Death of Iran's 'Blue Girl' casts spotlight on lives of Iranian women
TEHRAN, Iran - Sahar Khodayari understood the law: Women in Iran are forbidden to enter sports stadiums. But the 29-year-old wanted to watch a soccer match - a benign activity hundreds of thousands of women around the world enjoy.
So, in March when her favorite team was playing, Khodayari did what other Iranian women have done in order to watch live sports events: She disguised herself as a man. Donning a blue wig and long overcoat, Khodayari made her way toward Tehran's Azadi Stadium, but she never made it inside. A security guard caught her and arrested her. When she found out in early September that she faced six months in prison, Khodayari set herself on fire outside the courthouse where she had been summoned. She died in a Tehran hospital less than two weeks later.
Khodayari's death has made her the face of a social media campaign pressuring authorities to officially end their long-running ban on females entering stadiums. To many, the young woman has also become a symbol of the Islamic Republic's restrictive laws governing women. Using a hashtag that means "until she comes I won't go," Iranians have flooded social networking sites with messages of outrage, heartache and despair.
"Where men determine women's fate and deprive them of their basic human rights, there are women who help men in their tyranny, all of us are responsible for detaining and burning girls like this in the country," reformist lawmaker Parvaneh Salahshouri wrote on Twitter.
Women's rights activists in Iran said international condemnation after Khodayari's death casts a spotlight on the country's burgeoning women's rights movement spearheaded by young Iranians who are leveraging the power of social media to advance their cause. That movement, activists say, is being fueled by generations of Iranian women who, over the last eight decades, faced repressive laws imposed on them by both the Pahlavi dynasty and Islamic Republic.
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