a system, women seeking divorce must prove their lives are in danger, and their testimony is worth only half that of a man. Judges routinely force women who have been beaten or threatened back into the homes of their abusers.
Through its laws, media, and judiciary, the clerical regime perpetuates these crimes. Violence extends from home to the school, from the street to the courtroom, widening its reach every day.
But beyond the laws, today’s social tragedies in Iran stem from political roots. The misogynistic clerical regime is founded on the subjugation of women. The horrific killings of women are not isolated acts of personal fanaticism; they are the product of a system that authorizes violence against women.
The rising number of honor killings must therefore be understood as the direct result of the regime’s anti-woman policies and the patriarchal culture embedded within its structure. The Iranian people blame not society but the regime itself, an oppressive, misogynistic establishment that preserves its power through the suppression and elimination of women.
Data compiled over the past three years by the NCRI Women’s Committee shows a sharp upward trend in the number of women murdered under the misogynistic rule of the clerical regime. These figures are drawn entirely from documented and published reports by state-run media and other available sources. They therefore represent a minimum estimate, as the regime deliberately obscures such information, and many families, fearing the perpetrators, avoid publicizing the killings of their daughters and female relatives.
According to these findings, at least 105 women were murdered in 2023, 160 in 2024, and during just the first eleven months of 2025, no fewer than 175 women have been killed in Iran.
