பெண்ணியத்தின் தேவை

ஒரு ஈரானிய பெண்ணின் வாழ்க்கை. இந்த உலகத்தில் பெண்ணியத்துக்கு எவ்வளவு தேவை இருக்கிறது என்பதை ஓரளவுக்கேனும் யாருக்கேனும் புரிந்தால் நல்லது.

Growing up female in Iran: 'Adjust yourself to fate'
The story of how one lawyer saved one child sold into prostitution says a lot about how Iran's legal system and culture view women.
Click-2-Listen
By Margaret Coker
INTERNATIONAL STAFF


Sunday, May 06, 2007

TEHRAN, Iran — Growing up female in Iran, Layla did not know happiness.

At age 13, her family sold her to a man who forced her into prostitution. At 18, she was arrested and sentenced to death for adultery, while her pimp only paid a fine.


Golnaz Beshishti FOR COX NEWSPAPERS

Layla, 22, forced into prostitution as a child and sentenced to death for adultery, now lives in a women's shelter. A women's rights lawyer helped to get her sentence overturned.


In contrast, Shadi Sadr, a lawyer, was raised with the world at her feet. When young, her parents encouraged her education. As a young adult, she was free to travel and marry a man she loved.

These women's strikingly different fates aren't unusual in Iran, an Islamic republic of 70 million people where on the same street some women run businesses, while others walk anonymously behind their husbands, silent unless given permission to speak.

In Iran, women drive, vote and own property. They can be legally independent from male relatives — a status rare in the rest of the region, where the male-dominated tenets of Islam and tribal culture often subjugate women.

Yet Iran's legal system also codifies traditions that confer second-class status for women. A woman's testimony in court is worth half that of a man. A girl is considered an adult under the law at age 9, but the age for boys is 15. The laws also deny women equal rights in divorce, custody and inheritance.

But Layla's story — a young girl forced into prostitution and condemned to death for it — is extraordinary for how it has turned out.

Her fate changed two years ago, when Sadr, a crusading lawyer for women's rights in Iran, walked into her cell and saved her. Today, Layla lives in a women's shelter, ready to start a new life at age 22. Layla's last name is being withheld at the request of the shelter, for fear that people from her past might seek retribution.

Layla's face carries an easy smile, and the sparkle in her walnut brown eyes offers no hint of the ghosts of her past.

"When I was little, I didn't have any dreams for my life," Layla said. "All my life, people hurt me . . . until Shadi came. Now, each day is better than the last."

An old Persian proverb states: If fate does not adjust to you, adjust yourself to fate. It has been used to console some women — and resign them — to the harsh realities of life in Iran.

Sadr and her colleagues want to banish it from the lexicon.



No way out


Layla grew up with two brothers in a three-bedroom home in Arak, an industrial city about 120 miles south of Tehran. She helped her mother around the house, which her father said made it impossible for her to attend school.

Her father rarely worked, a situation typical for families in crime-infested, working-class Arak. To get money, Layla's parents sold her to a man who, according to Sadr and Layla's social worker, they knew planned to prostitute her.

The act of a father selling his daughter is legal in Iran if done in the form of a marriage contract. So, at 13, Layla became the wife of her pimp.

Iran's cultural and legal traditions left her no way out. Girls are raised to obey their fathers. Once married, women are commanded to obey their husbands. Judges, whatever the circumstances, usually side with the man in cases related to domestic disputes, according to Iranian lawyers practicing civil and domestic law.

That was Layla's predicament. Police arrested her when she was 18. The authorities charged her with prostitution and adultery.

Layla tried to defend herself against the charges. She told stories of incest at home as a child and of her husband's physical brutality.

"No one believed me when I told them the terrible things that had happened. Everybody judged me and thought (the sexual abuse) was my fault," said Layla, who had survived two pregnancies and the trauma of having to give up both babies.

When he heard her accusations, the judge decreed that she was responsible for seducing her brother. He sentenced Layla to death by stoning, the verdict the Quran commands for both adultery and incest.



A different life


Sadr, 33, decided to become a lawyer because stories like Layla's were too close for comfort, even for someone with Sadr's relatively privileged and independent life growing up in Tehran.

The majority of university students in Iran are women. Parliament has a small but consistent number of elected female members. Women excel in all fields open to them: the arts, education, business, law.

Behind many of these successful women are tales of female relatives whose yearnings were quashed by tradition or religion. For Sadr, that person was her grandmother, one of the first girls in Iran allowed to attend school in the 1930s, thanks to a decree by Reza Shah Pahlavi, who ruled Iran until his abdication in 1941. His son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, ruled Iran until he was overthrown by the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Sadr's grandmother completed the sixth grade and dreamed of becoming a teacher or midwife. But, according to Sadr, her great-grandfather forced her grandmother at 13 to marry someone more than three times her age, consigning her to a life as a housewife.

