Currently in Iran there are women being brutally beaten and arrested for simply wearing a piece of clothing “wrong”. Rioters are being given warnings as Iran’s army struggles to suppress the large unrest spreading throughout the country. Common people are taking to the streets in uproar and mourning over the murder of one young woman. 

Masha Amini was a young Kurdish woman who was arrested by the “morality police,” an Islamic police agency that enforces religious observance and public morality on behalf of national or regional authority. She was arrested for not wearing her hijab in accordance with government statute. 

She died in a hospital in Iran under suspicious circumstances. It is said that the cause of death was from a violent blow to the head. The intended punishment for her “crime” of violating the religious dress code in public is to be imprisoned for up to two months and and flogged with 74 lashes. Instead she was allegedly beaten nearly to death in the back of a police van. 

If the police are able to arrest and brutally murder an innocent woman whose only crime was allegedly wearing a price of cloth wrong, who’s to say they wouldn’t do that to anybody walking down the street. 

American women are currently dealing with the revoking of their bodily autonomy, these women can’t even wear a slightly different cloth without getting arrested. It has been the norm for centuries that women have been stripped of their rights and controlled by men. We sit and complain about the things our governments decide for us when in reality the fact that we just sit and accept it is what allows it to continuously happen. If we just sit and watch the injustices, then we are allowing things like the revoking of women’s bodily autonomy and murder of innocent young women to develop into such horrendous things. 

There are always going to be injustices in the world with human greed and narcissism, it’s inevitable. But as a supposedly superior, more developed country, how can we just watch as innocent human beings are being tortured? 

Humans cannot truly be superior unless we all stand together and fight for each other. Instead of sitting, watching and complaining about the things happening we need to fight it. Although horribly tragic, things like this inspire us to stand and fight for the revenge that Masha Amini and all other women suffering deserve.