Azad, Donya and Bahareh don’t know each other.
But the three women – whose names we’ve changed for their own safety – share a fierce determination to resist Iran’s theocratic government, and the dress codes it has imposed on women and girls for 45 years.
So, every day, they head out of their homes in the capital, Tehran – without covering their hair – despite the potential risks.
“It’s very scary,” 20-year-old music student, Donya, tells me over an encrypted app. “Because they can arrest you any minute and fine you. Or torture you with lashes. The usual penalty if you’re arrested is 74 lashes.”
Last month, a 33-year old Kurdish-Iranian activist, Roya Heshmati, made public that she’d been given 74 lashes after posting a photograph of herself unveiled.
But Donya, Azad and Bahareh say there is, for them, no going back.
“It is symbolic,” says Donya. “Because it is the regime’s key to suppressing women in Iran. If this is the only way I can protest and take a step for my freedom, I’ll do it.”
The three women will also protest later this week by not turning out to vote in the country’s first parliamentary elections since authorities brutally repressed the women-led uprising that followed the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in September 2022.
She had been detained by the morality police for allegedly not wearing her headscarf properly. Refusing to wear the hijab in public can lead to imprisonment and torture – yet many women do it anyway.
“It’s true that there’s no longer a strong presence of people on the streets,” 34-year-old HR manager, Azad, tells me.
“But in our hearts, the regime has been completely destroyed, and people don’t accept anything it does. So their way of showing their disapproval will be not to vote.”
Azad was arrested in October 2022 and imprisoned for a month.
She was re-arrested in July last year, for social media posts criticising the government, and spent 120 days in jail – 21 of them in solitary confinement.
“Solitary confinement was the worst place you can imagine,” she says. “The cell door was locked all the time. The cell was 1m (3.3ft) by 1.5m (4.9ft). There was no outside light, but artificial lights were on day and night. We were blindfolded when we went to the toilet.”
Azad was so disturbed by the ordeal that she hit her head against the cell wall, and is still traumatised.
“Sometimes now I start crying without any reason,” she says. “Sometimes I don’t want to open my eyes because I think I’m still there. The memory of the jail is with me every moment.”
She described interrogations that lasted from 08:00 until night-time.
—BBC