Sadr didn't want her life to turn out like that, and she doesn't want it for her own daughter, Darya, 7.

"My grandmother wasn't allowed the life she wanted. I was lucky. I achieved everything, but the struggle was still hard. I didn't want the dearest person in my life to have the same troubles," Sadr said.

Sadr was a journalist before going to law school — a career switch prompted when the government shut down the reformist newspapers where she published unflattering stories about the treatment of women.

For the past three years, she has operated a pro-bono legal service that helps dozens of women. She has secured the release of eight women from death row after their convictions on adultery charges were overturned.

Her cause has not been easy. Sadr has spent time in prison, including a recent three-week stint for organizing women's rights demonstrations in Tehran.

Practicing law, the odds are against her, too.

After the 1979 revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a prohibition against female judges. Khomeini said that a woman's brain was not developed enough for such decision-making power. Female justices, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, lost their positions.

The male clerics who run the judiciary interpret laws more harshly against women, according to Sadr and other human rights lawyers.

"It's a monopoly of power," Sadr said. "They have a mentality that is very traditional (and) a bias against nontraditional women. It's a constant struggle for justice."

Women's rights were making some advances under the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami but are being rolled back by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who succeeded Khatami in August 2005.

In recent weeks, for example, Iranian police have launched a campaign against women accused of not covering up enough, arresting nearly 300 women, some for wearing too tight an overcoat or letting too much hair peek out from under their headscarves and veils. The campaign is the toughest such crackdown in nearly two decades.



Saving Layla


In 2004, a friend told Sadr about Layla's case. She found the young woman languishing in prison, catatonic and without basic sanitary items.

Sadr presented a defense at the appeals court based on the Quranic injunctions of mercy and charity. The court saw merit in the argument because of Layla's deteriorating mental state.

Sadr persuaded the judge to sever the legal relationship between Layla and her family and make her Layla's custodian.

In 2005, when Layla was freed, Sadr took her to Tehran and enlisted help from a network of women working to rehabilitate thousands of women and girls abused by Iran's system. They include homeless girls, victims of rape, divorcees and prostitutes. In the eyes of traditional Iranian society, they all have one thing in common: the presumption that all have lost their virginity, and, therefore, their worth.

"Girls and women like that . . . are completely written off by the government and by most of society," said Marjaneh Halati, a psychotherapist who founded Omid e Mehr, the women's shelter in downtown Tehran where Layla now lives.

The government also runs shelters for abused women that provide them with beds and meals, but Omid e Mehr provides a way for girls to escape the shackles of their past and not be defined by it. The center provides therapy, foster care, vocational education and job placement. The women, ages 20 to 35, spend two or three years in the program.

The social workers are teaching Layla to read and do math. She gets to draw and paint with her friends. She goes on field trips to the mountains that border Tehran and to see a movie once a week.

Most of all, she feels safe to dream about the kind of future she wants, about finding love and starting a real family.

"It's difficult to be a girl in Iran. You survive by learning to tolerate what life brings you. That was what my life was like in the past," Layla said.

"Now, I dream about making myself happy, about having the whole world brought to me on a silver platter."

mcoker@coxnews.com

Additional material from

The Associated Press.



How Iranian laws are tilted against women:

•Girls are considered adults at the age of 9, can be tried as an adult in a criminal court and are liable to receive the death penalty for murder. Boys become adults at 15.

•If a man and a woman are injured in an accident, the man gets double the punitive damages.

•Although the legal age of marriage for a girl is 13, a father can make her marry earlier with court permission.

•Mothers may not act as the financial guardians of their children or make decisions regarding their children's residence, foreign travel or medical care. Women need permission from a father or husband to travel.

•Men have uncontested rights to divorce their wives and may practice polygamy. Polygamy is believed to be rare in urban areas and more prevalent among the poor and rural.

•Women receive half the inheritance of men.

•If a man dies childless, the totality of the inheritance goes to his parents, not his wife.

•Women can be stoned to death for adultery. Nine women are in jail sentenced to stoning death. The sentence has been carried out once since 1998.

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ஊழல் செய்வதற்கும், அராஜகம் செய்வதற்கும், ரவுடித்தனம் பண்ணுவதற்கும் உரிமை இருக்கும் பெண்கள் வாழும் நாடுதான் பெண்ணியத்துக்கான தேவை அற்ற நாடு.

ஆனால் அப்படிப்பட்ட ஒரு சூழ்நிலை உலகம் முழுவதும் இல்லை.

பெண்கள் இப்படிப்பட்ட எல்லா பெண்களுக்கும் குரல் எழுப்ப உரிமையுள்ளவர்களாகிறார்கள்.