Iran International
A video showing Iranian police beating and sexually humiliating a teenager while officers laugh, insult him and film the abuse has unleashed fury across Iranian social media, with users asking what may happen beyond public view.
The footage shows several uniformed officers surrounding the teenager as he is struck and subjected to sexual humiliation. At one point, an officer appears to expose or touch the boy's buttocks as other officers watch.
The atmosphere captured by the camera has become almost as central to the outrage as the physical treatment itself. The officers can be heard joking during the encounter.
“We haven't seen his buttocks yet,” one voice says in Iranian Turkish during the recording. Another uses a homophobic slur against the teenager.
East Azarbaijan province police confirmed that the confrontation occurred in Tabriz on June 4 after the person was detained following a street fight, according to the police account carried by state media.
The police said "the officers responsible for the improper treatment" of the teenager are in custody. It said it took "internal disciplinary action against the officers as soon as it learned of the incident, but added that this does not preclude judicial proceedings against them."
Dadban, an Iranian legal rights group, argued that the images should not be reduced to “improper behavior” or an internal disciplinary issue.
The beating and humiliation of a detainee by state officers can carry criminal liability under Iranian law, Dadban said. If the person shown is a minor, the sexual conduct would also fall under legal protections covering children and adolescents and should trigger an immediate, independent criminal investigation, the group said.
‘What happens behind closed doors?’
The images quickly produced a torrent of anger online, much of it centered not simply on the violence but on how openly it appeared to take place.
“If they sexually assault a child in front of a camera, what is happening in detention centers?” one social media user wrote, invoking the death of Mahsa Amini after her detention by morality police in 2022.
“When this happens publicly and with this degree of impunity, there can be no guarantee about people's safety in detention centers and behind closed doors,” another reaction said.
Another user returned to the same fear in starker terms: if this can happen to a teenager in front of a camera, “what is happening in detention centers?”
“If we die from this pain, it would be understandable,” another wrote.
Some demanded that the footage be circulated widely enough for every officer involved to be identified.
Another video fuels the anger
The footage emerged only days after another video from Tabriz circulated widely online, showing a police officer holding two young men's heads close to the loud exhaust of their vehicle.
The apparent purpose was to force them to experience the noise their car had been making.
That video drew significant engagement on social media after appearing online.
Dadban argued that even if the men had committed a traffic offense, police had no authority to invent a roadside punishment. Officers could document an offense, take measures permitted by law and refer suspects to the appropriate judicial authority, the group said.
The two recordings circulation within days of each other has intensified an online argument about police power, humiliation and accountability.
Bonuses sharpen anger
The videos have surfaced just as reports of new bonus payments to members of Iran's armed forces have spread online, adding another source of anger over the treatment of security personnel.
Reports published said a presidential bonus linked to service during the recent war had been deposited for armed forces personnel, with 100 million rials ($43) for staff personnel and 150 million rials ($65) for operational personnel.
Normal military personnel generally earn about 300 million rials ($130) a month, according to figures circulating with reports of the payments.
The timing has drawn a darker interpretation from some government critics on social media. They portrayed the payments as an effort to keep security forces loyal and ready to use greater force should another round of anti-government protests erupt.
That fear comes against a charged backdrop. Security forces were deployed in cities across Iran before a gasoline price increase took effect on September 8, with police, special units and Basij forces reported on streets and around fuel stations in cities including Tabriz, Tehran, Mashhad, Shiraz and Isfahan.
For critics circulating the police videos, the combination is combustible: footage they see as evidence of officers abusing their authority arriving at the same time as reports of authorities rewarding members of the security apparatus.
One reaction to the teenager's treatment went further, questioning why people had previously objected to police stations being destroyed by Israel during the war.
George Floyd comparison resurfaces
One social media response to the teenager's video pointed directly to the contrast with the Iranian leadership's reaction to police violence abroad.
“If American police had committed such a crime, what would the Islamic Republic be doing now?” the user wrote.
It is a comparison with a documented precedent.
After Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd in May 2020, former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei used Floyd's death to criticize the United States and its treatment of Black Americans.
Khamenei described Floyd's killing as revealing the “nature” of the US system and invoked Floyd's dying words, “I can't breathe,” in arguing that they reflected broader grievances against Washington.
Iranian officials and state media devoted extensive attention to Floyd's killing and the demonstrations that followed.
The comparison adds another layer to the anger surrounding the Tabriz footage: For those sharing the teenager's video, the camera has now turned inward.
And beneath the insults, abuse, laughter and blows, one question has persisted across the reaction: if officers can do this while somebody is filming, what happens when nobody is watching?
The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran said its report examined the 2025-2026 protests and found that killings by state security forces took place across all 31 provinces. It described the repression as an unprecedented escalation from previous crackdowns.
At least 221 children were reported killed, some as young as two, while tens of thousands of people were detained, according to the report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council.
Security forces fired at crowds
The mission said security forces positioned themselves on rooftops and other elevated locations and fired assault rifles into crowds.
