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A 16-year-old girl tragically took her life in Iran after she was threatened with expulsion by her school after she was recorded dancing without a hijab.
An image of Arezoo Khavari’s final moments, which shows her balancing on the edge of a building, has been circulating on X, with several social media users condemning Iran’s strict dress code laws.
The death of Arezoo, who was an Afghan citizen living in the Iranian city of Shahrari, was confirmed by the General Department of Education of Tehran in a statement that said that the girl was ‘injured due to a fall from the height of a residential building’.
‘After being immediately transferred to the hospital and despite the efforts of the medical team, she died’, the statement explained.
While the department said that the ‘motivation and reasons for this action’ had not been determined, respected Persian human rights activist Masih Alinjad said in a post on X that Arezoo was driven to her death after ‘being sent back from a school trip for violating the dress code by wearing jeans instead of the prescribed uniform’.
The teen had also faced repeated harassment from the school for not complying with its dress code policy, Masih alleged and also claimed that Arezoo had been threatened with expulsion after she was filmed dancing without a hijab.
Following Arezoo’s death, her father has lodged a formal complaint against the school accusing them of negligence and insensitivity, activist Masih said.
Commenting further on the teenager’s death, Masih said: ‘The Taliban strip girls of education, and Iran’s clerics crush a girl’s spirit for letting her hair flow in the wind, for dancing, for choosing her own clothes.
‘Arezoo’s voice—like so many others—will be buried beneath the world’s louder headlines. Shame on Western leaders who shake hands with the Islamic Republic and the Taliban, thinking they can reform this cruelty.
‘We the women of Iran and Afghanistan want an end for this gender apartheid regimes. Stand with us not our killers!’.
The teen’s tragic death and the circumstances around it comes just days after an Iranian woman who stripped down to her underwear in protest over hijab laws was arrested.
The young unidentified woman was seen in footage walking around the campus of Tehran’s Islamic Azad University science and research branch on Saturday before security guards detained her.
The widely circulated video on social media shows the woman sitting and pacing back and forth with her arms crossed around the campus in her underwear.
Growing numbers of women have defied authorities by discarding their veils after nationwide protests that followed the death in September 2022 of a young Iranian Kurdish woman in the custody of the morality police for allegedly violating hijab rules.
Mahsa Amini, 22, died after being captured by morality police for not wearing her hijab correctly.
Her death spearheaded mass protests known as ‘Women. life, freedom’ which lasted months in the country.
A year later, in October 2023, an Iranian teenager named Armita Geravand was injured in a suspicious incident on Tehran’s metro while not wearing a head covering.
She later died in the hospital after falling into a coma.
