with me today is nealy daryabegi who
was is an attorney and had spent half of
her time
in iran for a number of years you
were a resident of iran
I was born there I lived here for about fifteen years
uh... why don't we take a look at uh... what
you dressed like when you were in ian
as opposed to
what you look like now
sure now can you tell us what the purpose of
the the dress code is
um...
you have to cover basically your hair
uh
your face your hands
you can't have any makeup on any nail polish on
uh... you have to your full body has to
be covered
up unto your ankles
and the purpose is that if you're not
married or if you're not married to a man
and if he's not your father your brother or your
uncle
he can't see you
without the dress code
without the scarf
and the
overdress but what is it designed to
prevent
basically in islam
it's considered the men can't control
themselves 
and a woman shouldn't do anything to
tempt him
so basically so
we have to cover ourselves to prevent
them from getting tempted so-so greater
responsibility is placed on the woman exactly
because they think a man's is just innocent and
he can't you know he can't control himself
now can a woman be forced to marry in iran
a man can't force a woman to marry him
her parents can
let's say if her parents want her to marry a
forty-fifty year old man
and she refuses at that age you really
don't have that much strength to go
against your parents wishes
and if she says yes
I'm not so sure at that age she even understands what she's agreeing to
in this country we consider that to
be rape i we don't even think a child that age
has the capacity to consent
um... and what happens is once she does
get married and certain you know if he's
physically abusive towards her or towards
the kids she can't ever get a divorce
from him
and even if let's say he does let her go
he gets automatic custody of the
children regardless of how he may have treated
the children during or the wife during
the marriage exactly regardless he gets
automatic custody
and most mothers can't walk away from their
children
so what they do is they just sit in order
to protect the kids they stay in that marriage
and even in a good case scenario where he said
you can go and you can take the kids
with you
let's say she's fifteen sixteen years old
at that at that point
she's got three four kids because there's
no birth control
she never finished elementary school so
where can she really go
and let me just ask nealy when we had talked
earlier you said she may be one of
multiple wives
it's permissible to have many wives in iran
you can have four wives a man
can have four wives
which is for lifetime 
what a marriage what we consider a marriage
should be
anything after that is considered to be
temporary marriages
where it's for a specific amount of time
and a certain amount of money
but you can have as many as you
want
a man can have a man can have as many as he wants
because if a woman was to engage in a
in an adulterous relationship
what would be the penalties for that
she would get to death
he would get fined
but the man really never needs to commit
adultery because he can have a
temporary marriage so basically it's
just a monetary loss either way if you
look at it
she would be stoned to death she would be stoned to death 
and the thing is if she's married
and she can't ever divorce her husband
and she decides she wants to have an outside
affair
she risks her life
uh... she also risks her life for
violating the dress code
uh... the dress code is
strictly enforced 
and you really don't get jailed basically
you get physically punished
there's different forms depending on what
she did
it ranges from like throwing acid
on your face they could stand on the side of the street and throw acid on your face
if you walk by you know you
said that matter-of-factly and you said that
to me earlier when you said it and it struck me
as how barbaric
it's very barbaric but
um... let me just say the other forms than
another thing that then they can do is that they do is
they they stand in every block
in a bus they have buses and the guard standing on
every block
and they just take people randomly in if for
any reason
you could get either whipped on your
hands a hundred times on your back
there's putting you in containers of water
with leeches in it
getting your fingers cut off depending
on what it is and it changes all the
time you know one form gets
popular over another every three four
months
um...
and they don't care if you're a child or if you're a pregnant woman or if you're an old lady
and most
pregnant woman can't survive under it
uh
an example is that what they do is
that they separate the schools the boys and
the girls
and the hours are even different 
seven to two is boys and then from eight to 
0:04:51.470,0:04:53.260
three is the girls schools
and what they do around three o'clock is
they
uh... they block out the whole street
they stand at one end of the street and then they start walking up
as we're going down as the girls are going
down
and then they start taking you in
you know depending on
whatever the dress code violation
yeah the dress code violation
and one-time
you know you could have naturally you could have like rosy
cheeks or you could have long eyelashes
and you haven't done anything
uh... one-time when we were walking out
uh... a friend of mine
she was a beautiful girl she had these big
like long curly eyelashes
and the guard just grabbed her started pulling her
eyelashes
and and while he was doing it he
realized that they're real
and he just continued he
pulled the rest of them out and he said you should'nt
even look this pretty because it just attracts
so much attention you shouldn't even have these eyelashes
and just pulled them out
or let's say if you have like rosy cheeks they think you
have make up on so you might get the acid thrown in
your face
and you haven't even  done anything
this excerpt is brought to you by the
massachusetts school of law