In Karaj, forces used tear gas to trap demonstrators in narrow alleys before shooting at them, the report said. Protesters suffered severe injuries to the head, chest and eyes from metal shotgun pellets, with some left permanently blind.
Security forces also attacked healthcare facilities, beating and arresting wounded protesters and detaining some healthcare workers, according to the mission. It said the actions deterred injured people from seeking treatment.
Five-month internet shutdown
Iranian authorities imposed a nationwide internet and communications blackout on January 8, at the height of the violence, the mission said.
The shutdown lasted more than five months, which the mission described as the longest nationwide communications shutdown on record, restricting access to information and emergency coordination.
The report said tens of thousands of people were arbitrarily detained and that some faced torture, solitary confinement and denial of access to lawyers. Families were in some cases left without information about detainees' whereabouts, raising concerns of enforced disappearances.
Authorities also delayed or refused to return bodies to some families, demanded payments and pressured relatives to sign statements falsely describing victims as state agents, the mission said.
Executions linked to protests
The mission said Iran also intensified its use of the death penalty against people linked to the protests.
At least 29 men were executed between March and August 2026 following expedited trials, including five who were executed publicly.
More than 70 people, including five women and three boys, remained at imminent risk of execution, it said.
The mission concluded that violations including murder, imprisonment, torture and other inhumane acts amounted to crimes against humanity because they formed part of a widespread and systematic attack against civilians.
US strikes also examined
The report separately found reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed war crimes in two strikes during the conflict with Iran.
It said US Tomahawk missiles struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab, killing more than 150 people, including about 120 children.
A separate US strike in Lamerd dispersed tungsten pellets over a sports complex and nearby residential area, killing 22 civilians, the mission said.
The mission said the attacks amounted to indiscriminate strikes resulting in civilian deaths and damage to civilian objects.
“I felt like a human being, that I had the right to choose and that others could no longer decide for me,” one woman wrote.
Most of the responses portrayed removing the headscarf not simply as a change in clothing, but as an emotional experience accompanied for many by anxiety over possible consequences.
Freedom and fear
Words including freedom, relief, lightness and power appeared repeatedly in the responses. Some said going without a headscarf gave them a sense of making their own decisions about their bodies and clothing.
But many described fear alongside that sense of freedom.
Some others said they initially carried a headscarf in their bags, repeatedly looked around while walking or worried about being confronted.
One woman recalled leaving home without carrying a scarf for the first time in November 2022.
“I was wearing a hooded puffer jacket so I could do something if I had to. It was the first time I had left home without taking a scarf with me, and my heart was racing with fear the whole time. But now wearing a headscarf feels unusual to me,” she wrote.
Another respondent said seeing other women without headscarves gradually reduced her anxiety.
“I was extremely afraid, but seeing people like me made me less frightened and gave me more courage,” she wrote.
Public defiance of compulsory hijab expanded after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in September 2022, three days after her detention by Iran’s morality police, triggering the nationwide Woman, Life, Freedom protests.
‘When the wind touched my hair’
Several focused on physical sensations that had previously been denied to them in public, including feeling wind in their hair or cool air on their face and neck.
One woman said going completely without a scarf and feeling the wind in her hair was so different that she regretted experiencing it at 40 rather than 20.
“The first time I sat behind the wheel wearing a T-shirt, I was about to cry,” another woman wrote. “Why did we have to wear so many clothes and suffocate in the heat? When the air touched me, I felt light.”
Another wrote: “When the wind touched my hair, face and neck, I enjoyed feeling it without having to fix my headscarf afterward or untangle the hair underneath it.”
The accounts come as messages sent to Iran International in recent days described the return of morality patrols and increased pressure on women in cities including Isfahan, Rasht, Fuman, Mashhad and Neyshabur.
Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, a member of Iran’s Expediency Council, another the Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei’s father-in-law said on September 9 that the Islamic Republic could not enforce its hijab requirements as extensively as it wanted because of “war conditions,” describing the situation as more difficult than in 1980s.
Grief and solidarity
For some, taking off the headscarf brought the dead with it.
One woman wrote that the experience did not bring a sense of freedom because she remembered the “heavy price” young people had paid. Others recalled crying or experiencing happiness and grief simultaneously.
Solidarity between women also featured prominently.
A middle-aged woman in Pardis, near Tehran, said she was among the first women of her age there to remove her headscarf.
Another recalled girls periodically giving her chocolates with notes thanking her for her courage.
“I will never forget the smile I had at that moment,” she wrote.
Others described smiles and encouragement from women they did not know, while some said simply seeing others without headscarves helped their fear subside.
For some women, there was no defining first time. Years of gradually pushing back against compulsory hijab had blurred that boundary, while others said workplace rules, restrictions on clothing or decades of habit still kept them from abandoning the headscarf altogether.
The responses also showed how the experience stretched across generations. A 70-year-old woman said she had stopped wearing a headscarf completely at 60. Another, born in the 1960s, described removing it as unexpectedly recovering a piece of her youth.
“I couldn’t believe I was feeling like a teenager again,” she wrote.
