Women's History Month

 

She was born in 1973 in the green, forested Mazandaran Province of northern Iran — the third of four sisters in a family that valued books, art, and quiet ambition. As a little girl, Asieh Amini spent her afternoons in a local library poetry circle, dreaming of becoming a painter or a writer. What she could not have known back then was that one day, her words would help save lives.

She studied journalism at Tabataba'i University in Tehran. While still a student, she began writing for newspapers. It was not easy. As a young, single woman in a male-dominated newsroom, she faced resentment at every turn. Colleagues spoke ill of her. Editors watched her every move. But she stayed. She worked harder — some days stretching to fourteen hours. She rose to become cultural editor of a major newspaper's youth supplement. For a woman in Iran at that time, this was an unusually bold achievement.

In the late 1990s, a brief easing of press censorship opened new doors. Amini moved to a newspaper focused on women's issues. She met a photojournalist named Javad. They married. In 2000, their daughter Ava was born.

Then, in 2004, everything changed.

Amini received a tip about a case from her home province. A 16-year-old girl named Atefeh Sahaaleh had been publicly hanged in the town of Neka. She had been executed for "acts incompatible with chastity." The government said nothing. The press stayed silent. But Amini started digging.

What she found left her breathless.

Atefeh had been raped repeatedly by a 51-year-old ex-revolutionary guard named Ali Darabi. She had no mother — her mother had died in a car accident when Atefeh was just five years old. Her father had become a drug addict. She was left to care for her elderly grandparents, who largely ignored her. When she was 13, Iran's morality police arrested her. A judge sentenced her to 100 lashes — the legal punishment under Iranian law for sex outside of marriage. The law was merciless: a fourth conviction meant death. Atefeh was arrested a fourth time. She was 16. She was hanged from a crane in the centre of town, in public, as a warning to others.

Her own judge placed the noose around her neck himself.

Amini was stunned. International law clearly forbids executing anyone under the age of 18 — but Iran's legal code held girls criminally responsible from the age of 9. Documents presented to Iran's Supreme Court had falsely listed Atefeh as 22 years old. Her own birth certificate said otherwise. Atefeh never had a fair chance.

Amini wrote the story. Her newspaper fired her for it — the editor-in-chief said it was impossible to publish because she was challenging Sharia law and the Iranian judicial system. She sent the story to another outlet. They declined. After a long and exhausting search, a women's magazine finally agreed to publish an edited version.

It was a small crack of light in a very dark wall.

Shortly after, Amini heard of another girl. Leyla was 19 years old but had the mental capacity of a child. She had been prostituted by her own mother since she was between five and eight years old. She had been sentenced to death for crimes against chastity.

Amini did not look away.

She tracked Leyla to a prison in the city of Arak. She visited the judge who had sentenced her. He told Amini that the law was the law. Amini published Leyla's story. International pressure mounted from human rights organisations worldwide. Leyla was freed.

But Amini could not stop. She had seen too much.

In 2006, she discovered that despite a moratorium on stoning declared by Iran's chief justice back in 2002, secret stonings were still happening. Judges claimed they answered to a higher authority than government law. Amini began gathering evidence — case by case, victim by victim. She and her collaborators documented 14 people who had been sentenced to be stoned, smuggling facts to Amnesty International so that the world could not ignore them. That October, she co-founded the Stop Stoning Forever Campaign — a movement to document, expose, and end this hidden practice.

The government denied everything. State media attacked her. But the evidence kept coming.

In March 2007, she joined a peaceful sit-in outside a courthouse to protest the imprisonment of fellow activists. Police moved in. She was arrested and held for 5 days in Iran's notorious Evin Prison. When she was released, she knew her phones were tapped. She knew she was being watched. She pressed on anyway.

Then came 2009.

After a disputed presidential election, protests erupted across Iran. Amini reported carefully, knowing the danger. Then came the warning she had feared: 36 women being held in a prison cell had been questioned about her. Half of them. Her name was circulating in the wrong places.

She had to go.

With her daughter Ava, Amini left Iran. She travelled first to Sweden for a poetry festival, then found refuge through the International Cities of Refuge Network, settling in Trondheim, Norway. It was not easy. She described the loss of her language and her audience as losing everything — like a businessperson arriving in a new country with empty hands. One night, she stood at her daughter's bedside and heard Ava speaking in her sleep — in Norwegian, a language Amini was still learning. She stood at the edge of despair.

But she kept writing.

From Norway, Amini continued her fight. She published poetry, including a Norwegian-language collection called Don't Come Into My Dreams with Guns. She earned a Master's degree in Equality and Diversity from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She joined the board of Norwegian PEN. She received the Human Rights Watch Hellmann/Hammett Award in 2009, the Oxfam Novib/PEN Award in 2012, and the Ord i Grenseland Prize in 2014. In 2005, UNESCO's office in Tehran had already named her the best young Iranian poet.

Thousands of miles from the girls whose stories she told, her voice has never gone quiet.

Atefeh was hanged at 16. Leyla nearly followed. Countless others had no one to speak for them — until Amini picked up her pen.

She was fired for it. She was arrested for it. She was forced to flee her home and her language and everything she had ever known for it.

She chose them anyway.

One woman. One pen. 1 unbreakable decision to tell the truth — no matter the cost.

Because some stories are too important to leave untold.